Making an Impact on Professional Development
We are a lean team, so ensuring all faculty have current training on Canvas and associated tools is like herding cats. We'll show you how using Studio and Impact to create weekly Canvas "tips", push them to faculty dashboards, and track analytics using Impact has been a game changer!
Okay. I want all of you to know that in our most recent statewide contract within structure, impact has been included as part of the initial package. So if your, Canvas admin has not already started impact for you. You can go back to your campus and let them know that you would like them to install impact and get going with impact. If you're not in a California community college, I'm so sorry. You'll have to work out something with your own, district or school or or whatever, but we don't tend to get a lot of extra tools at the California community colleges, so this is a big coup for us.
And if your LMS administrator won't put it in, have them call me. So, I'd like to know how many of you are already using Impact? Okay. That's good. How many of you are here because you've never heard of Impact and just thought that it might be interesting thing. Okay.
How many of you are LMS administrators for your campus? Okay. Really cool. And I just heard in the session that I was in that if your campus is using impact, it used to be something just for administrators, and now the faculty actually can use impact at the course level to get course level analytics. And you can even check things like, whether or not your students are reading your feedback. So that is, like, really cool.
But I'm gonna show you a particular use case, that we did with Impact over the last couple of years. It's not the full functionality of the Impact tool. There's so much more that you can do with it. So this is just a little sliver, to show you what we did at Foot Hill College. And, oh, this is different than mine.
Will I need tech support to show me how to use a there we go. Okay. So, are we doing here today? The first thing that I wanna do is give you just a little bit of context of how we came to be using impact, and then I will tell you a little bit about the lessons that we learned from our first couple tries using Impact, and then some suggestions for where we're gonna go in the future. And I hope that that will help you try to determine whether or not you can use the tool at your campus if you were using the tool how it might help you, support your students and your faculty. A little bit more about Foothill College, there's a hundred and fifteen California community colleges, and we're just one of them.
We have an FTE of about ten thousand students, about six hundred faculty tea, many of them part time faculty, and many of them freeway flyers. So they're actually teaching at multiple campuses. We do have a sister campus, Deanza, and, we have different, instances of canvas. So we don't necessarily share the same tools. The the same processes.
We can be very different, and then sometimes similar. And then we are in the silicon So we're geographically close to other community colleges who may have a completely different way of doing things. So we might have a faculty member who's teaching on campus, and then goes to another campus where the world is completely different. The only thing that we know we all share canvas. So all one hundred and fifteen of us are on canvas.
Foothill College is unique in the California system. As is Deanza, our sister campus. We're on the quarter system. Everybody else but Lake Tahoe is on the semester system. So we don't even have dates that align with the other campuses around us, which can be really terrible if you're teaching at multiple campuses.
And then, we moved to Canvas in twenty fifteen, I was not yet at the while I was teaching at the campus, but not in an administrator role. We didn't finish our Canvas migration until two thousand eighteen. So we are not necessarily a campus that does things overnight. We kind of roll slowly. And, we don't require Canvas for in person classes.
Prior to the pandemic, we do not require it. After the pandemic, we do not require it. And so we have a lot of people that are interested in using Canvas, and then we have a whole bunch of people that are never canvassers. And so, oh, and one other important thing, the California community colleges have an overarching, system called the, California virtual campus or the online education initiative. And we are the host campus for that grant.
In some cases, it means that we get things where, like, the test case. And so whatever is gonna happen happens on our campus first. In other ways, it means absolutely nothing. And I would really like some more goodies from them for the work that we do. But, oh, well.
None of you can help me with that. So online learning at Foot Hill, prior to the pandemic, fifty one percent of our enrollments were online. So we were very, very much an online campus. And so that was March twenty twenty when we hit that fifty one percent. We also had a whole bunch of niche online certificates.
And so we had a lot of programs that were deeply into online learning And then we had some programs that were not online at all. And, to support this very large online program, we had just for full time employees. So we had an administrative assistant, Adine, one instructional designer and one technology trainer. And then, we had a very, very well developed online handbook for our faculty. And in one way, that was really, really great because we had that resource that people could refer to.
On the other hand, meant that we had this, like, three hundred page canvas course for faculty to try to find something in. That's not me the way, where's our AV person? Okay. It's yeah. Okay. So that was kind of the background for here.
So in, two thousand nineteen, because we were piloting things for the CBC OEI, which is that overarching statewide thing. They asked us if we would install this new tool called EasySoft. And so we said, sure. We'll install EasySoft. And, our sister campus also installed EasySoft.
We were the only two. And their idea was that as students moved back and forth between these one hundred and fifteen campuses. So if someone in Southern California couldn't get their English One class, they could take it in Northern California. But they needed a way for the teaching college to be able to message the students. And so they thought, great.
We'll use this tool and then that way we'll be able to come connect all of our Canvas instances through this tool. Unfortunately, what they did is sent a message on the first day of enrollments to they sent a message to us, and they sent a message to our sister campus to all students that said, Hey, can't get the class you want. Take it over at this other campus. I had been on a job about two and a half weeks. Open up my email.
All these messages from faculty, from of the vice president of instruction, from the president saying, what the heck have you done? And so, we had to talk a little bit about our messaging. And, so what we did is we worked with EasySoft to try to figure out how gonna do this a little bit better. And, I stole this little gift from their, their website because it turns out that we worked with them extensively over the next year and a half. It was mainly a tool that had been used in black board with a little bit of canvas, and we were really, really pushing them to make this into a tool that worked better with Canvas. If there was a feature in Blackboard, we were knocking on the door and saying, please, please, please, can you make it this in Canvas as well.
The problem was is that it was an international company. And so we often had to get on a call with them at four o'clock or five o'clock in the morning our time. And, we were willing to do that, though. So, At the point, at this point, what we were really looking at was the context specific help. We were wondering how to help our fact through that gigantic, faculty support book that we had and how we could help students with the context specific help.
And so all of our energy was trying to make that context specific help. Were work in Canvas. And we were able to get it up and going. We had a beautiful help dashboard. It would say, hi, Renee, when I logged into it, and it knew where I was.
It would give me a list of context specific articles or videos to watch to figure out what my problem was. And so when that happened, when we were able to get that going, we were like, okay. Wait a second. This tool's pretty useful. And we were really interested then in figuring out how we could make it work for us even more.
