First Semester with Canvas

[gdeleon]

Our district will start using Canvas (from Blackboard) for the first time this coming Fall semester. As an admin I'm preparing myself for questions and scenarios that will be presented to us when the semester starts. We have a couple of pilot classes but I don't think we have enough data to consider myself well prepared. If you can share your experiences during your first semester with Canvas to help me better prepare myself that would be awesome. Thanks!

[rconroy]

Hi  @gdeleon  Welcome ‌to the community! It seems you've had an account for a while, but this is your first official posting.

Congrats on migrating over. It's gonna be crazy, but it'll be fun.  Use the Community as a resource for everything- it saved me when I took on the LMS Admin position at my institution. Definitely check out the Canvas Engagement Strategies group! Its chalked full of good content that will be super helpful as you navigate your migration over to Canvas. 

While I didn't manage the migration, taking it on meant being prepared for anything and everything. The FastTrack: Canvas Admin Series was GREAT for me getting started. From there, the original Canvas FastTrack Series was great, too. 

Also, I LOVE the Guides: Canvas‌ space. Literally everything you need at your fingertips. If they had a "I ❤️ the Docs Team" shirt, I'd wear it everyday.  

All all seriousness, the common questions like "How do I login?" "How do I reset my password?" "Where are my Courses?" are always going to come up, and in multitudes. If you have some training that you can quickly hyperlink and send out to answer, it'll save you heaps of time. I usually went about explaining how to do it, and hyperlinked to a Guide so not only do they have my explanation that is specific to our school's instance, but we also have a link to the Community so they can go and explore, themselves! 

There are a lot of ways to go about it, but in the end, do what works for your users. If a 30 second screencast showing how to do something in your instance is how they'll learn best, collect some of those, host them to Vimeo (being FERPA compliant, of course. Use mock students, mock courses, but your Institutions instance), then send them out. Have a "Canvas Camp" a couple weeks leading up to it so people are prepared. There are tons of ways to do it, but have FUN. Maybe see if you can score some swag from your CSM. It might get people a little more excited.  

Happy hunting! As always, use the Community for a sounding board for advice and enjoy!

[crodriguez3]

Hello Gerard!

We too are *newbies* coming over from Moodle.  My best resource is the Canvas Commons, my fallback is an admin at another school who's implementation is amazingly just like ours, same SIS, same everything.  I fall back on his expertise whenever I get into a pickle or when the documentation isn't really getting me there.  I also joined the "Admin Group" and follow most of those postings, they give you so much information and are quick to respond when you have a query.

When we first started I relied heavily on our account rep, she was wonderful in helping me navigate to the *right* resources to get my information.  Our startup this Fall went much better than we thought, but then we had almost two semesters to work some of the kinks out of the system, with about a third of our population using the system. It was a great trial that helped me find the most significant issues that our faculty were going to encounter and we were able to address those in our training classrooms.

We have created two resource classrooms for our folks and have linked to the relevant canvas Videos that speak to each topic. For our campus specific issues we have a trainer who created most of our the Campus specific videos that are in that training.  We require the Tier 1 training for all faculty, whether face-to-face, hybrid or online.  Our goal by Spring 2018 is that everyone has a student-facing classroom in Canvas, even if it is just for grades and attendance.

We found that our champions here on campus were the most helpful in easing our faculty into the system, we still have some stragglers and those who want to cling to the "Moodle" mentality.  But at least now I'm not supporting two LMS' as we have officially shut Moodle down (with the exception of the archives). There is also a steering committee now for Canvas related issues, so I'm not the one making all the decisions, but I do have input (critical). 

We still find little issues each day that *used* to work in Moodle and I am constantly working to find workarounds for those.  It helps to have other admins you can call on when it gets sticky.

Cheryl Rodriguez (LMS Admin) Weatherford College

[Robbie_Grant]

 @gdeleon ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie