Unleashing Success: Customers Share their Wins with Learning Services

Alright. Hi. Welcome. Thank god I have a mic because I've lost voice. So also thank God it's a panel because we'd all be in trouble. But thank you for coming.

Appreciate your time. Today, we're talking about unleashing success. Customer sharing their wins with learning services. I'll introduce myself And then I will let them introduce themselves and then we'll get started. And there should be some time at the end.

I will give you a QR code at the end for any resources if you're asking and wondering about questions about specific things they talk about, just wait till the end and you'll be able to get the QR code and gather all the resources right from that. We have one pagers that we've created. So I have been today is actually my, what we call an instructor, our pan diversories. Today is my official three year pan diversity. But I've had a lot of time in in education.

I started elementary, went to middle school, taught high school, then became an administrator. And then in twenty twenty, I was like, deuces people. I'm out. See you later. It was twenty four years, and I needed to do something else, but I still feel like I work in education, working here at instructure.

And I'm from Philadelphia. So I'm gonna say things funny and people always make fun of the same way. I say, what else? I'll say it now, and then we'll get it out of the way. Okay? I used to be a dedicated consultant, which is what some of, are panels gonna talk about today. And now I'm the manager of the learning services.

Which a lot of these people, their consultants and dedicated are all on my team. So thank you again for being here. I'm so pleased that you decided to think, you came to talk. So Let's get to started with the panelists. And we'll start here with Doctor.

Sharon Schubridge. Perfect perfect spot. So good afternoon. My name is Sharon Shebridge. I'm the director of instructional technology in Virginia Beach City Public Schools.

We're at k twelve. And this is our we're going into our second full year of Canvas implementation. The state of Virginia purchase during the pandemic Canvas for all districts if they wanted to opt in. And so the first year we weren't, the second year we jumped in And Casey and her team really, were the reason we were so successful. So thank you for having us.

Good morning folks. My name is Hong Ho, and I am from southwestern College in Chula Vista. Chula Vista is, ten minutes south of San Diego. Case you don't know where that is. And, I've been a Canvas admin at my institution for the past year, and we just finished our impact onboarding a little under two months ago.

There. My name is Cole Samson. I'm the administrator of professional learning and student support for the Kern County, superintendent of schools office in California. We are the third largest County in the state of California, supporting forty six school districts, and approximately two hundred and twenty five thousand students across our county. And this is our fourth year, with Canvas implementation.

My name is Daniel Cook. I am a learning instruction technology coach, assigned to the site, and then I'm under LSS, learning support services, and instructional support services. This is our six year implementation, but we're entering our third year, of an online credit recovery option that is built within Canvas So and I've been a big part, more a part of that rather than the initial uh-uh canvas onboarding. Hi. I'm Brian Lens.

I'm a coordinator of digital learning in Clark County School District, which services, Las Vegas in the greater surrounding area. And we've had Canvas. I say we're in our tenth year of our rollout. Because that's what it feels like so large. And so, yeah, happy to be here.

Awesome. Thank you, Dan. Brian, sorry. I'm losing my track and my thoughts. So the way it's gonna work is honestly, I have questions on the board so you can on the screen.

You can see what the questions are. I'll read them because we are recording so that anyone who's listening later on will know what the question was. And then the panelists have, already given some answers to me, but then they'll be able to rip off each other as well. So question one, what were the key challenges your organization faced before implementing our comprehensive learning services and which services were most instrumental in helping you address those challenges. And honestly, this was all of you.

So whoever wants to jump in first, please do. Okay. I'll start. A key challenge that our organization faced is that we had already had a LMS in place, and it had been in place for five years. But when the pandemic hit, we probably only had ten percent of our teachers actually using that LMS.

So when the pandemic hit, we were thankful we had something in place. Everybody grabbed on like a lifeline, and only for us to realize that it was servicing anything we needed it to service. So in the middle of a pandemic, we said, let's change learning management systems for teachers who are already stressed out, and for sixty five thousand students who were like, what is happening in our world. So one of our one of our biggest challenges was how do we navigate away from something people weren't really using, but felt now suddenly we couldn't take it away from them to demonstrate that there was so much more. That was our whole catch phrase, but wait, there's more.

In in what we could offer with the Canvas product and really the, opportunities to look at the differences between and highlight what the Canvas platform offered that the other one didn't even have as an opportunity was really beneficial for us. Go next. So, at our institution, we've had Canvas since twenty seventeen, I believe. And at the time, the only instructors who were using Canvas were the ones who were actually teaching online, which was a very small percentage at the time. But of course, COVID hit and then everybody had to go online.