So right as this was happening, something else was happening in the world that kind of pulled the rug out from under our feet. And as we shifted in the into the pandemic, we realized that we had three hundred faculty who were never canvas. And we had literally, as all of you probably understand, just one week to get all of their finals online. So we were that we were one week away from our finals. And then we had a week break, and then we had to get them into spring courses.
And so we had to conclude a term, and then start a new term at the very beginning of the pandemic. And it was a ton of work. So we were wondering, oh my gosh, how are we gonna be able to to do this? How are we gonna be able to, help all of these faculty who have never used Canvas before. And the context specific help was interesting to us, But even more important than that was, like, they needed to be able to understand the contact specific help. They needed something before the contact specific help.
And so that's when we really started going into, this big shift in how we were using the tool. And, so we were looking at I'm so sorry for there's no, there's no IT support. Kind of blinking on and off. So we were looking at ways that we could support faculty by marrying some pedagogy about online learning with also some, ideas about Canvas. So how are we going to provide, you know, pretty much in in full instructional design courses for these people who had never taught online with Canvas, And it got even worse as we were heading into fall of the first year because California, was still on lockdown.
So we didn't allow anyone back on our campuses. And all summer, faculty kept saying, I don't have to learn anymore about Canvas because in fall, I'm gonna be on campus. And so when August rolled around, all of a sudden, they realized I'm not gonna be back on campus. And now I have to build not a course that was just, you know, a stop gap. I actually have to have an online course.
So we were really interested in these messages that would marry pedagogy and skills. And we really thought that what we needed to do was provide week by week guidance for faculty because it was like huge cognitive overload to have them, trying to learn all of it at one time. Focus on that one. It's not blinking off and on. Have all you just like it might be the plug on the projector.
Yeah, I keep trying to plug this in, but Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll turn out to be distracted.
And then the other thing that we were really interested in is that our faculty started kind of faltering. Their, their spirits were low. They were telling us that their spirits were low. So we were trying to figure out some way to use these messages to create community as well. So we had very, very, high asks for this tool.
Right? Who's gotta train our faculty, it's gotta keep them up on pedagogy week by week, and it's gotta help us build community somehow. And, first thing that we wanted to do is, like, how to help them start a new term. So, what we started using was the messaging in EasySoft that allow you to put a message on the Canvas dashboard that slides out. It's a this tray that comes out. You can also do a message that is on the dashboard that they have to close before they can do anything in Canvas The Sistra just sits there.
They can still get to all of their tiles. They can still enter a course. Once they enter the course the SISTray is gone because it's only on the dashboard. But we really wanted to make sure that that the messages were there without prohibiting them from getting their work done. So, the other thing we wanted to do is differentiate between these messages and what was happening in our global announcements.
So how many of you noticed during the pandemic that all of a sudden, you know, your your entire, may have gone pretty much unnoticed by your marketing department, but the second day after the pandemic, your marketing department was like calling you and saying, Hey, can you make me an admin in Canvas? And we were like, no. No. And so we really wanted some way to control the messaging and differentiate between what's happening in the Canvas glow announcements and what's happening in our easy soft announcements. Later on, we would find out there was really good reasons for that. In the beginning, dumb luck.
Okay. So we were using studio, and then we were using an animation program called Beyond. And every single week, we were churning out a one minute to three minute video that had something to do with What they needed to know about using Canvas that particular week, tied to some kind of pedagogy. We were rolling out these videos like you would not believe. So two thousand twenty to now, we have done two hundred and twenty eight messages using this tool to both our faculty and our students.
So you can imagine, you know, how much work that is for a four person team. Okay. We were really leveraging that cyst tray, and we wanted to take it full advantage of all the pieces of the cyst I really kinda like wanna walk over to one of these. I'm super afraid of falling off the edge. By the way, like, Helen is on my team.
She's amazing, and she's told me about fifteen times as we're walking through it. Watch your step step over that thing right there. Like, I'm the one that's gonna fall. Okay. So if I go off the edge, it's okay.
In this particular message, what you see is a video message, and then it's in studio, so you can see the studio playbar that's right here, they literally could play it right here if they wanted to, or they could open it up, and it would open up full screen. And so we were leveraging the SIS tray and that ability, to put that video right there in the middle of their Canvas dashboard. That was our first one that we did, by the way. Okay. So what we didn't realize is that we would get all this great feedback because you can have the user give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
And then if they're interested, they can give you some written feedback. So we put in some feedback that they could just choose from So they could just say, like, you know, they could click on some already pre done feedback, but we also gave them the option to write in their feedback. And this really helped us kind of figure out where our faculty were because we got some, you know, Not so nice comments. We got a lot of good comments from people, which told us to keep doing it, but the negative comment helped us figure out what was going wrong with the tool. It actually helped us find a bug easy soft because it turned out you can leave let me go backward.
You can leave the message fairly easy lee by clicking the x up at the front, at the top corner. And we were getting these messages saying, how do I get this stupid message off of my dashboard? And then it turned out that there was a bug the X wasn't closing it. And so we were able to work with EasySoft really, really quickly to solve that bug And then we just created a new message, and the message said, here's how you get the message off of your dashboard. And because the last thing that we wanted was for people to resist the professional development. So how could we use the tool to make sure we were reaching every single faculty member without making faculty so, resistant to it that they were no longer receiving the message.
We're looking for that kind of like optimal openness. So what I did is to every single one of those messages that were coming through If there was a negative message at of any type, I responded to the faculty member. You know that if you have one person who's complaining, that you have others that are feeling it. So some of the things that we did, like some people put, I've been teaching in Canvas, or I've been teaching online since, nineteen sixty two. And, Why are you giving me this message? And so we would write a really nice message back to them saying we're so grateful for our seas and, online instructors, why don't you come to professional development? Cause things have changed since nineteen sixty two.
We would erase that part. And then say, like, your help is so important for the faculty who may be struggling in your area. We're gonna keep doing these messages every week. If you can think of really good ideas for us that that new faculty might need, please tell us, and we'll make that into a message. So some of the people that were naysayers in the beginning, all of a sudden, were sending us ideas.
And believe me, we needed those ideas is because we wanted to keep the messages coming, but we also didn't want it to be from only one perspective. So we had analytics from the tool. It's one of the most pieces of of, easy soft impact. And we got all of, this data from the users as well. So this is one of my favorites.
It's not relevant. I've been teaching since nineteen ninety eight. Thanks. This is one of people that I responded to. I mean, at least they said, thanks.
Right? And I I said, hey, you know, give me some ideas for future messages. And by the way, we're gonna keep doing this. So, you know, just to kind of expect it on your dashboard. And, then we have things like this. Not clear enough.
It's not relevant. It has incorrect information. I can't get these pop up windows to go away. I'm not new to online learning or teaching. And it is very frustrating to have these pop ups block my dashboard.
Okay. This person's spent a lot of time giving me feedback. Right? And so I don't know about the it's not relevant. I understand you've been teaching a long time, but the pop up won't go away started to kind of resonate. And so that's when we worked with EasySoft to to fix that bug.
Okay. Has useful information? It's easy to understand, was provided at the right time. This was so awesome. After I got over my initial fright of having to pop up LOL, with great info and a great format thank you for all you do. So for my team, one of the things that I would do is make sure they saw this one because the negative ones, you know, two negative ones.
Trump sorry for using that word. Ten other ones. Right? And so it was really important that, team understood that people were experiencing good things from these as well, and it also helped us kind of figure out which of the mess resonated most with the newer faculty. So we could kind of, like, tell, oh, because that's the piece I forgot to tell you. The great thing about the analytics is that they tell you who the person is that gave you the feedback.
It's not anonymous. And, keep that in mind. Okay. So we have this amazing instructional designer that was working with us. She went on to another job.
I'm super sad about it. I just wanted to make sure that both Easysoft, Danet Easysoft who worked with us over and over again, and Jolie, our instructional designer, really get some some credit because I don't think that Canvas would have purchase impact if Jolie and Dan, we're not meeting almost every day for about six months. So it went from being a Blackboard tool to being a canvas tool in that time. And it was really great for our campus, and it's great for all of us now because it's a it's a really terrific super powerful analytic tool. So I just wanted to give some kudos to them for their collaboration.
So if you wanna ask me any of like the fine tuning back end stuff. Sorry. The front end person. I'm the one that was sending the emails to the faculty. It's Jolie and Dan, that we're doing that, back end fine morning.
So we were ready for messaging two point o, and, We were thinking about the difference between the cyst trace light out and that pop up that you can't get around. So the pop up, you have to watch the video and then close it. The SIS tray, you can still get to your work. You can just leave it forever. We still see faculty that have their, their tip open all week long.
And, we wanted to make sure that we understood what was happening with what we were calling the serial naysayers. So these were the people that every single message, they took time to give it a thumbs down, and a nice paragraph to me. Every single time. So we wanted to make sure that we were taking care of that. We figured even though, you know, it was the pandemic, and it was a lot harder for them to meet around the water cooler.
There were virtual water coolers. And we wanted to make sure that they weren't kind of tainting the water. And then we also were really worried about crowded desktops because we realized that more and more people were working their laptop. And when you start putting lots and lots of things on the Canvas desktop, there's just less real estate for people to work. That was what we were really looking for in our messaging two point o.
And dealing with this, the pop up won't go away. So, one of the things that we really liked is the responsive, design, of the pop up And I just wanna show you a couple of things on this. So what we started doing is that we always made sure that we had a really good title that would explain to people what was happening in the beginning, we didn't even think about that. We have a paragraph, a very, very short paragraph that introduces whatever is in the video, then we have our video. We've now branded our videos.
So we have, a, thumbnail that goes on to all of these, and we store them in a studio course, in in a in studio, and then in a canvas course. And then we have links at the bottom that would take people directly to additional resources, and we use this format every single week. And that really allowed us to take better advantage of that SISTR format while also connecting people to the information that they needed. And that took us a while to kind of like figure out. Oh, sorry.
Okay. So, this is a QR code, and it will take you to the course that we created that goes along with this. And I'll just show you that really quickly. I would love to show you one of the videos. One of the things that we were really, really interested in was one way to, create community is to make sure that we were using kind of the best principles of humanizing in our professional development.
So we may ensure that sometimes we used, pre made videos that were done by other people, but of the time, we used videos that we made for our faculty and we've waste them. And so everyone heard us We tried to be really reassuring. We tried to use a lot of humor. Let me see if I can find one. One piece of feedback that we got from our faculty was that they would often not close the SIS tray and just leave the Tuesday tip up all week.
Waiting for that moment when they could watch it. And then it would be the next week, and it would be a new message. And we had set an end date because we didn't want people like with fifteen messages stacked on top. We thought that would completely freak them out. And so they asked for an archive.
And so we just started archiving them one after the other we've kind of grouped them in different ways. We've done it chronologically, but then we also grouped them in some, of categories. I'll show you one video. Just the beginning of it. Sorry, I was totally gonna have this all up and ready to go for you.
But then the last group ran a little bit late. Oops, sorry. Oh, hello. I'm just out here doing a little video editing. We know that virtual teaching can team a little bit like being out in space alone.
But as we head into fall, we want you to know you're not alone. In fact, the online learning team is ready to support you with extended office hours, weekly webinars, and brown bag lunches, and Tuesday tip videos. Since canvas is serving as our virtual campus right now, we wanna make sure teaching in canvas is easier than rocket science. Okay. That QR code will take you if you are dying to watch that video, you can go back and watch some more.
But the important thing I wanted to show you is that we were really trying to use humor. Thinking through both of our extreme groups, the groups that didn't want to be using, Canvas at all and are people that had been teaching in Canvas for a really long time or teaching online for a really long time. And so we were trying to have things that would pique the interest or satisfy the needs of both of those groups. And so humanizing, what we were doing was incredibly important, which meant really kind of looking at what the needs the group were, using our own voice. And then there's lots of research out there that are saying that avatars are just a little bit less imposing than the actual person.
And especially since I had to do as many of these as my team, having an avatar Dean instead of having the Dean stand there in a talking head and saying, have you provisioned your course yet? Can't imagine myself doing that, but sounds good. Right? So that's kind of where we were, turning out videos every single week. One of the features of Canvas that we're super excited about is the Canvas walk throughs. So this used to be a task that someone on our team had to do. We assigned it every single week.
And So we rotated through, because doing several of them in a row is like a huge workload for people. Now, Helen, takes over, and she does them every other week. But even every other week is a really big load. So we're going to be using Canvas walkthroughs to kind of lighten that load. So there'll be a video from us, saying something new from us.
