Sunday, July 17, 2016

The Teaching With Canvas Train Has Left the Station!

Spotted on the Grand Lawn last week:

Cuyamaca College Teaching with Canvas train

This past week marks the beginning of Cuyamaca College's journey from Blackboard to Canvas. The decision has been made and I've been asked to help make it happen.

Like the Hogwarts Express, with less literary flair, the Teaching With Canvas train is chugging through Cuyamaca College to get us to our destination. Last week, this train picked up passengers for the  first Teaching With Canvas online course and I couldn't be happier with the exceptional group of adventurous faculty who have come together to share this ride. We have a team of smart, creative, and funny colleagues keeping it light and fun while we figure out all this techy stuff.

We have about 2 years to get everyone on board. We will be stopping to pick up passengers for the Teaching with Canvas train twice every fall and spring semester, and once every summer until everyone is on board.

I am anxious to share Canvas with everyone. So far the response is very positive and many of those who try it want to start teaching with it right now. Unfortunately, we won't have the GCCCD server up until late this year. We hope to get our Canvas server talking to Colleague/WebAdvisor so it can manage all the automatic enrollments in time to offer our first courses in Canvas beginning with the spring semester.

There's no rush to get on board right now; the big push will come after we get our server running. I want to keep you all updated about where we are, where we're going, and let you start thinking about when you want to hop on board this train. Take a look at the Route to Canvas Timeline for more information.

I plan to start offering "how to" posts on Canvas as soon as we get our GCCCD server running, so have everyone you know sign up to receive emails from this blog.

If you want to be in that first group of faculty to teach courses in Canvas for the spring 2017 semester, sign up for a Teaching With Canvas course this fall.