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MICHELLE STEPHENS: Hello everybody.
When I first got my job teaching at my very first
full-time teaching job, I had approximately five weeks to
pack up my family.
I had a three-year-old son, I was pregnant with my daughter,
I had to move to a new town, move into a new house, and
start a new job.
And they kind of say what are the three most stressful
things that you can do are move, change occupations, and
have children.
And so I decided, why not?
Let's do all three at once.
And I wasn't terribly, hugely pregnant--
I was only like middle-y pregnant.
I had my daughter in December.
But we packed up the house.
We went around and I was like, OK these are
boxes for the kitchen.
This is for the kids bedroom.
This is for my bedroom.
This is for the living room.
And we moved everything into the house and it got unpacked
very rapidly, because we had the new baby
coming and the new job.
And it was, in some ways, very overwhelming.
And so as we were sort of going through this process,
unpacking, we didn't notice a lot of things about our house.
We bought our house really fast.
And so I realized that I had put stuff in the dining room
that really belonged in the living room.
And I had put stuff in the bedrooms that probably should
have been in storage.
And we just sort of lived like that for a while.
And it worked.
We were able to eat and feed ourselves and bathe ourselves.
But we weren't really living in our house.
We were living in our old house that we had moved to the
new house, which can be problematic when you've
finally bought your first house and you're not really
taking full advantage of it.
My backyard--
nothing.
I'd never had a backyard before.
I'd always lived in condo--
when I was a kid I did.
You live in dorms, you live in apartments, I lived in a
townhouse where they did all the landscaping.
So this beautiful backyard--
and what happened to it over the course of the next two
years is it turned into a jungle.
And I'm not kidding.
When we finally cleared it, it took us two weeks.
I live in a place where plants grow like the rainforest.
So I started thinking about that as we were beginning to
migrate from ANGEL to Canvas.
We created a Rubric--
the Online Task Force, together.
We created a Rubric for all of the things that we wanted an
LMS to have, before we ever started looking at them.
And migration was very, very high on the list.
We wanted seamless migration.
We wanted to appease faculty because we had just
transitioned from Web CT to ANGEL four year-- or three
years earlier.
So we were sort of forced to move again, and faculty were
just like, really--
what, again?
And so we want to be able to say, it's OK.
We've got a great migration plan, it's going to be
effortless.
We're going to help work you through these problems.
We didn't want to disrupt faculty.
We didn't want to change the way they were doing things.
We wanted to enable them to continue to make contact with
students without having a lot of extra work
that they had to do.
And it seemed, at the time, like this was a really great
way of going about things.
And I think those of you that are here who have recently
migrated or who are in the process of thinking about
migration, you really can probably sympathize with where
we were at in the situation.
And you've got a faculty that is working hard to be good
online instructors, to say we're about to change
everything again.
All of your tools-- it's almost like if you tore down
all of your classrooms and built all new ones
and said, good luck.
So the Online Learning Task Force began migrating classes
into every possible LMS that we could get our hands on.
We were in Sakai, we were in Desire2Learn , we did
Blackboard, we did Eraser.
We did all--
I know.
Don't migrate into Eraser.
It goes discussion boards-- what are those?
And we had problems.
Problems here, problems there.
This one-- and so it was part of our Rubric along with many
other criteria.
And so we like, wow.
Canvas seems to have a good migration and that's good.
And a couple of these other ones have
a really good migration.
And I was obsessed with migration.
What do you get?
ANGEL Cartridge, Common Cartridge-- does it import
differently?
What happens when you import it?
Do you still have access?
Do you still have settings?
And I probably spent a month or two just migrating my
online classes-- particularly speech.
I teach online speech.
I know, it's like, what?
How does that work?
That's a different session, I think.
But when I have a class that I have rolled over, I roll over
that class approximately 12 times a year.
Because it's designed to be taught in three week, four
week, eight week, and 16 week intervals.
And the class is built so that I don't have to worry about
those different times.
The students are able to work through the course the way
that it's built.
We didn't want to disrupt faculty.
But what does disrupt mean?
Because we think, oh-- disruption is bad.
Well you know I've been in meetings where there's been a
disruption, and the meeting ended and I was like, yeah.
Disrupting--
to throw into disorder, to interrupt the normal
course or unity of.
And the great thing about being thrown into disorder is
that you're forced to find a way to reorder, to create
order from chaos.
