This post was inspired by the very informative July 14th BCcampus Canvas LMS session with Stan Wendt and moderated by Clint Lalonde.
If my reading of the tea leaves is correct, there could be a big uptake of the use of the Canvas LMS in Canada with news of a possible hosted in Canada cloud offering. As a sessional faculty member of the Computing Science Department at Simon Fraser University I’ve been using Canvas for the past several years and I thought it might be helpful for other potential users of Canvas to share my experiences so far.
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I am putting together a very brief presentation about flipping an LMS with an open + collaborative platform. Here is what I’ve got so far:
Flip it Good! Flipping the LMS with an Open + Collaborative Platform
Do you have unmet pedagogical goals due to the constraints of your current LMS? Do you want to have a better experience for your students and yourself? In preparing his Fall 2015 CMPT-363 (User Interface Design) course at Simon Fraser University, instructor and interaction designer Paul Hibbitts faced these same challenges. His solution was to ‘flip the LMS’ by designing and developing an alternative front-end to the institutional LMS Canvas (http://paulhibbitts.net/cmpt-363-153/). In this approach, the LMS was used only for elements it was best suited for (i.e. student records, grades, etc.) with all other elements handled by an open extensible platform completely under his control.
I am excited to be presenting my approach of a Flipped-LMS at Simon Fraser University’s DEMOFest 2015 on November 24th.
Here is the description of my session:
Flipping the LMS: Benefits and Lessons Learned of Using an Alternative Front-end to Canvas
Let’s be honest, as course facilitators we want to deliver the best possible online learner experience but at the same time make our own experience as convenient as possible. LMSs, such as Canvas, provide some great pedagogical elements but often fall short when it comes to such things as streamlined course updates, content reuse, easy customization, and providing a truly open platform. The solution? Flip the LMS!
In this article I will describe the workflow details for my Fall 2015 Simon Fraser University CMPT-363 course companion, which meets the requirements first outlined in the LinkedIn article Online Course Companions: Workflow Requirements for (us) Instructors.