And then the next time we post one, there'll be a Canvas walk through showing people something from a new release or showing something, that's useful for their students or a tip on how they can use Canvas better. So we're super excited about the Canvas walkthroughs that are part of Impact. Those are kind of, like, videos that are already done by instructure so that you don't have to do them yourself. So that's where we're headed for the future. We've been really happy with the tool.
Super glad we now have it in our state. I'd love to answer any questions that you have about impact or the way that we used it or, you know, whatever. Yeah. Sure. That was easy.
Yeah. So, and, using impact is that had a a a big impact on faculty using more tools for creating better quality courses. Have you seen anything changed So we haven't done anything, to kind of quantify that. We are a small team, and we have been like, really busy. One piece that it has helped us is, like, maybe three quarters of the way through, when we were still off of campus.
They decided that, we no longer needed our after hours support person. And so they said, oh, yeah. We're gonna remove this position from your department. And we were able to show when people are actually logging in to Canvas and working in Canvas. And that data was so easy to get, which before would have required, you know, a lot of work.
And we were able to get it in, like, ten minutes. And then I just took it to a cabinet meeting, and I said, this this is when our students are accessing Can this. This is when our faculty are accessing Canvas. This is when we have to have personalized support. So that was like an immediate piece that we got from that.
And we ended up getting that position, which was paid for with, her funds. All the way through the entire time that we were in lockdown, and then about six months afterward. So that was a a real win for us. We've also we started, using studio in two thousand nineteen, and we were having a pretty slow pickup of studio. And we used the tool at that time to determine who was using it a lot because we thought if we could let people know the champions and how they were using studio that, it would be really helpful.
And, so we were able to use the tool for that. We are starting a new accessibility, I don't know, program. I don't know. It's it's the never ending accessibility program in fall, and we really hope to be able to use. We're gonna be using pope tech dashboard, by the way.
We have pope tech installed. Just a little shout out to them. It's a really great tool. Yeah. Based on behavior.
So, and we're, I think, specifically around RSI, but if you haven't done a certain thing, we probably know that's tricky, but I was just wondering if you We are not yet doing anything like that. We have talked, a lot about how to use the added features of impact and, you know, what it looks like moving forward for us. And we've just been focusing on the messaging. And and there's lots of things about that, by the way. Like, our marketing department really would love control this.
And they have been after us after us after us. They said, oh, how about if we only put a message out every Monday? And we're like, okay, like, for, like, fifteen minutes, because it's not like an email. Like, you get it in your, you have to, like, log into Canvas to see it. Right? So, we've been fighting those battles about messaging and things like that, but we would love to be able to use it for that. And we actually are trying to figure out, how we can make more time in our week, give Helen more tasks so that we can do more things like that.
Yeah. I'm gonna go over here and then get back to you. Uh-huh. Yeah. So the videos that you have, I want to show this very contextual or something like advertising services.
Yes. It's a lot of the other ones. You ship on, do you happen to be like, this is how you publish a course. Yep. So we were right in the middle of adding it to the contextual help, when, EasySoft became impact.
And much of the work that we had done on that, did not transfer. So we were kind of on hold, for that, but now we're working with our CSM, to get those back, in. We had one particular person that was working on, cleaning out all of, our, support pieces in the Canvas admin panel. And, that was a really, really long process. We had hundreds of things in there from different people over time that had added them.
So we've cleaned all of those out, and now we're getting ready to add back in those pieces. Yeah. Yeah. We made some mistakes. I mean, learn from our lessons.
One of the things was that we grounded it in time. So we have a lot of, you know, like welcome to spring, and then we would have a flower open with spring twenty twenty one. Like, you made it. Right? And so some of them to kind of be edited. But, yes, it's a very powerful tool for that.
Yeah. So do you allow other departments for user groups to use? They impact to target, custom beliefs? Yes. One of the groups that we have wildly supported is our students. They can okay. So we told all of our departments including marketing, they could use the messaging, but it had to be a video.
If it's just a static image, then put it a Canvas announcement or something, that we wanted to show them that they could really use the power of this history. Right? And so some of our faculty, for instance, their courses weren't making. And so we said make a thirty second video, and we will put it on the dashboard to students, student facing. And their videos were so bad. We were like, don't you know, like, how do you think that's gonna entice people to go to your class.
So, we've done a couple of workshops for faculty, how to do those videos and how to actually sell their class. Now that we have Helen, she's, like, great at marketing. So we hope that she can do a few more workshops with faculty about, like, how to be more engaging, in those videos. And, but the student groups, like, the second they saw those videos that were targeted to them, our associate student body was like, can we do a video about elections? Sure. So they had all their candidates make videos, and we would put them up, you know, during election week.
They've done some of the best videos. And then our marketing team, we did give them some access, during the pandemic, but not anymore. Yeah. They're just not up to our standards. Yeah.
Issues, do you close out the pop out this fall that can't, the teacher now, click on the x, and the pop out will go away. So the company was still easy soft at that point. And we literally, we contacted them and said, hey, like, some of our people are that they can't close the SISTray. And so they said, okay. You're probably gonna have to train them.
So we made a video that said, like, here's how you close your EasySoft message. And we showed them how that, you know, they mark the box do not open again, if they never wanna see it again, and then use the X or just use x if they wanna see it next time they log in to Canvas. And we got a ton of thumbs down on that message saying this doesn't work. This doesn't work. And so then we started testing it, and sure enough, it it was broken.
Might have worked in Blackboard, but it didn't work in Canvas. And so we called EasySoft right away. And they had it fixed. It was a bad bug. At first, they said to us, like, take your messages down.
But they had it fixed within, like, forty eight hours. And it's worked perfectly for us. Simms. Yeah. Do you have a campaign for new Canvas users and how do you set that up? Is it just open ended so I can get to it? We have not used it for that.
We still do live, canvas training for students who are new, we do it several times every at the beginning of every quarter. And each time we do it, we're like, why do we not have a campaign for this. Right? So we just haven't got around to it. And then we also would love to use it to integrate with, our Canvas training. So, really make a tailored effort to use the out of the box walkthroughs from Canvas, because then you can link them to these analytics as well.
Right? And and that's the powerful piece. You can really see, who's actually doing it. And so we've thought about creating a canvas shell for people who are new to our district that has some campaigns already loaded in it. And then because you can, like, focus them in specific, subaccounts. And then as they would go through our training, they would be required to do things in that shell.
