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SCOTT DENNIS: So I'm from Washington State.
I did most my education up there.
I've been a hardcore Canvas fan since 2011.
And I've been with the company since this last August.
And later, if you want to ask me, I'll tell you about almost
joining the Spanish Army.
JORDAN DAYTON: I would also add, I think Scott owns every
Instructure t-shirt, which is--
SCOTT DENNIS: I do.
And ask me about this one later, too.
So I'm also here today with Allison.
ALLISON WEISS: Hi, I'm Allison.
And I know a lot of you.
I've been with the company--
this is my third Instructure Con, actually.
So I was one of the forces behind the documentation and
training products and now working a little bit more on
community initiatives.
But I come from the humanities background with two masters in
humanities, and worked in K-12 and higher ed before coming
here to Instructure.
I know a little bit more about Star Wars after
being with the company.
And I guess my claim to fame is I helped Malia Obama with
her headset.
JORDAN DAYTON: I don't know if I can top that.
But my name is Jordan Dayton.
And for some reason, that showed up there on my slide
for my name.
I guess there wasn't enough room for
Jordan Dayton on there.
But I'm one of the trainers for Instructure.
I love training.
I put on here also self-proclaimed tech junkie.
I love technology, use it all day long.
I love how it simplifies our lives and just makes us more
productive and better.
I've been with K-12 and higher ed for the past five years.
The company before here I was with was called ParentLink.
It was a school-to-home communication company.
So I was excited to make this move to work with higher ed
and K-12 and do some training.
I do the screencast.
Some of you have seen those new release screencast.
Also in the near future, we're going to be creating a lot
more tutorial videos for you guys to leverage and share
with your users.
I love training as I put on there.
I do have a PC, whereas everybody else in
the company has Macs.
So if anyone has PC questions about Canvas, I could probably
help you out.
And I do hate running, but I love a challenge.
And my brother has run many marathons.
And so I thought, I think I'm going to challenge
myself to do that.
And so I did it.
And as you can see, I barely made it under four hours.
So that's me.
SCOTT DENNIS: He's 7 minutes faster than me.
So I wanted to give you an idea of the kind of resources,
as a company, that we're putting into this effort.
Back in 2011, we had one person who was, yes, they were
training, documentation, the whole thing.
And by 2012, in March, we had gotten up to three people.
We added a few more.
It got bigger and bigger.
That's about when I came on.
At the current time, we have 13 people involved in
training, instructional design, and documentation.
So the documentation are they guides, which we'll talk about
a little bit more.
The bulk of what we do for training is implementation
training for new customers.
So if you are a new customer, if you come on board with
Canvas, at a minimum all clients
will get three trainings.
You'll get at least two hours of admin training.
It's a webinar format, live, synchronous online training
for your administrators.
You will get support, training.
We used to do admin and support as one session.
So if you've been with Canvas for a little while, you
probably had one session for that.
But we've broken it out.
Because we found that the people who do support at a lot
of institutions are not often the same
people that are admins.
So different audiences, different sessions.
And then we also have an instructor
training that we do.
And the goal for that is user experience, to see what Canvas
looks like for teachers and for people who are in it.
That's also a two-hour live session.
You have other options that you can purchase as clients or
that you can avail yourself of.
We have an expanded menu of webinar style trainings that
we've created.
Allison's going to speak more to that.
We also will come on site.
So far every on site training that we've
done has been unique.
And we've gone to multiple countries.
We've trained rooms full of students, faculty, and
administrators, support people.
We've been to call centers and trained call center people.
Whatever we need to do, we'll come to your site and set it
up for you.
Or now that we have our new office in Salt Lake, we have
classrooms there, too.
So we're bringing people on-site when they would prefer
to come to us.
I mentioned the documentation and resources.
This is an area that just in the last month really we've
been able to dedicate quite a bit more, too.
But the baseline right now at the current time is that we
keep all of our documentation.
All of our guides are up to date every three weeks.
So every time Canvas changes, all of the documentation
changes, too-- all the screenshots, the links, all
the options.
So rather than trying to maintain your own offline
documentation and have to keep it up to date, if you can
point your users to that guides.Instructure.com, you'll
have good stuff there.
We also are expanding, this summer, the resources that we
have available to work with community.
