Skyline College is partnering with the District to leverage tools and resources available through the California Community Colleges’ Online Education Initiative (OEI) that will transform how online education is delivered at the College with the goal of increasing student success rates. The Online Education Initiative (OEI) is a collaborative effort among California Community Colleges (CCCs) to ensure that significantly more students are able to complete their educational goals by increasing both access to and success in high-quality online courses.
Key to taking advantage of the programs and benefits of the OEI is the adoption of Canvas as the course management system (CMS) for Skyline College and SMCCCD. Canvas was selected as the CMS for the California Community Colleges participating in the course exchange portion of the OEI.
In June 2015, OEI announced that Canvas would be available to any College who would like to change their current CMS and that OEI will be providing 100% of the costs of the services for Canvas at least through the 2018-2019 academic year. Over the next 18 months, SMCCCD will be
working with OEI through a cohort program to transition from Moodle/WebAccess to this new course management system.
WebAccess to Canvas Timeline:
District ITS will begin the technical implementation of Canvas on April 1, 2016. While much of this work will be behind the scenes, this phase will include the migration of courses from WebAccess to Canvas. Existing summer and fall WebAccess courses will be migrated to Canvas in April and May and Spring courses will be migrated in June and July. Canvas will be providing training for technical staff and for our CTTL staff in late spring.
Professional Development for Skyline College Faculty and Staff:
The CTTL will be providing training for faculty using Canvas course materials that have been developed by @One in partnership with the OEI and Canvas. During Flex Day on Thursday, March 3 there will be two information sessions held by Ricardo Flores at CTTL. To attend the Canvas Basics 1 session, visit the Flex Day Registration Form. Training will be offered in cohorts starting in spring for the small group of faculty who will be teaching with Canvas in the summer. During the summer, several intensive training options will be offered to ready faculty to teach with Canvas in the fall semester. Then during the academic year, a series of Canvas workshops will be offered and faculty will be able to work with CTTL staff on their courses. At the conclusion of the training, faculty will have their course ready to teach in Canvas for the following term.
This professional development for faculty will be focused on designing learning environments online that are enhanced for student success and access. This training will be centered on the application of the OEI Online Course Quality Rubric that was developed collaboratively with the California Academic Senate and is based upon research supported best practices for online education. Many of these practices are applicable to the traditional classroom (face-to-face Instruction) therefore as faculty are trained on Canvas and online course design, they will also be exposed to best practices that positively impact student success, persistence, retention, and completion in all courses. In addition, we will be able to assure that all instructional materials in online and face-to-face courses meet Section 508 standards for accessibility.
Teaching with Canvas:
Skyline College will teach 7 or 8 courses in Canvas during the Summer 2016 term. An additional 90 courses will be taught in Canvas during Fall 2016 semester, and then the remainder of our courses should be using Canvas during the Spring 2017 term.
For further information, contact your Skyline College Canvas Migration Team:
- Ricardo Flores – CTTL Instructional Technologist – floresr@smccd.edu
- Bridget Fischer – Faculty DE Coordinator – fischer@smccd.edu
- Jonathan Paver – Dean, ASLT – paverj@smccd.edu
Additional information and updates will be made available on the CTTL website at www.skylinecollege.edu/cttl.
Article by Jonathan Paver