And the the how to would be right there walking them through. So it's next on our horizon. Yeah. The new contract that the CDC has with an structure for impact. Does it waive the one time configuration? No.
What was the question? Oh, I'm supposed to be repeating those. The, the California Community College's consortium, is paying for impact, but you still have to pay your implementation. Yeah. Alright. Great. I'll stick around if anybody has questions. Thank you so much for your time.
And if your LMS administrator won't put it in, have them call me. So, I'd like to know how many of you are already using Impact? Okay. That's good. How many of you are here because you've never heard of Impact and just thought that it might be interesting thing. Okay.
How many of you are LMS administrators for your campus? Okay. Really cool. And I just heard in the session that I was in that if your campus is using impact, it used to be something just for administrators, and now the faculty actually can use impact at the course level to get course level analytics. And you can even check things like, whether or not your students are reading your feedback. So that is, like, really cool.
But I'm gonna show you a particular use case, that we did with Impact over the last couple of years. It's not the full functionality of the Impact tool. There's so much more that you can do with it. So this is just a little sliver, to show you what we did at Foot Hill College. And, oh, this is different than mine.
Will I need tech support to show me how to use a there we go. Okay. So, are we doing here today? The first thing that I wanna do is give you just a little bit of context of how we came to be using impact, and then I will tell you a little bit about the lessons that we learned from our first couple tries using Impact, and then some suggestions for where we're gonna go in the future. And I hope that that will help you try to determine whether or not you can use the tool at your campus if you were using the tool how it might help you, support your students and your faculty. A little bit more about Foothill College, there's a hundred and fifteen California community colleges, and we're just one of them.
We have an FTE of about ten thousand students, about six hundred faculty tea, many of them part time faculty, and many of them freeway flyers. So they're actually teaching at multiple campuses. We do have a sister campus, Deanza, and, we have different, instances of canvas. So we don't necessarily share the same tools. The the same processes.
We can be very different, and then sometimes similar. And then we are in the silicon So we're geographically close to other community colleges who may have a completely different way of doing things. So we might have a faculty member who's teaching on campus, and then goes to another campus where the world is completely different. The only thing that we know we all share canvas. So all one hundred and fifteen of us are on canvas.
Foothill College is unique in the California system. As is Deanza, our sister campus. We're on the quarter system. Everybody else but Lake Tahoe is on the semester system. So we don't even have dates that align with the other campuses around us, which can be really terrible if you're teaching at multiple campuses.
And then, we moved to Canvas in twenty fifteen, I was not yet at the while I was teaching at the campus, but not in an administrator role. We didn't finish our Canvas migration until two thousand eighteen. So we are not necessarily a campus that does things overnight. We kind of roll slowly. And, we don't require Canvas for in person classes.
Prior to the pandemic, we do not require it. After the pandemic, we do not require it. And so we have a lot of people that are interested in using Canvas, and then we have a whole bunch of people that are never canvassers. And so, oh, and one other important thing, the California community colleges have an overarching, system called the, California virtual campus or the online education initiative. And we are the host campus for that grant.
In some cases, it means that we get things where, like, the test case. And so whatever is gonna happen happens on our campus first. In other ways, it means absolutely nothing. And I would really like some more goodies from them for the work that we do. But, oh, well.
None of you can help me with that. So online learning at Foot Hill, prior to the pandemic, fifty one percent of our enrollments were online. So we were very, very much an online campus. And so that was March twenty twenty when we hit that fifty one percent. We also had a whole bunch of niche online certificates.
And so we had a lot of programs that were deeply into online learning And then we had some programs that were not online at all. And, to support this very large online program, we had just for full time employees. So we had an administrative assistant, Adine, one instructional designer and one technology trainer. And then, we had a very, very well developed online handbook for our faculty. And in one way, that was really, really great because we had that resource that people could refer to.
On the other hand, meant that we had this, like, three hundred page canvas course for faculty to try to find something in. That's not me the way, where's our AV person? Okay. It's yeah. Okay. So that was kind of the background for here.
So in, two thousand nineteen, because we were piloting things for the CBC OEI, which is that overarching statewide thing. They asked us if we would install this new tool called EasySoft. And so we said, sure. We'll install EasySoft. And, our sister campus also installed EasySoft.
We were the only two. And their idea was that as students moved back and forth between these one hundred and fifteen campuses. So if someone in Southern California couldn't get their English One class, they could take it in Northern California. But they needed a way for the teaching college to be able to message the students. And so they thought, great.
We'll use this tool and then that way we'll be able to come connect all of our Canvas instances through this tool. Unfortunately, what they did is sent a message on the first day of enrollments to they sent a message to us, and they sent a message to our sister campus to all students that said, Hey, can't get the class you want. Take it over at this other campus. I had been on a job about two and a half weeks. Open up my email.
All these messages from faculty, from of the vice president of instruction, from the president saying, what the heck have you done? And so, we had to talk a little bit about our messaging. And, so what we did is we worked with EasySoft to try to figure out how gonna do this a little bit better. And, I stole this little gift from their, their website because it turns out that we worked with them extensively over the next year and a half. It was mainly a tool that had been used in black board with a little bit of canvas, and we were really, really pushing them to make this into a tool that worked better with Canvas. If there was a feature in Blackboard, we were knocking on the door and saying, please, please, please, can you make it this in Canvas as well.
The problem was is that it was an international company. And so we often had to get on a call with them at four o'clock or five o'clock in the morning our time. And, we were willing to do that, though. So, At the point, at this point, what we were really looking at was the context specific help. We were wondering how to help our fact through that gigantic, faculty support book that we had and how we could help students with the context specific help.
And so all of our energy was trying to make that context specific help. Were work in Canvas. And we were able to get it up and going. We had a beautiful help dashboard. It would say, hi, Renee, when I logged into it, and it knew where I was.
It would give me a list of context specific articles or videos to watch to figure out what my problem was. And so when that happened, when we were able to get that going, we were like, okay. Wait a second. This tool's pretty useful. And we were really interested then in figuring out how we could make it work for us even more.
So right as this was happening, something else was happening in the world that kind of pulled the rug out from under our feet. And as we shifted in the into the pandemic, we realized that we had three hundred faculty who were never canvas. And we had literally, as all of you probably understand, just one week to get all of their finals online. So we were that we were one week away from our finals. And then we had a week break, and then we had to get them into spring courses.