And at the height of, I think it was summer and fall of twenty twenty, we were con or my colleagues were constantly offering different canvas, like how to use canvas workshops. And the attendance was very high at the time, but we've noticed over the past two semesters, attendance has been very, very low, but we have new all the time, and we have new students all the time. So how come they're not coming? Cause they need the info. So that was our reason for purchasing impact because impact has so many things, but one of the things that we really love is the messaging where we can send out information. So what we hope to do and again, we've had it for a little under two months.

But we hope to offer the information that our students or instructors need in the moment that they're in Canvas. So for example, like on if our instructor goes to the syllabus page in Canvas, we have a pop up message that tells them, Hey, did you know that we have a syllabus template that's in the con, Canvas comments for you already and it takes them there. And yeah, we we use a lot of the instructional design services that's we're on a year three of a contract. We have Sasha. We used a third party designer when we first used Canvas about six, seven years ago, and it was mostly for our career technical education courses.

It was not, really fitting the needs of our core content area. And a lot of the templates were a little on the, a lot of our core subject teachers were critical of them. So with an instructional design service, it's more of a collaborative effort and what Sasha is particularly a specialist in is, accessibility in design and I would say our biggest hurdle before using services was our teachers are content specialists. They're not online course designers. I have a master's in, curriculum and instruction and I didn't take any classes on how to properly design, an online ecosystem that is supportive to students and meeting students needs, particularly students who have an IEP five zero four or any other language barriers.

So Canvas brings all that to the four, but teachers don't know how to implement it because they're not training that design. So, Sasha is really good on on taking content specialists taking where our problems are with special populations and then turning that into a whole package. And then to quickly touch on the the credit recovery side, it being designed in house by our peers will put more value whereas prior, we were spending a lot of money on a third party and every teacher had a lot of criticism of of the the genuine nature of those credits and the value of those credits and why are they a through g credits or, or, you know, university college preparatory credits, when the answers are all available online, and I will not name the four different options out there that all have that, all that have that problem. So now that we're building our own credit recovery model inside built by our teachers and our staff with our anchor standards. Now the streamline of that and the authenticity of our content is is way more well received from, some of our more difficult staff members.

So our county journey with Canvas began to fall before the pandemic, and we really were trying to invest, in trying to reimagine what professional learning look like for our, forty six districts. Our furthest district from our central office is about two and hours away. And so to deploy my team to be able to get them there, we'd have to leave at six o'clock in the morning and be there all day, get back. Not necessarily the best service model because by the time you get there, you're a little little sleepy. And then still have to track track your way back.

And so really trying to figure out a way to provide equal access to professional learning to folks all across our area. Not knowing that just a few short months later, everything was gonna break loose, and nothing was gonna be normal anymore. And so instead of being trying to be innovative and be out in front, we're let we our entire content team shifted to building lessons. So we built over thirty courses of nine weeks each from kindergarten, through twelfth grade. So in on the math side, we did kindergarten to calculus, over a thousand hours of instruction that we were able to blueprint to teachers, during the first spring of the pandemic.

But nobody on my team had ever interacted with Canvas before. So we had a lot of challenges, going from how to push the buttons and makes the things kinda work and figure it out to how to actually develop pretty courses that students would like to engage with. So we really leverage the ID side, the instructional design side, to say, yep, you guys are on track here, but let's refine it just a little bit and they would go in and polish it up and make sure that what kids were receiving on the other end, had the alt text built into it, had the immersive reader functions kind of ready to go. It's really helped it become a better product that now is a product that is free for anybody in the state of California. Alright.

And then for us, we're at k twelve. We're the fifth largest school district. So we serve three hundred thousand students, three hundred and sixty different schools spread out over a land size about the size of Massachusetts. And during the pandemic, it was clear that, you know, the teacher shortage was amplified. So members of our team were moved back to the classroom, like rightfully so.

The highly qualified teacher is the biggest thing we can give every student. So that left one instructional support person for the entire district. So we leveraged training quite heavily, especially because pre pandemic, we had zero inroads in elementary for Canvas. And then post pandemic canvases our sole LMS K twelve to provide that consistency for our families no matter what level their child is in. They have one platform for their for their LMS.

So that's why I joke. We've had Canvas for ten years now. Pre pandemic, we are around fifty thousand active users per month. Now we're at two hundred and fifty thousand active users per month. And so we're still onboarding a lot of a lot of teachers.

And so the joke is is, well, when's Canvas going away, right? Cause they're brand new. It's like, well, we been going away for a decade. So I think we're safe. And now our state has, started to, fund it partially for our, for our state. As well.