And we didn't want to do that.
And I began to think, why don't we want to do that?
Is that necessarily a bad thing--
to disrupt faculty?
To have every single person in your institution say, I have
to re-look at this course or all of these courses?
But still, we were a driving force was for faculty to have
an effortless change into this LMS.
I think every institution wants that.
All of you online learning coordinators and IT people
know what it's like-- oh my gosh.
We just got these faculty to finally figure out the LMS and
now we're going to change everything.
Now this is what happens when you say to faculty, I want you
to please write all of your courses from scratch.
Uh, that's going to happen.
Do you know how much stuff I have in one online class?
It's going to take me years to build every
single item from scratch.
And so I figured the only way to really--
I have an administrator--
anybody here Tacoma, Washington people?
Tod Treat, our former vice president and about to be your
new vice president-- who by the way is fabulous.
Do not worry.
He's coming in-- he does good things.
He said to me, Michelle, you have to pull faculty
and not push them.
You have to give them a reason to want to do it rather than
tell them they have to do it.
And so I began to explore what those avenues might be.
I'm going to talk to you a minute about me migrating my
speech class from ANGEL into Canvas.
But first I want to bring Kristi Palmer up here to talk
about her experience, because I'm pretty late to the game.
I started teaching online in 2006 with Web CT, but we
didn't really have a lot of support for online learning, I
had no idea what I was doing.
I just threw some--
I had sort of a course somebody built once and I sort
of copied that and ran with it.
And it was what I would call half-*** at best.
But without anything to compare myself to, I thought I
was doing pretty good.
Kristi, on the other hand, taught our first online class.
And she went from there all the way to here.
And I want Kristi to come up and talk about that process.
KRISTI PALMER: Because I'm the old one.
When Richland asked me to put a class online in 1999, we
didn't even have email at Richland.
And I was an adjunct, and they figured well if I screw it up
they don't have to just rehire me the next semester.
There's nothing lost.
So I got this nerdy woman from the library that knew
something called HTML--
whatever.
And then I got this awesome thing-- it was called the Web
Board, and it was an online bulletin board.
And I could like post this sentence and other people
could read it.
And I'm like, oh my god--
this is awesome.
OK.
So what I did was I got one Web Board, and I ended up
doing this I guess fairly well--
and so I got like three or four classes going online--
1999.
My one Web Board, though, I had every student
from every class in.
So I had to color code--
Ed Psych students, read the red--
Soc students, read the blue.
I mean it was that convoluted.
It was a terrible.
When we got Web CTI I truly thought God had
come down to earth.
It was like, oh my gosh.
You mean we can actually put assignments in, and quizzes
in, I don't have to worry about HTML?
So I took my Web Board stuff, and I put it in Web CT, then I
added some things.
Then we went to a different version of Web CT, and I
switched it over.
And I was online coordinator at the time.
Then we went to ANGEL.
And it's like, OK.
Well this is kind of nice.
So I scootched it over again.
And then we get to Canvas.
And I hear our director of online
learning, and my friend--
who's also an online guru--
saying, you really need to start from scratch.
I'm like, what the hell?
I've been doing this since 1999.
I know what I'm doing.
Then Michelle was telling me about her house and
that sort of thing.
My mom, recently divorced, wanted to redo her house.
You know, power of the woman.
We painted everything, carpeted everything.
All of her stuff is in her solarium--
to store.
So when I was bringing out stuff for her to hang back up,
I said, OK, Mom, where do you want this picture?
That's the living room picture.
I said, OK, your living room was white but now it's green.
This won't go.
But it's the living room picture.
But it looks better in the bedroom.
But it's the living room picture.
And that's what I was doing.
And when Kona, our online director, when she looked at
the classes that I simply migrated over, she said, why
are you just like posting instructions here, and then
discussion here?
And why are you--
why is this so choppy?
Because when I was on Web Board it had to be choppy.
That was my only choice.
I finally had to think outside the box when I started from
the ground up.
I was going from a trailer to a mansion,
living the same way.
And it didn't work.
So trust me-- somebody that's been old, and been there 14
years online--
I'm telling you, unpack those boxes.
Start building your rooms from scratch, and you'll be amazed
at how you have to rethink what you've always done.
And you see it in a much different light.
It's true.