And so we had to conclude a term, and then start a new term at the very beginning of the pandemic. And it was a ton of work. So we were wondering, oh my gosh, how are we gonna be able to to do this? How are we gonna be able to, help all of these faculty who have never used Canvas before. And the context specific help was interesting to us, But even more important than that was, like, they needed to be able to understand the contact specific help. They needed something before the contact specific help.
And so that's when we really started going into, this big shift in how we were using the tool. And, so we were looking at I'm so sorry for there's no, there's no IT support. Kind of blinking on and off. So we were looking at ways that we could support faculty by marrying some pedagogy about online learning with also some, ideas about Canvas. So how are we going to provide, you know, pretty much in in full instructional design courses for these people who had never taught online with Canvas, And it got even worse as we were heading into fall of the first year because California, was still on lockdown.
So we didn't allow anyone back on our campuses. And all summer, faculty kept saying, I don't have to learn anymore about Canvas because in fall, I'm gonna be on campus. And so when August rolled around, all of a sudden, they realized I'm not gonna be back on campus. And now I have to build not a course that was just, you know, a stop gap. I actually have to have an online course.
So we were really interested in these messages that would marry pedagogy and skills. And we really thought that what we needed to do was provide week by week guidance for faculty because it was like huge cognitive overload to have them, trying to learn all of it at one time. Focus on that one. It's not blinking off and on. Have all you just like it might be the plug on the projector.
Yeah, I keep trying to plug this in, but Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll turn out to be distracted.
And then the other thing that we were really interested in is that our faculty started kind of faltering. Their, their spirits were low. They were telling us that their spirits were low. So we were trying to figure out some way to use these messages to create community as well. So we had very, very, high asks for this tool.
Right? Who's gotta train our faculty, it's gotta keep them up on pedagogy week by week, and it's gotta help us build community somehow. And, first thing that we wanted to do is, like, how to help them start a new term. So, what we started using was the messaging in EasySoft that allow you to put a message on the Canvas dashboard that slides out. It's a this tray that comes out. You can also do a message that is on the dashboard that they have to close before they can do anything in Canvas The Sistra just sits there.
They can still get to all of their tiles. They can still enter a course. Once they enter the course the SISTray is gone because it's only on the dashboard. But we really wanted to make sure that that the messages were there without prohibiting them from getting their work done. So, the other thing we wanted to do is differentiate between these messages and what was happening in our global announcements.
So how many of you noticed during the pandemic that all of a sudden, you know, your your entire, may have gone pretty much unnoticed by your marketing department, but the second day after the pandemic, your marketing department was like calling you and saying, Hey, can you make me an admin in Canvas? And we were like, no. No. And so we really wanted some way to control the messaging and differentiate between what's happening in the Canvas glow announcements and what's happening in our easy soft announcements. Later on, we would find out there was really good reasons for that. In the beginning, dumb luck.
Okay. So we were using studio, and then we were using an animation program called Beyond. And every single week, we were churning out a one minute to three minute video that had something to do with What they needed to know about using Canvas that particular week, tied to some kind of pedagogy. We were rolling out these videos like you would not believe. So two thousand twenty to now, we have done two hundred and twenty eight messages using this tool to both our faculty and our students.
So you can imagine, you know, how much work that is for a four person team. Okay. We were really leveraging that cyst tray, and we wanted to take it full advantage of all the pieces of the cyst I really kinda like wanna walk over to one of these. I'm super afraid of falling off the edge. By the way, like, Helen is on my team.
She's amazing, and she's told me about fifteen times as we're walking through it. Watch your step step over that thing right there. Like, I'm the one that's gonna fall. Okay. So if I go off the edge, it's okay.
In this particular message, what you see is a video message, and then it's in studio, so you can see the studio playbar that's right here, they literally could play it right here if they wanted to, or they could open it up, and it would open up full screen. And so we were leveraging the SIS tray and that ability, to put that video right there in the middle of their Canvas dashboard. That was our first one that we did, by the way. Okay. So what we didn't realize is that we would get all this great feedback because you can have the user give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
And then if they're interested, they can give you some written feedback. So we put in some feedback that they could just choose from So they could just say, like, you know, they could click on some already pre done feedback, but we also gave them the option to write in their feedback. And this really helped us kind of figure out where our faculty were because we got some, you know, Not so nice comments. We got a lot of good comments from people, which told us to keep doing it, but the negative comment helped us figure out what was going wrong with the tool. It actually helped us find a bug easy soft because it turned out you can leave let me go backward.
You can leave the message fairly easy lee by clicking the x up at the front, at the top corner. And we were getting these messages saying, how do I get this stupid message off of my dashboard? And then it turned out that there was a bug the X wasn't closing it. And so we were able to work with EasySoft really, really quickly to solve that bug And then we just created a new message, and the message said, here's how you get the message off of your dashboard. And because the last thing that we wanted was for people to resist the professional development. So how could we use the tool to make sure we were reaching every single faculty member without making faculty so, resistant to it that they were no longer receiving the message.
We're looking for that kind of like optimal openness. So what I did is to every single one of those messages that were coming through If there was a negative message at of any type, I responded to the faculty member. You know that if you have one person who's complaining, that you have others that are feeling it. So some of the things that we did, like some people put, I've been teaching in Canvas, or I've been teaching online since, nineteen sixty two. And, Why are you giving me this message? And so we would write a really nice message back to them saying we're so grateful for our seas and, online instructors, why don't you come to professional development? Cause things have changed since nineteen sixty two.
We would erase that part. And then say, like, your help is so important for the faculty who may be struggling in your area. We're gonna keep doing these messages every week. If you can think of really good ideas for us that that new faculty might need, please tell us, and we'll make that into a message. So some of the people that were naysayers in the beginning, all of a sudden, were sending us ideas.
And believe me, we needed those ideas is because we wanted to keep the messages coming, but we also didn't want it to be from only one perspective. So we had analytics from the tool. It's one of the most pieces of of, easy soft impact. And we got all of, this data from the users as well. So this is one of my favorites.
It's not relevant. I've been teaching since nineteen ninety eight. Thanks. This is one of people that I responded to. I mean, at least they said, thanks.
Right? And I I said, hey, you know, give me some ideas for future messages. And by the way, we're gonna keep doing this. So, you know, just to kind of expect it on your dashboard. And, then we have things like this. Not clear enough.
It's not relevant. It has incorrect information. I can't get these pop up windows to go away. I'm not new to online learning or teaching. And it is very frustrating to have these pop ups block my dashboard.
