Inspiring Professional Development: Leveraging Canvas Catalog during Learning at Work week

[CarolinePearl]

Thursday, July 11th at 11:00am

Abstract / Session Overview

Presenter: Caroline Bearpark, University of Sunderland in London.

Canvas Catalog has become our one-stop shop for staff to access professional development opportunities. With a particular focus on the use of Catalog in Learning at Work week, Caroline shared what to do and what not to do, from setting up and implementing Canvas to inspiring people to utilise Catalog.

Key takeaways for audience:

• Strategies for setting up and implementing Canvas Catalog within organisational structures, including best practices and potential pitfalls to avoid.
• Ideas for inspiring staff to actively engage with Canvas Catalog.
• Digital tools that can be utilised to create learning resources for Canvas Catalog.

Details

Caroline started by sharing a bit of background and context with regards to why the university implemented Canvas Catalog. After joining the university, she implemented a Digital Learning offer. The audience for this was primarily academic staff and the offer consisted of workshops aimed at developing their digital skills for teaching and learning. However, staff often struggled to attend workshops due to conflicts with teaching or other job requirements. So, she started to map out what could be offered asynchronously and how. The main problem was that the university didn't have a space where these could be advertised and staff self-enrol on them. Canvas Catalog now provides this space.

Then, Caroline ran through the process of implementation. This was straight-forward. A project team was assembled with a representative from Instructure. They had weekly meetings where the Instructure representative would demonstrate an aspect of the set up, this would then be implemented. The biggest challenge was content creation. She didn't want to launch Catalog without enough content and didn't want all the content to be digital skills focused. As such, the aim was to collaborate with other teams and subject matter experts to produce content. A lack of engagement impeded this but the team was able to create plenty of content to launch with.

She then briefly talked about some of the tools used to create content. The main tools they use for content creation are Canvas modules, Rise from Articulate360, and Canva. Several people were creating content so to ensure consistency between modules, module templates were created. This ensures that all courses include the relevant information for learners, such as an FAQ page and instructions on navigation. 

Catalog was launched for staff in March 2024 with the launch to students following in April 2024. The purpose of launching to staff before students, allowed them to identify any potential issues. In preparation for the launch, an instructional video and step by step guide was created showing learners how to navigate and use Catalog. For staff, a pre-launch session was also hosted. Marketing for the launch consisted of newsletters, a one page flyer, and announcements on the university's various communication channels. 

For staff, they also decided to utilise Learning at Work week to promote the platform and drive-up staff usage. Caroline briefly talked about how they delivered Learning at Work week in 2023. The offer consisted of 17 learning opportunities and was the result of a collaboration between 8 teams. They created micro-learnings and ran workshops. To host these opportunities, they created a Canvas module and added all staff to this module. This was problematic as not all staff accepted the module invite. For Learning at Work week 2024, 5 teams collaborated to produce an offer of 10 learning opportunities. Again, this learning consisted of workshops and e-learnings. Having Catalog provided a centralised space to host the e-learnings. Each day we had a theme with an event and associated e-learning relevant to that theme. For example, Monday was Inclusive Monday with a workshop on creating LGBTQ+ safe learning environments and an e-learning on Designing inclusive learning materials. They used Learning at Work as an opportunity to promote Catalog and encourage staff to visit the platform. Engagement was good with 22% of staff engaging with at least one learning opportunity. Better still, engagement with Catalog did increase. By the end of the Learning at Work week, 38% of staff had activated their Catalog account compared to 20% before. 

Caroline presented her key takeaways and recommendations from the implementation of Catalog:

• It is important to carefully consider the creation of content, especially when several people are creating content. Although she highly rates individuality and didn’t want every e-learning to look the same, some consistency is important to ensure quality and the relevant information is included in every e-learning. She highly recommend the creation and use of templates for this.
• Think carefully about the information that users will need in the e-learnings. When creating the template, she considered information about how to navigate the e-learning and how to find their certificate upon completion but there was a lot she didn’t consider. Research and look at other institutions’ Catalog sites. A lot of their FAQs were influenced by another institutions’. Because she didn’t consider this carefully before creating and launching the template, she had to go back through already created content to add this.
• Likewise, consider the information that you need to include in the listings on Catalog themselves. Like with the FAQs, she found herself having to go back to change many of these after the fact which was time consuming.
• The relevance of content is key. Asking staff (and students) what they want to learn is important to ensuring engagement. It can be difficult to engage staff with the process of submitting this information, however.
• Ensure that there is plenty of content before launching. There is nothing worse than seeing an empty site. And this also plays into the ensuring relevance of content. The same content won’t be relevant to all staff, so variety is good.

Resources

You can access a copy of the presentation here.