Canvas to Deliver Free Online Training Course for Apple Development in Swift Coding Curriculum

[cwruck]

We all know education is about more than just learning long division and how to compose a sentence. Education is also about fostering thoughtful and respectful human beings. As a platform for learning, it’s not often that we get an opportunity to help with the latter. While at SXSWedu this year, I saw a film called “The R Word” (which I highly encourage you to see) and I saw a different kind of opportunity for us. One of the things I learned from the documentary is that people can grow when they have the opportunity to learn more about how their behavior (even unintentional behavior) can be harmful. It’s certainly not a new idea, but something clicked for me during the Q&A for the film.

It occurred to me that one of the challenges organizations like Special Olympics face is getting their materials distributed into the hands of folks who can make a difference. I just kept thinking, “How can I help? How can I help?” While content is freely available on their website, it still requires instructors to know it’s there, take the time to seek it out, and then customize it for Canvas. We have this awesome tool called Commons. If we could find some Instructional Designers to help us tailor the content for Commons, we could make it so much easier for folks to get this awesome content into their courses.

Thus, the idea for “Featured Content in Commons” was born and we couldn’t be more excited for the possibilities this new feature will open up. We teamed up with Designers for Learning to make sure the content looks awesome in Canvas. By the way, if you’re an instructional designer who would like to help with this in the future, you should reach out to them!

We’ve only just begun this new kind of partnership. And while we’re piloting this new feature with Special Olympics (and another organization that we’ll tell you about at Instructurecon), we want to hear your ideas for organizations that you’d like to see us partner with for more awesome featured content. Look for the Special Olympics featured content to appear in Commons during Instructurecon in just a few short weeks!

Speaking of Instructurecon... join us for a chat IRL if you're going to be there!