Okay. This person's spent a lot of time giving me feedback. Right? And so I don't know about the it's not relevant. I understand you've been teaching a long time, but the pop up won't go away started to kind of resonate. And so that's when we worked with EasySoft to to fix that bug.
Okay. Has useful information? It's easy to understand, was provided at the right time. This was so awesome. After I got over my initial fright of having to pop up LOL, with great info and a great format thank you for all you do. So for my team, one of the things that I would do is make sure they saw this one because the negative ones, you know, two negative ones.
Trump sorry for using that word. Ten other ones. Right? And so it was really important that, team understood that people were experiencing good things from these as well, and it also helped us kind of figure out which of the mess resonated most with the newer faculty. So we could kind of, like, tell, oh, because that's the piece I forgot to tell you. The great thing about the analytics is that they tell you who the person is that gave you the feedback.
It's not anonymous. And, keep that in mind. Okay. So we have this amazing instructional designer that was working with us. She went on to another job.
I'm super sad about it. I just wanted to make sure that both Easysoft, Danet Easysoft who worked with us over and over again, and Jolie, our instructional designer, really get some some credit because I don't think that Canvas would have purchase impact if Jolie and Dan, we're not meeting almost every day for about six months. So it went from being a Blackboard tool to being a canvas tool in that time. And it was really great for our campus, and it's great for all of us now because it's a it's a really terrific super powerful analytic tool. So I just wanted to give some kudos to them for their collaboration.
So if you wanna ask me any of like the fine tuning back end stuff. Sorry. The front end person. I'm the one that was sending the emails to the faculty. It's Jolie and Dan, that we're doing that, back end fine morning.
So we were ready for messaging two point o, and, We were thinking about the difference between the cyst trace light out and that pop up that you can't get around. So the pop up, you have to watch the video and then close it. The SIS tray, you can still get to your work. You can just leave it forever. We still see faculty that have their, their tip open all week long.
And, we wanted to make sure that we understood what was happening with what we were calling the serial naysayers. So these were the people that every single message, they took time to give it a thumbs down, and a nice paragraph to me. Every single time. So we wanted to make sure that we were taking care of that. We figured even though, you know, it was the pandemic, and it was a lot harder for them to meet around the water cooler.
There were virtual water coolers. And we wanted to make sure that they weren't kind of tainting the water. And then we also were really worried about crowded desktops because we realized that more and more people were working their laptop. And when you start putting lots and lots of things on the Canvas desktop, there's just less real estate for people to work. That was what we were really looking for in our messaging two point o.
And dealing with this, the pop up won't go away. So, one of the things that we really liked is the responsive, design, of the pop up And I just wanna show you a couple of things on this. So what we started doing is that we always made sure that we had a really good title that would explain to people what was happening in the beginning, we didn't even think about that. We have a paragraph, a very, very short paragraph that introduces whatever is in the video, then we have our video. We've now branded our videos.
So we have, a, thumbnail that goes on to all of these, and we store them in a studio course, in in a in studio, and then in a canvas course. And then we have links at the bottom that would take people directly to additional resources, and we use this format every single week. And that really allowed us to take better advantage of that SISTR format while also connecting people to the information that they needed. And that took us a while to kind of like figure out. Oh, sorry.
Okay. So, this is a QR code, and it will take you to the course that we created that goes along with this. And I'll just show you that really quickly. I would love to show you one of the videos. One of the things that we were really, really interested in was one way to, create community is to make sure that we were using kind of the best principles of humanizing in our professional development.
So we may ensure that sometimes we used, pre made videos that were done by other people, but of the time, we used videos that we made for our faculty and we've waste them. And so everyone heard us We tried to be really reassuring. We tried to use a lot of humor. Let me see if I can find one. One piece of feedback that we got from our faculty was that they would often not close the SIS tray and just leave the Tuesday tip up all week.
Waiting for that moment when they could watch it. And then it would be the next week, and it would be a new message. And we had set an end date because we didn't want people like with fifteen messages stacked on top. We thought that would completely freak them out. And so they asked for an archive.
And so we just started archiving them one after the other we've kind of grouped them in different ways. We've done it chronologically, but then we also grouped them in some, of categories. I'll show you one video. Just the beginning of it. Sorry, I was totally gonna have this all up and ready to go for you.
But then the last group ran a little bit late. Oops, sorry. Oh, hello. I'm just out here doing a little video editing. We know that virtual teaching can team a little bit like being out in space alone.
But as we head into fall, we want you to know you're not alone. In fact, the online learning team is ready to support you with extended office hours, weekly webinars, and brown bag lunches, and Tuesday tip videos. Since canvas is serving as our virtual campus right now, we wanna make sure teaching in canvas is easier than rocket science. Okay. That QR code will take you if you are dying to watch that video, you can go back and watch some more.
But the important thing I wanted to show you is that we were really trying to use humor. Thinking through both of our extreme groups, the groups that didn't want to be using, Canvas at all and are people that had been teaching in Canvas for a really long time or teaching online for a really long time. And so we were trying to have things that would pique the interest or satisfy the needs of both of those groups. And so humanizing, what we were doing was incredibly important, which meant really kind of looking at what the needs the group were, using our own voice. And then there's lots of research out there that are saying that avatars are just a little bit less imposing than the actual person.
And especially since I had to do as many of these as my team, having an avatar Dean instead of having the Dean stand there in a talking head and saying, have you provisioned your course yet? Can't imagine myself doing that, but sounds good. Right? So that's kind of where we were, turning out videos every single week. One of the features of Canvas that we're super excited about is the Canvas walk throughs. So this used to be a task that someone on our team had to do. We assigned it every single week.
And So we rotated through, because doing several of them in a row is like a huge workload for people. Now, Helen, takes over, and she does them every other week. But even every other week is a really big load. So we're going to be using Canvas walkthroughs to kind of lighten that load. So there'll be a video from us, saying something new from us.
And then the next time we post one, there'll be a Canvas walk through showing people something from a new release or showing something, that's useful for their students or a tip on how they can use Canvas better. So we're super excited about the Canvas walkthroughs that are part of Impact. Those are kind of, like, videos that are already done by instructure so that you don't have to do them yourself. So that's where we're headed for the future. We've been really happy with the tool.