So you heard last night about the coaches and the
[? Canbassadors ?]
and people who are active in the forums.
If you go to help.instructure.com, we have
Canvas live sessions.
We're going to be doing a lot more with that as well.
So that whole involving people from the community, and
helping each other, and us working with them is something
that is very important to us.
I think it's integral to our company culture.
And then we also have specific initiatives like the Canvas
Advance trainer and the Canvas Challenge programs that
Allison, again, is going to speak to today.
And we have a growing number of fully online, asynchronous
instructor led courses that you can sign up for, you can
send your people to sign up for.
And these are courses where there is an Instructure
employee teaching the class and grading student work,
answering questions.
And then there is a certificate of
completion at the end.
So if you want to outsource direct training to us as a
company, we will do that for you.
We also can work with you to license course content as well
and to customize course content.
If you want to come to us to get a course that you will
then teach to your own faculty or your own users.
So Allison now is going to talk more about the
webinar-style training that's on our training menu.
ALLISON WEISS: Great, thanks.
So our webinars are additional one-hour webinars with usually
small groups of people at our client locations.
And they're usually demo focused, so
not a lot of hands-on.
We can do some hands-on.
But usually it's demo-focused explaining how something works
in Canvas in greater depth than we're able to do during
normal implementation training.
And we can customize these slightly if there's an area
you'd like us to focus on.
But we've seen these be really helpful for jump starting the
conversation about a specific piece of the Canvas
experience.
So if in your second or third phase of implementation you're
really excited about mobile apps, then you might want of
loop us in and we can talk to that specifically.
So right now what we have, we have a Canvas Essentials class
that's really good for students but also instructors,
again, the real basics if you need that to be reintroduced
at some point.
We have a course design workshop similar somewhat
similar to what we did for our pre-conference workshop.
So some basics around how to put a course together and
maybe how to train a faculty member to
put a course together.
We have a webinar just about course delivery.
So if you have faculty who will not be touching the
design of your course but just delivering, then we can help
them get oriented and teach them how to facilitate
effectively in Canvas.
We have an assessment and grading webinar, which is good
if you want to just focus on the Grade Book
and the Speed Grader.
That's all you want, we can dive into
that in greater detail.
Training strategy is really good at the beginning stages
of implementation.
If you need some help thinking through how you're going to
roll out Canvas across your organization, again,
jump-starting that conversation, giving you some
tools to put a plan in place.
Same with migration strategies, for some of you
you're starting with Canvas as the first LMS.
Others will need some coaching as they put together a
migration plan.
We can talk about collaboration tools in Canvas
and, like I said, mobile apps.
We also have an open Q and A. So sometimes a special
interest will come up like outcomes, and we'll put
together training just specifically focused on what
you want to address.
So lots of options there for webinars.
JORDAN DAYTON: OK, thanks, Allison.
So I'm going to talk to you guys about on-site sessions.
How many of you have had an on-site session from one of
the Canvas trainers before?
Raise your hands high.
Lots of you, great.
And the rest of you that don't have your hands up, this is
available for you if you want to.
So a few things I want you guys to know about what this
is, these on-site trainings that we do, unlike the ones
that Allison just mentioned where they stick to a pretty
strict agenda, we customize the courses that we will train
you on when we come on site.
It's very important that we tailor our on-site trainings
to your unique needs.
And so you have complete
customization of those courses.
We're going to start off with a needs assessment call to
make sure we understand what your needs are and your
roll-out plan, how long until you go live.
And what kind of users do you have?
How are you uniquely using Canvas?
So we're going to try to understand that.
Also, we've had a lot of experience doing
these on-site sessions.
So if you are thinking we want a Canvas trainer to come out
here but we don't know exactly what we want them to train us
on, we can share with you some agendas, some things we've
done with other institutions to give you some ideas on how
you can construct your own customized on-site training.
Also, it gives you an opportunity to either spend a
whole day with a Canvas expert so that we can answer all
those questions really intimately with a group, or
we've had some other on-site sessions where we do a few
sessions a day, where we teach people in the morning and then
another session in the afternoon, and we just crank
through a lot of people.
So there's a few different ways that you can do that, but
it's completely customizable.
Also, it is a complete experience.
