Renee Collins: OK, go ahead and make sure that you accept the live transcript so that you-- the disclaimer message when it appears or you will be removed from the meeting. I'm now going to turn it over to Anthony Burik and his team, who will be presenting Using Canvas and Participating in the California Distance Learning Cooperative. Hey, Anthony.

Anthony Burik: OK, thanks so much, Renee. Again, good afternoon. Welcome to our session today, Using Canvas and Participating in the California Distance Learning Cooperative. My name is Anthony Burik. I am the OTAN Coordinator for Distance Learning Projects, again joined by Renee Collins, the Director of Adult Education.

And our all-star panel, we have-- today we have Tonya Cobb from Santa Monica-Malibu Adult Education Center, Alfred Miller from the Berkeley Adult School, Ed Schmalzel from Clovis Adult Ed, and then Ute Maschke and James Jones from East Region Adult Education Consortium.

And we are here today all of us to talk about Canvas and our participation in the California Distance Learning Cooperative or the CDLC and to share really our experiences with Canvas so far to answer your questions about Canvas and encourage you to also become CDLC members moving forward.

But we'll talk more about that as we proceed through the session. So again, just a quick rundown of our agenda today. We're going to talk about the CDLC. Renee is going to start with that talking about the CDLC, its inception, current goals and kind of where things stand with the CDLC at the moment.

And then we're going to turn it over to our panelists, Tonya, Alfred, Ed, Ute, and James. They're going to share their experiences at their agencies, especially around implementation, challenges, successes, kind of what's been going on at their agencies with Canvas. We'll take questions kind of throughout.

We have some kind of breaks during the session that we will open it up for questions, and then when we close, we will talk more about getting involved in the CDLC, how you could do that at your agency. We do have a link to our CDLC web page. It's the bit.ly link at the bottom, bit.ly/. And then it's case-sensitive after the slash, so it's capital CDLC and then the word Canvas with a capital C. And that will take you to the webpage on the OTAN website.

Just a word about OTAN. We are one of three state leadership projects for adult education in California along with CASAS and CALPRO. We focus on applying technology and adult education programs and classrooms and schools and things like that. So for more information, please visit the OTAN website, otan.us.

And I will just say too just kind of a shout out to CAEP TAP, which has been administering the CDLC for almost two years now. We're going to turn it over to Renee to hear more about that. We work in partnership with CAEP TAP on the management of the CDLC. And again, just thanks so much to the CAEP TAP program for really kind of guiding us on getting the CDLC started. So before I turn it over to Renee, just a word about the CDLC.

So it is a partnership between the Sacramento County Office of Education, OTAN and CAEP TAP adult education and leadership projects and Instructure, which is the manager of Canvas to basically provide access to the Canvas Learning Management System. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Renee to give us more kind of background on CDLC before we hear from our panelists. Renee.

Renee Collins: All right, thank you, Anthony. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about the inception or the idea behind bringing the California Distance Learning Cooperative or Canvas to our adult Ed program throughout the state. So learning management systems are nothing new to OTAN for sure. We have run Moodle for the last 15 plus years.

And many of you have also used Blackboard or other LMS Learning Management Systems throughout the years. So LMS is something that many of us are familiar with. However, we started-- in the midst of the pandemic, we were trying to-- we started wondering whether Canvas might be something that we wanted to explore because it had kind of the greater bells and whistles that modern LMS have.

And many of our community colleges had already adopted Canvas. In fact, the entire community college system, including our noncredit system had adopted Canvas as well as many of our higher education systems and many of our K-12 programs. So in order to facilitate that-- potentially facilitate that transition between educational institutions, we thought maybe Canvas is something that we should look into. In 2020, we decided-- we determined to do an LMS survey, an OTAN LMS survey.

And we had 68 agencies participate and serving over 200,000 students. And of those who responded, 22 were currently using Canvas. So potentially, they were already-- maybe they were a community college or they had gone out and gotten it on their own in some cases or maybe their district had already invested in Canvas and they were able to by extension have their adult Ed be part of that-- be part of that K-12 adoption of Canvas.

However, there were-- and the results of that survey were that more than 56,000 students from these 68 agencies felt like-- or I'm sorry, from the 46 agencies that were not currently using Canvas felt like they could launch Canvas successfully within a year of having it available to them. So then we started exploring even more. And we decided that we needed to-- we needed to move away from Moodle.

Although it was an open educational resource and it was a free resource, we felt like Canvas, again, being adopted by the community college system would be in closer alignment to what we were trying to achieve as far as strong transitions between adult Ed and the community college.