And I just wanted to reiterate. So the services that they're specifically talking about strategic dedicated consulting, which a few people have been using. The instructional design consulting, which a few teams have been using impact is another one of our products in addition to Canvas. There's also the Mastery Connect platform. And now I'm trying to think of the other ones.

And then, Brian Ann is mentioning the training services, which is our training team that also goes out, but in addition, the training services, platform. It's been a long day, guys. Alright. So the next one, in what ways did our services enhance the effectiveness of your learning programs and initiatives lives. And if you combine more than one service, how did you enhance those? So I'm gonna start here with Sharon and then move on to Daniel after that.

Thanks. I have my notes. My team said you have to make sure you say these things. I will say that one of the most effective things that Cacey and Dave Dick at the time did with us was really talk about a vision template. And what is it you're hoping, Canvas will provide for you? And that really helped us focus on what we had that wasn't working and what we wanted to make sure we highlighted moving forward.

And that really kept our goals, as the target. You know, sometimes when you're implementing something or you're starting something, you can start to go down different rabbit holes. Oh, that's interesting. We need to go there. And being able to do the vision board or the vision template, and the other benefit was we would come back around to that.

Okay. So when we met here oh my gosh. Somebody's calling me right now. I'm so embarrassed. When we met here, you said this is what you wanted to do.

Have you been successful with that. And then what do you wanna do next? And so that again kept us really focused on what we had said? Did we meet our goals or targets? And then how do we wanna refine those? And who was I passing to? So our our goals, and again, I'm gonna speak from the credit recovery side, which I've been more on the ground floor with have always been to provide the most comprehensive amount of courses that are aligned Our course model is, they were five weeks and they are now four week terms, that are happening while the students are already taking semester courses of you know, six courses if they're an athlete, baby seven or avid. So they're already overwhelmed with plenty and they have not shown maybe a track record of a lot of academic success So honing in on those academic, you know, those core standards and then assessing. And then we started looking at, last year was our pilot year. Sorry, not the year that just happened but the year before.

I feel like we're, you know, right in between years here. We had it was kind of not a lot of guiding principles. And our instructional designer brought in a canvas tool and then her own accessibility lens had said, Well, here are some design best practices that you should implement now that we've trialed it. And we went back to some of our courses, and we looked at their How many modules were there? How many how many third party integrations were utilized? What was the assessment model? There were the modules lined up to weeks and the term or where it's lined up to units and and kinda getting, again, teachers who are not trained in these course designs to think about it in that way. And hone it in.

And we started doing a little bit of a case study and basically the more clicks you have and the more third party integrations you have, the the lower the success rate was. And so to make things as simple and and and clean as possible, simplify navigation during COVID, we also found as we were giving students hot spots in our some of our more rural areas that the more complex and pretty the bitmoji classroom that the teachers created, which were adorable, of course. It was not loading very fast. It was really frustrating for a student on a Chromebook. And and they're disengaged immediately because they're they they already rolled out a at a time that's very uncertain and now their Chromebook is not loading and they've got a parent in the living room on a meeting and they've got a little kid that's logging into clever for some other because we're a high school district, and it's just chaos.

And so we we got to talk to them about let's hone some of that in. Let's clarify things in our next project that we're working on now with, again, our our instructional designer is creating templates for our site. So where we have all of our tier one interventions as a template that our our staff can now adopt where it has all of the information on our wellness center, all the information from what a through g looks like, all of our information, and then also a template of what it should look like in your module one, what does indentation look like, what are your headings look like? So you're meeting all the accessibility standards. And then pushing it out to the commons and and creating a common space where especially those new teachers, the new teachers, they come in and the old model was to hand them a giant binder of copies. And it's a lot to sort through.

Now we can do that in a digital way and let them sort through it and look at many versions of it. So we've had a lot of success with with having an idea that's really kind of half baked in instructional design team, turning that into something that is is is student ready and and is checking all the boxes on what you need for access. And I'm gonna add, he was mentioning the course evaluation checklist And so you are all the first to hear that we have just developed a course evaluation checklist three point o because apparently we just need to keep using numbers. Can't come up with a new idea. And that includes accessibility, content, curriculum questions as well.

So that'll be at the end. There'll also be a link with that wakelet that I'll provide for you. You'll be able to get the new access to the new course evaluation checklist. So question three and we'll start with Brian and then go to Hong and then Cole can you share specific examples of how our training or instructional design and or strategic consulting services have positively impacted your organization's performance and results. Yeah.