So the focus when we come on site, unlike the webinar
trainings, is hands-on.
We want to give people a doing
experience, not just listening.
Some of the on-sites I've done, people have requested
that it be just a listening experience because we're
cranking through so many people.
But we really try to focus them on
hands-on whenever possible.
Complete care, when we're there, as we are trying to
offer these as customized sessions, we really try to
listen and not just talk like a broken record, the same
thing over and over that we always train on.
Because we understand your individual needs, we try and
apply our knowledge of Canvas and come up with the
workarounds for you guys.
And the more that you give us feedback, the more we can
tailor solutions for the unique needs that you have
when we're on site.
Also, we try to have Q and A time throughout the entire
session, not just waiting until the end, so that people
really understand things as we go along not just shut up,
don't say anything until we get to the end.
It's not like that.
They're very intimate and personal.
And then also, these on-site sessions provide a community
experience where you're having a relationship
with a Canvas employee.
And we take that relationship and we grow on it
in places like this.
We also take that relationship back to the home office.
And any questions or concerns that you had when we were on
that on-site training, we make sure if we weren't able to
answer it that we bring that back to your account manager
or project manager so that they can work with you through
those issues you're having.
We don't want anything to slip through the cracks.
Yeah, that's what we have in on-site training.
It's very customized.
ALLISON WEISS: I'm going to talk a little bit about two
initiatives we have going on right now.
And actually there are some great presentations.
Chris is going to present on the Canvas Challenge tomorrow.
The Canvas Challenge is a new initiative for K-12.
It makes it easy for K-12 institutions to roll out the
basics of Canvas to their faculty via 10 small, mini
challenges where they learn how to customize the course
nav, build a homepage, build their first assignment and
rubric, build a discussion, build a quiz, design a page,
put it all together in a module, and
publish their course.
And instead of having faculty sit down and do something for
three hours, by having it stretched out over a two week
maybe even four week period, we've seen some really great
gains in terms of faculty adoption, because they have
plenty of time to process and support each other in their
peer groups.
So if you're interested in that, email Elizabeth.
She is currently running the Challenge.
And she'd be happy to answer any questions that you have.
We also have a train the trainer opportunity that
several, I think there's a handful of you in the room
that have taken advantage of this.
This is really good for the instructional designers, the
technology coaches, even the teachers who are really
engaged and want to get the most out of Canvas.
There are three levels to this program.
The first level is free.
And if you want to, you can join that.
I'll show you how later.
And in that first level, you pretty much validate your
product knowledge, applications of the product,
your training skills, and engage
with our Canvas community.
So if you go to bit.ly/catprogram you can
learn more and enroll in that free course.
That's available to anyone in our community.
And then level two--
oh, and by the way, these are the folks who have finished.
So kudos to all the folks.
How many in here have finished level one?
Raise your hands so I can see.
Yeah, all right.
So talk to the people with the red lanyards if you want to
learn more about the CAT program.
And then level two is a paid experience.
It's more intensive.
We go into some of those external tools.
We talk about issues of audience, the training needs
of your organization, how to meet those needs, and
effective practices.
Thinking a little bit more about mobile-friendly design,
so kind of taking it up another level.
And these are the folks, if they're here, these are the 10
people who just finished level two.
So I don't know if they're here today.
AUDIENCE: Woo hoo!
ALLISON WEISS: Yeah, go level two.
So if you see any CAT memes on their
lanyard, you'll know why.
JORDAN DAYTON: So I want to ask you guys a question.
And if you can tell me the answer by a little bit of
noise, I'd appreciate that.
How many of you have used the Canvas guides and
love or like them?
[APPLAUSE]
JORDAN DAYTON: All right, that's mine.
So let me talk about it a little further.
You guys have all heard the old adage give a man a fish,
feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.
So we understand that adage.
And we really have invested a lot of time and a lot of money
into making sure that you guys have some really powerful
documentation.
Is it nice that when you have a new release, you have brand
new documentation to go along with that release?
When Canvas changes our features, and the buttons are
in different places that the documentation follows that.
And you guys don't have to do anything.
It's just done for you.
So that is the beauty of the Canvas.
SCOTT DENNIS: Sorry to interrupt.
Can I ask, how many of you have watched Jordan's videos
that come out every three weeks?
