Chapter 1

The Who, What, When, Where, and Why of Canvas

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding what Canvas is and who uses it

Deciding when you should use Canvas

Looking at the importance of blended learning environments

Regardless of whether you are an aspiring Canvas Panda or you are a proper Panda Professional, we all share the same goal: to do what is best for the learners in our classrooms. You understand that blended learning - the mixture of traditional face-to-face instruction with digital media in any teaching modality - is here to stay; you may have struggled through teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most arduous times in history (let alone in your educational career); and you now are looking to use one of the most powerful educational technology (edtech) platforms in the world. You are in the right place.

With nearly 30 million paid users worldwide, 1.5 million active users within the Canvas community, 13 U.S. states adopting Canvas LMS and/or Instructure-powered products statewide, and tremendous growth in Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific, you are among an enormous group of fellow Pandas all working toward the same universally important goal.

This chapter provides you with an overview of the Canvas LMS ecosystem and the reasons why it is such a powerful educational technology tool. You also get a preview of the topics you will explore in more detail throughout this book.

Who Uses Canvas?

The answer to this question is fairly simple: a world of educators, administrators, and learners who are focused on teaching and learning beyond the walls of a conventional classroom.

Educators

Next to students, educators are the biggest users of Canvas LMS in the educational sector. We hope that school administrators, social workers, instructional coaches, and office staff also gain helpful insights into how Canvas LMS can make learning and communication better for all by reading this book as well.

As educators ourselves, we have had very different Canvas experiences. In 2018, Eddie worked as the innovation coach at Central Nine Career Center, an adult and continuing education career center in Indiana. As most of the students who came to Central Nine were familiar with Canvas LMS already, having used it in school prior to coming to the center, Central Nine administration decided that it needed to consider adopting a learning management system (LMS), too. Eddie was well-versed in all things edtech and was extremely excited about the possibility of adopting and implementing Canvas LMS. Within a few months, Central Nine had made the decision to adopt Canvas LMS, and Eddie took on the task of facilitating a year-long implementation plan with a pilot teacher team that he named the "Panda Pilots." It was a great success! While Eddie was in those early stages of adopting and implementing Canvas LMS, he was constantly collaborating with Marcus. Marcus is what we refer to as an "OG" or "original gangsta" of Canvas LMS.

Marcus's background with Canvas started back in 2013. He was teaching high school English at a small rural school district in Indiana. As he recalls, the original reason for adopting Canvas LMS was because in the flatlands of Indiana, two inches of snow could shut down school for the day. Some of you know exactly what we are talking about, but for those who don't, the situation was this: Even a minimal amount of snow could close school due to the hazardous road conditions caused by the blowing and drifting of snow. So, in any given school year, Marcus would see roughly six to ten school days canceled by inclement weather. Those lost instructional days would be added to the end of the school year and every time that happened, end of the year events such as graduation ceremonies, open houses, awards nights, athletic events, and on and on, had to be rescheduled. This rescheduling of events over and over became quite a strain on relations between the school district and the community members.

Believe it or not, the primary reason his district adopted Canvas LMS back then was to attempt to avoid this calendar nightmare. The philosophy was simple. Having Canvas would enable teachers to provide work, mostly busy work in those days, to students even when they were not in school, thereby avoiding a full cancellation of the day. So, Marcus has been using Canvas for a long time. Though the journeys are clearly different, that is precisely what we felt made our collaboration work so well. To this day, we still often see Canvas LMS from completely different viewpoints and are constantly learning from each other's experiences in working with teachers.

The point right now is that many teachers worldwide from all types of teaching backgrounds - K-12, higher education, career and technical education, and beyond - find their way to Canvas LMS. (In Chapter 3 you take a look around the Canvas interface, and in Chapter 4 you discover the steps to setting up your very first Canvas course.)

Administrators

Administrators use Canvas LMS, too. Canvas is one of the few edtech platforms that can and should be used as regularly by administrators as it is by teachers in classrooms. Think about that. How many digital platforms do you use each day? How many of those can be effectively leveraged by an administrator? The answer is that there are very few, but Canvas LMS is one of the most effective platforms for administrators to utilize on a day-to-day basis.

Our primary experience is in the K-12 setting, but when you think about the myriad of ways administrators can use Canvas to lead within their buildings, you can see that an administrator not using Canvas LMS is an administrator who is working hard, but maybe not working intelligently. Whether you are a principal, an assistant principal, a curriculum director, or the superintendent of your district, leveraging Canvas LMS is absolutely critical, worthwhile, and effective.

We have all said this before: This meeting could've been an email! Well, as administrators continue to learn Canvas LMS, they can leverage the platform to save everyone time and struggle within the day-to-day grind of teaching. In Chapter 8, we go into the ins and outs of using the Canvas communication tools to not only make learning personal for your learners, but also help you streamline communication between departments and clearly communicate with stakeholders.

Did you know that there is an entire department at Instructure that solely focuses on educational thought leadership and provides professional development to school and district administrators? The Center for Leadership and Learning (www.instructure.com/product/canvas/leadership-development) works with hundreds of administrators every year to assist them in their implementation of the Canvas LMS, Canvas for Elementary, and MasteryConnect platforms, in order to better lead by example.

School staff

The phrase, it takes a village is likely one of the most appropriate phrases to apply to teaching and learning. In the K-12 setting, there are instructional coaches, technology coaches, technology integrationists, innovation coaches, paraprofessionals, councilors, teacher aides, and about a dozen other titles that all fall under this umbrella of "other folks who support learning who need to be fluent in their use of Canvas LMS." In Marcus's experience in some small- to medium-sized school districts, he would often leverage some of the classroom aides and paraprofessionals on campus to ensure that everyone could assist a student with learning via Canvas LMS. In short, adults in the building should be functional, if not fluent, in using Canvas LMS because it is one of the few digital platforms that truly impacts nearly every stakeholder associated with a school district or university.

Students

Last, but certainly not least, millions of student learners use Canvas LMS every single day. Whether the student is a kindergartener in Kansas, a preteen in Oregon, a teenager in England, a college student at the University of Notre Dame, or a student of dental hygiene in Australia, Canvas LMS students are as diverse and as powerful as ever. As with so many other technology platforms, often the adults struggle more with new technology than the kids do. Canvas LMS is quite intuitive, and with some basic knowledge of the platform and a little bit of time to become acclimated, students always find a way to see learning success within Canvas.

One of the best things you can do as an educator or administrator is to find a way to also be a student within the Canvas LMS platform. This is a point that is paramount when learning Canvas LMS. As an educator, you need to create, design, and build content for your students, but you should also experience that content as a student. (You discover how to use the Student View in Canvas to check out how your courses appear on students' screens in Chapter 4.)

In much the same way you design a lesson backward, starting with the desired outcome, as an educator you always want to consider how your lesson design in Canvas LMS looks, feels, and works from the student perspective. We are all lifelong learners. We are all students.

What Is an LMS?

LMS is short for learning management system. What is that? We like to put it like this: A learning management system, like Canvas, is an...