So look, you know, having to do more with less or at least maintain the same with less, that goal of, hey, coming out of the pandemic, we weren't one to one pre pandemic. And that was a lot of pushback from a lot of our populations as to why we wouldn't adopt digital learning was what our students don't have access. So with Esther dollars, we were able to solve that problem. We're now one to one. Hot spots provided to those, based on need or express need.

And so now we can say that every child at least has a device. And so we wanna build on that momentum as our department knowing that digital learning can solve and align with a lot of our district initiatives on student achievement. How do we not or how do we limit that snap back to normal that we heard so often coming out of the pandemic? I can't wait till we just go back to normal and they kind of forget that. And so partnering with training, with the flexible service packages, what we're able to do is at least give the teachers that baseline knowledge of the buttonology of Canvas. So we could remove that.

And then our staff, like the our staff, the person that did instructional could work with teams and our teachers that were very proficient, our campus champions, and canvas, and actually aligning that to district goals. So now Canvas, the partnership, they're handling what they know best, the platform, the clicks, and all that. And then we can do what we know best aligning how we can align to district initiatives to make sure that we're trying to move the needle on student achievement with digital learning. And that really helped us out tremendously as a department. And so that's why we have seen a dip since the pandemic but we're still well above where we were at two hundred and fifty thousand active users, this past school year.

So in addition to using impact for professional development for our instructors, We are hoping to use impact on the student services side of things too. The thing is So many emails go out to students and they don't check their email or maybe they'll read it one time and then forget about it. Right? So all of that crucial information is lost somewhere. So, in impact, there's something, called a pop up that you can create. So the moment that the student logs into their Canvas dashboard, there's a message.

There's a pop up window that pops up. It's like a layover on top of the canvas. So what we've done for fall twenty twenty three is we tell them, Hey, did you know that registration for fall is now open? Do you have priority registration and there's a link that takes them there? And then do you know how to check your registration appointment? And I've linked it to a Google doc I've created. Do you need to talk to a counselor? There's a link that takes them to the Ukrainian lobby where they can make an appointment and then I invented a video that walks them through how to register for classes. So that's one of the things that we've done.

The other thing is and this this is from like a inclusive perspective. In canvas when you go to set your pronouns, There are three options by default. That's it. We have the option to add more. Sure.

But for the past year, We've been a team of two people and we don't think that two people should decide what pronouns are available to our entire community. And we've asked, we've reached out to our, student lgbt group. We've reached out to the employee LGBT group, they've either ignored us or said, that's a great idea and then forget about us. So what we've done is we again, using impact, we've created a message where when a student goes or even a faculty, go to set their pronouns. There's like a little message that pops up that says, select your pronoun.

You don't see your pronoun, let us know what you wanna see in the feedback. So we reach out directly to our community and they let us know what they want, and then we put it in for them. So kind of initially, as I had mentioned, we were kind of brand new Canvas users as we were implementing trying to build all of this. And so a lot of it started with a lot of training of our team building some initial capacity. But then that very next school year, it became how do we train all the students and the families in our community because they were all at home to engage as well.

So we had a lot of training support upfront to to help our whole community come come on board. But then as we are coming out of the pandemic, some cool stuff started happening where we started to think like how can we leverage the services that we have to really help us think about our office priorities. And so in our office, we support, obviously, all forty six of our districts, but then we also support other counties as well as some statewide initiatives. And so we really started to leverage and think about how can we use, we're very fortunate. We have three designers and one strategic consultant that full time dedicated to our team.

And I treat them like extensions of my team. I often will run things by them before I run them by my team. They're kinda like my little personal think tank and, say, Hey, I'm thinking about this. Where are the holes? Where am I gonna get it blown up from? You know, how can I make it better? Great. I agree.

Can you make it look pretty? And that's pretty much how a lot of our conversations go, and it's really, great because then they do, whether it be a professional learning, They've helped us build out conference courses. They've helped us, lead statewide. We led the California Canvas collaborative, so they helped us lead that. And be a kind of a leader across California in that instance. And as well as continuing to be upfront with our districts.

And so we've leveraged those those services a lot. And again, it's always very highly collaborative too. So they'll bring something back to me and I say, yeah, but not quite. And they take that feedback. They adapt it.

And so and then really it's a collaborative process. The whole way through. So it's been pretty great. Question number four. Excuse me.

How would you describe the level of support and customer service you have received from our team? And in what ways have our services exceeded your expectations? So I'll just open this up to one or two people who wanna talk about this one. Oh my gosh. Can I please You may? Okay. So, the previous experience we had was really difficult. We couldn't get in touch with the company.