MICHELLE STEPHENS: So as I began migrating my online
speech class, I was like, OK, I had my ANGEL-- if any of you
guys are on ANGEL you can recognize--
I had my ANGEL homepage.
And it goes into the Lessons tab where I have all my
lessons-- there's all of my modules.
It was good.
Like I felt very confident and excited about my system of
organization.
Modules so that I can put due dates on modules rather--
I started off with weeks.
That didn't work, because then I had to have a different--
days.
I teach this class, sometimes, in a three-week interval.
Weeks don't work, sometimes.
And then here's an example of my Getting
Started module from ANGEL.
I want people to introduce themselves, I want them to get
some information, take a syllabus quiz, make sure your
questions are the really important
points on the syllabus.
And back-up plan.
Back-up plan is one of things we do in many of the classes
at our institution, which is just a student saying--
it's a question.
What happens if you're online, or your internet, computer, or
whatever tanks out at 10:45 at night and your assignment's
due at 11:00?
What is your technology back-up plan?
So students are forced to think about the fact that
their uses of technology are their responsibility, and not
my responsibility.
Just like they are in the real world.
So when we switched over to Canvas, I was frustrated.
Because I couldn't make Canvas do some of the
things that ANGEL did.
And I wanted those things.
And I built the original course in Canvas-- which I
looked for--
I don't even have it anymore.
It's been deleted and wiped out and started over.
But the original one didn't make a lot of sense.
And I began to say, maybe this is a Michelle problem, and not
a Canvas problem.
Maybe this is--
I'm not thinking about things the right way.
So I went in and I did a complete rebuild.
And this slide sort of represents a myriad of things
that happened.
The first one was fury.
There's a word I have for when I'm working inline and online,
and I'm not doing like feedback to students, grading
assignments--
but if I'm building, giving dates, doing settings--
I'm clicking.
Like I've got to go click for a while.
Because we get used to those paths of a click, click, add.
You're doing a quiz and you get used to where all of the--
and you try to become as efficient at it as possible.
And so that frustrated me.
I felt like I didn't want to do all of that clicking.
What does migration do for faculty?
Because when we talk about migration, it is something
that happens at the very beginning of the process, and
after that it's irrelevant.
Right?
We are not going to be migrating our courses in,
again, three years from now.
The course migration happens at the very beginning.
So what does it do?
It saves time.
Maybe.
I wanted to prove it.
So I did a very non-scientific study, because I'm theater and
communication, right?
All artsy.
I was like, well I wonder how long it would take?
So that's when I began calling Kona, and I'm saying, I need
more sandboxes.
I want to try something.
I probably have more sandboxes than anybody at the
institution.
I need like five more--
give me more sandboxes.
I got to try some stuff out.
And so I timed how long things would take.
And the time difference was not significant.
But what I found was, in the courses that
I built from scratch--
because I was able to look and explore the system in Canvas--
I was able to find ways to save time in
my day-to-day workload.
That if I had continued to try to do it the ANGEL way-- and
I'm not ever going to knock ANGEL, I loved it--
but the ANGEL way doesn't save me time in Canvas, because
Canvas is built to be run like Canvas.
And so one of the things that I tell faculty is, don't be
afraid to push buttons.
But that's not 100% true because I think Kristi pushed
a button once-- it deleted her whole class.
I don't-- can faculty still push that button, Kona?
Yeah, that button's gone now.
Fortunately, fortunately we were still in sandbox mode.
But like, oh my gosh, I just deleted the whole class--
that's bad.
So migration took about two hours for me
to go through every--
I think there's about 62 assignments
in the speech class.
And--
including discussions, and quizzes, and things like that.
So it took me about an hour to go back into each one and put
the settings, and link up the test banks,
and all those things.
And really it's not too bad.
Two hours is not too bad to roll a course.
I could roll an ANGEL course in 45 minutes.
Because I knew the path-- click, click, click.
I knew exactly how far that mouse had to travel to get to
each, individual box.
Building it from scratch took about two hours, except I
started seeing things that I hadn't seen before.
Like, wait a minute.
I can't do that in ANGEL.
What does that do?
I gave a talk a couple of years ago now called, "I Hate
Discussion Boards." And--
but the talk was how to utilize discussion boards in a
lot of other ways besides just traditional discussion.
How students can post assignments
and give pure feedback.
