Common Course Management System Adoption By Pat James

 [from Tech Edge newsletter]  Wednesday 22 April 2015 (click here for full article)

It has taken many, many months of work by the Common Course Management System (CCMS) Committee members, however, the time has finally come for colleges within our system to consider adopting a CCMS. The OEI will facilitate the use of and subsidize the cost of the Canvas course management system for colleges choosing to adopt it.

 

Seeing these words in print here causes me to tear up a little! We have thought about doing this since the early days of the California Virtual Campus and I want to thank everyone who has worked so hard to get to this moment.

In the Academic Senate for CCC paper, Ensuring Appropriate Use of Technology in Education, the authors (of which I was one) highly recommended that the decision of whether to adopt a CCMS be heavily dependent on what the faculty want to use in their teaching. At the time we wrote the paper, we thought the depth of the tool we were teaching through should be the primary concern. This decision should still rely primarily on the faculty to make, but we also know that ease of use by both the teaching community and the students is a critical component.

Online teaching and learning is a challenge for both teachers and learners if the tool used to accomplish the learning is not intuitive, and it can potentially interfere with the educational process. As the Canvas folks say on their website, “It's not worth much if people don't use it.” Include your students in the conversation wherever it makes sense to do so. We chose Canvas both because we liked it and because our students did, too.

We’ve put together a resource site at tinyurl.com/OEIresource to assist colleges in the decision-making process. Please see this TechEDge article for more information.

 

Here is the URL for getting a free CANVAS account, should you want to play around in advance of any local decision re adoption of CANVAS.

https://canvas.instructure.com/login