We couldn't get answers to questions. We had a laundry list. I mean, like, eighty nine items that were in, like, service desk. Like, we're like, come on, we need help with the previous product. And when we made the decision to change, the support, the level of support, the level of communication so exceeded our expectation.

And you know how sometimes with vendors they can become a little bit too much, and you're kinda like you're a little bit much. There, the folks we worked with were so balanced being there when we needed them, but not overwhelming us with, hey, what do you need? Hey, what do you need? Calls. Hey, we're to your point, I mean, excellent point of, hey, we have this idea, thought partner. They were an amazing Casey and Dave were an amazing thought partner. John Howard on the technical side, working with our, SIS admin and and how is that gonna work for our SIS admin? I can't even praise enough the level of support.

It exceeded I mean, it exceeded our expectation. Even our DOT friends who are kinda crunchy, appreciated so much the level of feedback and support that was, you know, they talk about on demand learning and on demand professional development. That's exactly what we got from our partners when we made that transition. Sorry. I didn't mean to jump in front of everybody else, but No.

I I think the last question. So and Cole made a good point about how they're part of the team. Sasha, I and I put I think she preface some of the questions to us. Sasha needs a district email. Like she is part of our district.

She we've embedded her into our our team's culture. She comes she came to our county office, which is down the street from us to speak. And in like it it's she's a big part of our team, but she doesn't just collaborate with us. She goes back to projects we've worked on both before her and ones that she worked on with us, and she's perfectionist. So she went back while we were present we're presenting tomorrow morning a session on accessibility, and she went back to something that her and I did together and she goes I can't believe I allowed that.

And she's she wants it to be so good and so much better and she she takes an idea and she makes it better and and but she's also reflective of her own work and then she's also very real with what other things we're seeing and and what's challenging is we put out these templates and we put out these kind of best practices and then we let teachers create and utilizing impact, which I just connected with our our coordinator of distance learning. I said we need to use impact so we could notify teachers that we've done an update on x, y, or z, course because we've made it better. We've made it more accessible. We've streamline things. We've updated resources.

We've done x, y, and z. And a lot of teachers once they've adopted and then they've tweaked, they then just re adopt their that they went through. Right? Cause they're constantly reflecting and perfecting. And, you know, we're we're we value the the work of our instructional design team to the degree that we need to make sure it gets out to our eleven or twelve hundred teachers and enrolling that out and impact is gonna be a part that kind of rolls into what our work is with instructional design. So we're running out of time.

We had lots more to say. Just so you know, So, unfortunately, I'm gonna jump. Don't look. I'm gonna jump. This is a way clip of resources all of the things that they're talking about.

If you wanna know about impacts, if you wanna know about consulting services or instructional design or training services, I'm also gonna put them on the spot. You see them later today or tomorrow, I'm sure they'll be happy to talk to you. Many of them are doing sessions. So within the I have one more announcement after this. So once everybody's gotten this, I'll come back to what I swear.

Let me just jump to the next one. If you don't know, we're launching Panda Pros again, which is a free session for teachers and staff that we, I do it. So what you're able to do is sign up for one on one training, if you will, asking any questions within a thirty minute period with a Panda expert. And what we do is you sign up, you go in, you can do Canvas or Mastery Connect. And you can say, well, you know what? I'm gonna come on Tuesday.

And I got three answers to the questions I had, but I have more questions. So I'm gonna sign up again. We do this until the end of to, nope, second week in September, I think. But really honestly, put this out on your, notifications on your global announcements. If your teachers need help and you need help helping your teachers and don't have it, send them this way and we will be happy to help them.

It we've done it now for three years, and it's one of the most rewarding things that I get to do. Is to work with teachers again. So, oh, yeah. Oh, it is September thirtieth, duh, it's right on the screen. So July thirty first is the first.

And it goes till September thirtieth. Alright. Any questions about that? I'll go back to the resources. Then I'm gonna ask if you would just announce what sessions, if you're doing a session going after this, what session where it is and what time because I know a few of you are. Oh my gosh.

That's pressure. So my team is doing a session on, a division wide implementation roll out of canvas. It's called Camp canvas, but wait. They're s'mores. Smores.

Four fifteen. Yeah. Somewhere. Four fifteen. Yeah.

Today. Oh, thank you. Seven pillars of accessibility and achieving accessibility in canvas with Sasha. She's the real expert. I'm just for comedic relief.

It's ten AM. I don't see where Redrock four five third floor. That's around the corner. Run the corner apparently. Okay.

And are there any questions? I know we're out of time, so it's one forty six. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate your time. If you have any questions for me, you can find me KC Testerman, and you can ask any questions, or you can ask questions of the panel. Thank you very much, everyone.