And as I'm going through, and I'm looking at groups, and
really digging into Canvas and pushing a lot of the buttons
and I'm saying, these are things I've
always wanted to do.
But I couldn't figure out how to do it.
I have an in-class class that doesn't get grades.
We do contracted grading--
they get complete, needs revision, this was a piece of
crap that you turned into me--
I know you half-assed it so you have to do it again.
It's a great system, because my students don't leave my
class unless they know their content.
I don't have to worry anymore that when they leave my class
I didn't teach them what they thought they were getting,
even though they got that C. They know what they got.
I know what they got.
They learned it.
So it was more like eight hours.
But by the end of those eight hours, I knew so much more
about Canvas, and I could do so much more, that the next
time I built it it took four.
And the next class that I built took about 90 minutes,
because I was able to familiarize myself.
I got in there--
yeah, I don't know what that is for you-- but I
was really into it.
For me it was the Rubric with the comments.
We've got two Rubrics in Canvas-- you've got a
traditional Rubric, and you've got the Rubric where you can
put in comments.
That's what I needed.
I needed that.
I didn't even know it could exist.
I wanted something that could marry feedback with Rubric
guidelines.
This is my speech classic in Canvas, now.
There's a little bit more frequently asked questions,
syllabus, these are all clickable.
And I was able to give students something that they
could identify with in a real way when they hit Canvas.
It was like, oh yeah, this is something I'm familiar with.
You saw my modules page.
Now my modules page looks like this, and I'm able to put a
lot of text in to help guide students through.
Before I had a folder and a little bit of text.
Now I can say, if this is your first visit, maybe start here.
Go through these courses--
back-up plan is still in there.
And even better for me is this module--
which is the most important module in the first half of
course-- it's when they transition from small work
into very large work.
And I was able to arrange it in a way that
made sense to students.
Where they weren't confused.
It wasn't that they opened a folder, and then opened a
folder, and then opened a folder and found all of the
things that they needed.
It was all right there.
And they had a very clear idea of what they were doing.
And my confused emails plummeted.
And I was very empowered.
So when you come to the point where you're thinking migrate
or not migrate-- it's a big decision.
And there's nothing wrong with migrating, as long as you
commit to getting in there and figuring it all out, too.
Once you've built one from scratch when you go into
migrate, a lot of times the migration seems sort of
unsatisfactory.
I don't want that stuff there.
I've been in Canvas.
I want this stuff over here.
I'm just going to pull it in wherever I need it.
What do you get from building?
When was the last time you completely rewrote a course?
When was the last time you looked at every single element
of that class-- every discussion, every test, every
assignment, and said, what does this give my students to
take away from this class that they need, and
what is busy work?
What about outcomes, what about retention?
What am I embedding in my course that does these things?
And if we are not doing-- and professors don't do
that all the time.
We can't-- we have no time.
But sometimes, when you get this opportunity, that's when
you take it.
It's a great time to say, this is the day I'm going to look
through every piece of my class to make sure that
everything I need is there.
Why do people not want to build?
Because they're afraid of screwing it up.
They're afraid of it not looking right, not looking as
good as other faculties' classes.
They feel like it's going to be really, really time
consuming and they don't have the energy or the time to
commit to it.
They don't know, necessarily, what a good class looks like.
It's very difficult, sometimes, to get faculty into
other online classes to see what's going on.
We have a set up at our school where we have sample classes
that they can look at, that are really well built with
best practices.
Just so they can go in and explore.
But also a fear of technology.
I don't know what that is, and I'm not sure how to use it.
And that, sometimes, is the biggest challenge.
If you could just import it.
If you could just migrate it and make it look like the one
I've been using, I'll be OK.
Because I know how to do that class.
But understanding increases competency.
What does that mean?
It means teachers need to learn, too.
And we sometimes forget that.
When you take the time to think, when you take the time
to see and evaluate, you are modeling for your students
exactly what you want them to be doing in your
classes every day.
And failure is not a bad thing--
I promise.
In fact, I firmly believe that success is only there to make
you feel warm and fuzzy.
So you'll try something new, and fail, and learn.
Teachers must always be learners you cannot be a good
online instructor if you are not committed, all the time,
to figuring out what's out there.
Technology is a wonderful tool to help
education, but it's a tool.
What we're talking about is student impact.