Super glad we now have it in our state. I'd love to answer any questions that you have about impact or the way that we used it or, you know, whatever. Yeah. Sure. That was easy.
Yeah. So, and, using impact is that had a a a big impact on faculty using more tools for creating better quality courses. Have you seen anything changed So we haven't done anything, to kind of quantify that. We are a small team, and we have been like, really busy. One piece that it has helped us is, like, maybe three quarters of the way through, when we were still off of campus.
They decided that, we no longer needed our after hours support person. And so they said, oh, yeah. We're gonna remove this position from your department. And we were able to show when people are actually logging in to Canvas and working in Canvas. And that data was so easy to get, which before would have required, you know, a lot of work.
And we were able to get it in, like, ten minutes. And then I just took it to a cabinet meeting, and I said, this this is when our students are accessing Can this. This is when our faculty are accessing Canvas. This is when we have to have personalized support. So that was like an immediate piece that we got from that.
And we ended up getting that position, which was paid for with, her funds. All the way through the entire time that we were in lockdown, and then about six months afterward. So that was a a real win for us. We've also we started, using studio in two thousand nineteen, and we were having a pretty slow pickup of studio. And we used the tool at that time to determine who was using it a lot because we thought if we could let people know the champions and how they were using studio that, it would be really helpful.
And, so we were able to use the tool for that. We are starting a new accessibility, I don't know, program. I don't know. It's it's the never ending accessibility program in fall, and we really hope to be able to use. We're gonna be using pope tech dashboard, by the way.
We have pope tech installed. Just a little shout out to them. It's a really great tool. Yeah. Based on behavior.
So, and we're, I think, specifically around RSI, but if you haven't done a certain thing, we probably know that's tricky, but I was just wondering if you We are not yet doing anything like that. We have talked, a lot about how to use the added features of impact and, you know, what it looks like moving forward for us. And we've just been focusing on the messaging. And and there's lots of things about that, by the way. Like, our marketing department really would love control this.
And they have been after us after us after us. They said, oh, how about if we only put a message out every Monday? And we're like, okay, like, for, like, fifteen minutes, because it's not like an email. Like, you get it in your, you have to, like, log into Canvas to see it. Right? So, we've been fighting those battles about messaging and things like that, but we would love to be able to use it for that. And we actually are trying to figure out, how we can make more time in our week, give Helen more tasks so that we can do more things like that.
Yeah. I'm gonna go over here and then get back to you. Uh-huh. Yeah. So the videos that you have, I want to show this very contextual or something like advertising services.
Yes. It's a lot of the other ones. You ship on, do you happen to be like, this is how you publish a course. Yep. So we were right in the middle of adding it to the contextual help, when, EasySoft became impact.
And much of the work that we had done on that, did not transfer. So we were kind of on hold, for that, but now we're working with our CSM, to get those back, in. We had one particular person that was working on, cleaning out all of, our, support pieces in the Canvas admin panel. And, that was a really, really long process. We had hundreds of things in there from different people over time that had added them.
So we've cleaned all of those out, and now we're getting ready to add back in those pieces. Yeah. Yeah. We made some mistakes. I mean, learn from our lessons.
One of the things was that we grounded it in time. So we have a lot of, you know, like welcome to spring, and then we would have a flower open with spring twenty twenty one. Like, you made it. Right? And so some of them to kind of be edited. But, yes, it's a very powerful tool for that.
Yeah. So do you allow other departments for user groups to use? They impact to target, custom beliefs? Yes. One of the groups that we have wildly supported is our students. They can okay. So we told all of our departments including marketing, they could use the messaging, but it had to be a video.
If it's just a static image, then put it a Canvas announcement or something, that we wanted to show them that they could really use the power of this history. Right? And so some of our faculty, for instance, their courses weren't making. And so we said make a thirty second video, and we will put it on the dashboard to students, student facing. And their videos were so bad. We were like, don't you know, like, how do you think that's gonna entice people to go to your class.
So, we've done a couple of workshops for faculty, how to do those videos and how to actually sell their class. Now that we have Helen, she's, like, great at marketing. So we hope that she can do a few more workshops with faculty about, like, how to be more engaging, in those videos. And, but the student groups, like, the second they saw those videos that were targeted to them, our associate student body was like, can we do a video about elections? Sure. So they had all their candidates make videos, and we would put them up, you know, during election week.
They've done some of the best videos. And then our marketing team, we did give them some access, during the pandemic, but not anymore. Yeah. They're just not up to our standards. Yeah.
Issues, do you close out the pop out this fall that can't, the teacher now, click on the x, and the pop out will go away. So the company was still easy soft at that point. And we literally, we contacted them and said, hey, like, some of our people are that they can't close the SISTray. And so they said, okay. You're probably gonna have to train them.
So we made a video that said, like, here's how you close your EasySoft message. And we showed them how that, you know, they mark the box do not open again, if they never wanna see it again, and then use the X or just use x if they wanna see it next time they log in to Canvas. And we got a ton of thumbs down on that message saying this doesn't work. This doesn't work. And so then we started testing it, and sure enough, it it was broken.
Might have worked in Blackboard, but it didn't work in Canvas. And so we called EasySoft right away. And they had it fixed. It was a bad bug. At first, they said to us, like, take your messages down.
But they had it fixed within, like, forty eight hours. And it's worked perfectly for us. Simms. Yeah. Do you have a campaign for new Canvas users and how do you set that up? Is it just open ended so I can get to it? We have not used it for that.
We still do live, canvas training for students who are new, we do it several times every at the beginning of every quarter. And each time we do it, we're like, why do we not have a campaign for this. Right? So we just haven't got around to it. And then we also would love to use it to integrate with, our Canvas training. So, really make a tailored effort to use the out of the box walkthroughs from Canvas, because then you can link them to these analytics as well.
Right? And and that's the powerful piece. You can really see, who's actually doing it. And so we've thought about creating a canvas shell for people who are new to our district that has some campaigns already loaded in it. And then because you can, like, focus them in specific, subaccounts. And then as they would go through our training, they would be required to do things in that shell.
And the the how to would be right there walking them through. So it's next on our horizon. Yeah. The new contract that the CDC has with an structure for impact. Does it waive the one time configuration? No.
What was the question? Oh, I'm supposed to be repeating those. The, the California Community College's consortium, is paying for impact, but you still have to pay your implementation. Yeah. Alright. Great. I'll stick around if anybody has questions. Thank you so much for your time.