[APPLAUSE]
SCOTT DENNIS: Because if you haven't seen those, go to the
product release forum.
Subscribe to those.
Every three weeks you'll get a video from Jordan, two or
three minutes that encapsulates what's new in
that release.
AUDIENCE: I feel like we're friends.
JORDAN DAYTON: We are.
That's why you feel that way.
I forget your name, because I don't think
we've actually met.
But isn't it amazing that we're friends?
So, yeah, thank you, Scott.
There's an incredible amount of information in the guides.
I want you guys to know that we have four full-time gals
that work at the home office keeping these guys
up to date for you.
So this is what they do all day, sitting there going
through those guides and keeping them up to date.
It's a very rigorous process.
We're very grateful for them for all that they do to keep
those updated.
Also you guys may or may not know this, but we have over
1,000 lessons.
That's what we call each of those individual places where
you learn about how to use Canvas.
They call them lessons.
Over 1,000 lessons in those guides that we're constantly
trying to keep updated for you.
So it's a lot of work.
We have a guide for every Canvas user.
We have an admin guide, the teacher guide, student guide,
and a designer guide.
How many of you have seen the designer guide?
OK, so a lot of you.
I get a lot of people asking me questions.
Jordan, do you have any examples of exemplary Canvas
courses that we can take a look at so that we can know
how to design our own courses?
And you can find that in the designer guide.
So if anyone's interested in looking at other courses other
institutions have made, in the designer guide there's one
called Staff Picks.
That's the one you want to take a look at.
Also in the designer guide there's another one.
Many institutions will create courses in Canvas that teach
their students how to use Canvas, a student orientation,
or perhaps a teacher orientation where they teach
their teachers how to use Canvas.
That can also be found in the designer guide.
And that one is called-- it's under a section called Public
Courses about Canvas.
So check both of those out in the designer guide.
A lot of people really love that.
So we have the answers in the guides.
How many of you have had a question who went to the
guides and did not find your answer?
Let's see a raise of hands.
I should see a lot of hands.
You guys found all your answers in the guides?
Maybe not, right?
So we have a solution for that as well.
And it's called each of you, our community.
So everyone in this room, you're part of our community.
And we all work together to share answers.
If anyone really wants to learn Canvas very quickly, I
recommend that you go to the community forum, which you can
access by going to help.instructure.com and click
on the Community tab.
And then there's a forum called Ask a Question.
That's where you guys can go to ask each other questions
about Canvas.
But it's also where you can go to subscribe so that every
question that's coming in, you see how other Canvas users are
using Canvas.
And you might find questions that you want to get answers
to as well.
So I really recommend it.
The two things that you want to make sure you do in the
community is, one, hit the Subscribe button so that you
get notified when questions are being answered.
And two, you guys have seen that little button that says
Me Too, thumbs up, make sure you're clicking that.
It adds value to the questions in the community.
And Reflected in the Community is also our
feature request forum.
Sometimes you don't have an answer.
And sometimes the answer is no, we don't
have that right now.
We're two years old, give us a break.
Give us a chance to do all these things that you guys
want us to do.
But what we are working very hard to get all
those features in Canvas.
I want you guys to know that--
and many of you do already know this-- our feature
request forum is not a black hole.
When you type something in there, it's not just going
into La La land.
Our developers are looking at that, our product managers,
our VPs, our CEO, our co-founders.
They're in there talking with you guys about the features
you request.
So just remember what we learned yesterday.
We're very serious about the features that we develop.
And every feature is very calculated.
And we want to make sure that we're not releasing things
when it's premature.
So please visit us in the feature request forums.
Again, remember, subscribe to feature requests that you're
interested in so that your apprised of progress on them.
Also, make sure you give feature request thumbs up.
It's very important that you do that to let us know that
it's important to you.
And last of all, if you guys want to receive notifications
about those release notes and all the new features we have,
make sure you go to releases.instructure.com.
That's a quick way to access all of the new releases.
That's for iPad, Android, and everything in Canvas.
That's it for documentation.
SCOTT DENNIS: Thanks, Jordan.
So we have lots of options.
We have a full menu of options.
And we can do on-site.
We can do online.
We can do webinars.
We can do lots of different things.
We can put together packages for you.