Making them better and preparing them to
be better than us.
And we can't do that if we are teaching content
from four years ago.
And I don't care what field you're in.
So what do you do to pull rather than push?
Because faculty are--
I've met very few faculty who just don't care.
Right?
Faculty are passionate about what they teach, they're
passionate about students, but technology can be a barrier.
What does Canvas do that our LMS couldn't do?
Feedback everywhere, in every form.
I can give video feedback, audio feedback, written
feedback, inline grading feedback, and that's not the
end of it because I can get feedback from them.
I ask my students throughout the semester, what's working
for you, what's not working for you?
If you could change one thing, what would it be?
If you could add something, what would it be?
What assignment do you feel didn't give you
anything in the class?
And I'm able to continue to adjust it
every single semester.
It's not--
I love the Dos Equis guy--
it's not possible to rebuild every class.
Oh, we're changing LMSes.
Some people teach five, six, seven online courses.
You may not be able to do that in a semester--
in one semester.
Pick a course a semester.
And then when you get to the seventh class, start over
again with the first one, because it's time to keep
things current.
This is just a warning.
I just--
I felt like I needed to do it.
So if there's anything that you take away from this
session, and even if you still are committed to migration,
get into the LMS.
Push all the buttons.
Make it work for you.
Make it work for your students.
It is an amazing piece of technology.
And you can use it in ways--
and it gives you advantages over traditional classes, just
like traditional classes have advantages over online classes
if you're willing to utilize it at its full potential.
Does anybody have any questions or comments?
AUDIENCE: This is a beautiful story, but how many of your
faculty agree with you?
How many actually [INAUDIBLE]?
MICHELLE STEPHENS: Well I have to say that there was a little
bit of a push, pull there.
Because our online learning decided to train all faculty,
and have them build courses to be reviewed.
And so they may have migrated those courses in.
But the courses were then reviewed to make sure that
they were using Canvas the way it was intended to be used.
That they were making it easy for students--
Kona is wonderful about going in and looking at it with a
student eye.
And even though I'm exempt from that, I still send her my
courses and say, take a look at these.
And she's giving me feedback that is
time and life changing.
Instructional designers and faculty should have a
wonderful relationship in that way.
It's not about instructional designers telling
faculty what to teach.
It's about telling them how to use best practices, and that's
something that's for the students rather than us,
necessarily.
AUDIENCE: You might have already said
this, but sample courses--
does Canvas supply them?
MICHELLE STEPHENS: No actually, our sample courses
are all built by faculty out on the online
learning task force.
AUDIENCE: Can other institutions access yours?
MICHELLE STEPHENS: I think we could make them public.
AUDIENCE: Could you put that in your discussions area?
MICHELLE STEPHENS: Yeah.
Yeah, we will look into it and we'll give it a try.
I would be more than happy to let you poke around in our--
sweet, awesome.
AUDIENCE: We have a bunch of math courses set up
[INAUDIBLE]
put in all the details and discussion questions
[INAUDIBLE]
to get around that.
MICHELLE STEPHENS: Yeah, I may be a Canbassador but I don't
actually work for Canvas.
But one of things I noticed, too, when I imported
discussions--
my Avatar was not there.
My Avatar's fantastic.
It's a little South Park face and it's
just Smiley with eyes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] if it was just not
there, that's great.
But for like half the instructional designers and
some of these discussions were quite detailed plus the
faculty kind of--
I mean not that they can't but when they contract with us,
they contract with us for a reason.
They're asking for additional help?
MICHELLE STEPHENS: Well and I think that's one of those
things we're talking to Canvas people and putting that
suggestion out there is probably something
that'll get it done.
AUDIENCE: I've actually [INAUDIBLE]
when you migrate content from a prior course, the Avatars--
so if you want to offer your content to another professor,
they can import that content [INAUDIBLE]
The author is no longer--
AUDIENCE: Because what we do is we create a [? dev ?] shell
and then we take that whole [? dev ?] shell and copy it to
their [INAUDIBLE] course when we're done.
And it did, at one point, [INAUDIBLE]
we couldn't-- we copied it over, but we couldn't get
[INAUDIBLE].
MICHELLE STEPHENS: Maybe you guys need to hook up later.
Any last questions or comments?
Our time is really, really up.
OK, well if you want to talk to me, please come up here.
Thank you very much.