So if you are an institution or you have people at your
institution that you need to train, we can work with you to
put together packages that work together.
So you might have a cohort or people that would benefit from
introductory training, then they're all together in an
online training that takes place over the course of
several weeks.
And then there's another synchronous event
at the end of that.
Or maybe that's what happens before we come on site and do
hands-on on-site face-to-face training.
Whatever that package looks like, we
can put that together.
Or you can choose from some examples that we
have set up for you.
We also do volume pricing, too.
So if you want to work with other people in your region or
you're a larger institution and you want to buy in volume,
there's benefit to you cost-wise there as well.
And again, we have a standard menu.
Also, you can work with your account relationship manager,
your sales people.
You can call me anytime, and we can work on that.
I wanted to say, we talked a little bit
about the Canvas Challenge.
And we're doing another presentation on that tomorrow.
If you are an instructional designer or a trainer who
works for Canvas right now, would you please stand up?
Beth Kramer is going to be leading a
session tomorrow, when?
BETH KRAMER: At 9:15.
SCOTT DENNIS: 9:15.
In what room?
BETH KRAMER: Oh, I don't know.
Over in the K-12 building.
[INAUDIBLE].
SCOTT DENNIS: Yeah, Bison Two, I believe it is.
So 9:15 tomorrow, Bison Two, if you want to learn more
about the Canvas Challenge.
Go there.
We also have an online course.
If you go to this URL here, you'll find more information
about all the things that we talked about today.
And with that, I think we're done.
We can open it up for questions.
In the back.
AUDIENCE: I don't have a question.
But I have a comment, David.
Last year when you know that all of the documentation was a
little bit out of date.
So thank you very much for adding more people to the
plate and making that documentation easier for us.
[INAUDIBLE]
make it look [INAUDIBLE].
So thank you.
JORDAN DAYTON: If you guys ever want to share your
positive feedback with our documentation team, they'd
love to hear that.
You can reach them at documentation@intstructure.com.
SCOTT DENNIS: So to repeat the statement for the recording,
she called attention to the fact that we, in the last
year, were able to get to our backlog and get to where we
keep all of the documentation up to date every three weeks.
So, question?
AUDIENCE: The designer guide, everyone has access to them?
SCOTT DENNIS: Yes.
If you go to guides.instructure.com, you'll
find the designer guide as well as the others.
AUDIENCE: One more question.
If you fill out or click on the feature request, should
you set reply or not?
SCOTT DENNIS: The feature request forum, you may get a
reply from a Instructure employee or from other people
in the community as a comment within the forum.
You probably won't get a direct phone call or mail-back
from Instructure.
Question?
AUDIENCE: Is there going to be a higher ed
version of that challenge?
SCOTT DENNIS: Well, actually we have run the Canvas
Challenge for higher ed customers already.
It was initially designed to drive
engagement in the K-12 space.
But we have run versions of it for higher ed already.
So, yes.
[? Gibson? ?]
AUDIENCE: Is there a plan to caption all of the
instructional video content?
SCOTT DENNIS: Yes, actually--
AUDIENCE: Can you repeat the question?
SCOTT DENNIS: OK, the question was, is there an effort in
place to caption our videos?
We are currently in the works to provide all of our
documentation in Spanish and Mandarin.
As part of that, we'll be captioning all of our video in
those languages.
And as a byproduct of that effort, we'll also be able to
caption them in English.
So that's coming for this fall, actually.
Other questions?
JORDAN DAYTON: Nobody's raising their hands.
So I want to do just-- oh, I was just going to say the
documentation people just walked in the room.
So I'd just either embarrass them.
Or if we could all let the documentation people know how
we feel about them.
[APPLAUSE]
SCOTT DENNIS: Good job.
JORDAN DAYTON: That's Ali with the sweater on, and Sam.
And then I think Erin's hiding down on the ground somewhere.
They're the ones.
SCOTT DENNIS: So we've got time for one more question.
AUDIENCE: I didn't want you to get away without telling us
about the Spanish Army [INAUDIBLE].
SCOTT DENNIS: I told you, ask me later.
I'll tell you about that.
That's a whole conversation one.
All right, so you came to our session at 4:45 in the
afternoon on a sunny day.
And we really appreciate that.
Thank you.