Canvas we found that it was equitable. Students were able to use it from the classroom, home, work, or any remote setting. Canvas was flexible in that it could be used in a face to face setting. It could be used on a blended setting or a distance remote model. And it was accessible in that it could be available on many devices, maybe a phone or a tablet or a computer.

So we did determine to move forward with Canvas at that time. And we started a pilot in January of '21. Well, in order to sign up for that pilot, we were only taking 25 agencies. And I think we had more than 25 within three days of posting it as available to the field. So it was very, very much sought after. And we did launch that-- launch that pilot of Canvas in January '21.

But we quickly found out because of maybe the silver lining of the pandemic was that we were not able to as OTAN travel and do our trainings the way that we normally would within the field, and so we had a lot of money within our contract that was going unspent. And we determined that we could-- going through the amendment process, we could transfer this money with the support of California Department of Ed to basically a new project, which would be the implementation of Canvas statewide.

So for about the first six months, we had the pilot of just the 25 agencies, but then we started what we called an expansion-- the expansion list or the expansion project. And so we quickly built from 25 to any number of agencies that were interested in Canvas being available to use it. At this point, there is no limit to who can access Canvas via our adult education system or through OTAN.

So that's a little bit of the background. The goals that we have are to make sure that we're preparing learners for success whatever their educational setting. And I've heard recently that-- or I've heard just over the last few months, oh, our students are all back in person. We don't need an LMS.

And I feel like that might be a little maybe the wrong-- I hate to tell people they're wrong, but it maybe shortsighted or maybe the wrong approach in that Canvas can be-- it's an organizational tool to be able to provide instruction in a singular space that students can access whether they're in the classroom, whether they're in a blended type of class or a hybrid class or whether they're doing distance learning or remote learning.

So it is just as valid and useful I think whether you're doing it in person or not. We also wanted to make a high-quality equitable and accessible LMS available to all adult education agencies regardless of whether you're at the community college level or at the K-12 adult education level.

So this is-- we're basically-- we have negotiated with Instructure, which is the parent company of Canvas to be able to create a URL, a unique URL for every agency that wants it at no cost to the agency through at least June 2023. So when an agency decides that they want to start Canvas, there is kind of an implementation cost.

So we've negotiated that that cost is wiped and it's only ever a one-time cost. So it's not that after 2023 that you would need to start paying an implementation cost. That's not the case. There's only a one-time implementation cost. And OTAN has been able to negotiate with Instructure to have that already paid for with that funding that I said we were able to reallocate from not traveling for a while and we were able to reallocate that to be used on Canvas.

Another goal I guess is to continue to be able to negotiate statewide leveraged pricing for licensing, for Canvas licensing and have that inclusive of services. So right now, we have 24/7 helplines or access to Canvas for assistance. And that's both for our teachers and for our students because all of our students are 18 plus, they're able to work directly with our students and not necessarily through a teacher.

And we also have full access to their training portal, so it's recorded webinars, live webinars, additional services that could be custom-made for us here at OTAN and shared with the field. And then we also-- there is a video platform that Canvas has called Studio that many people who want to kind of jump into Canvas and learn it are very eager to have Studio, and so that's another perk.

So this is something that we negotiate with Instructure and then turn around and offer it to the field. And then again, maybe a final goal is to assist with post-secondary transition, especially that warm handoff to the community college. But it might also be that warm handoff from our K-12 system or maybe our children's schools to their parents as they're coming into adult Ed. It can work both directions.

I did want to just finish by saying what is currently happening. We have close to 50 agencies or consortia who have committed to using Canvas at their site. In quarter one, we had over 234,000 logins to the Canvas system. We have 123 active courses, 93 active teachers, 790 active students with 4,576 individual logins.

So I know that's kind of a lot to throw at you, but all that to say that we are getting a solid start to using Canvas within the adult education program statewide. But we are still actively trying to connect with programs that could benefit from having an LMS for their students.

And we welcome-- and I'm eager to have you hear from the panel because they will be able to share with you how they've been able to either in many cases start very small with not a lot of resources and be able to identify how to successfully implement Canvas at their sites. So with that, I'm going to turn it back to Anthony, and then I'll be back to answer any questions and tell you how to take next steps if you're interested at the end of the-- at the end of the session. Thank you.

Anthony Burik: OK, great. Thank you so much, Renee, for that introduction to the CDLC. And again, if you have questions as folks are presenting here, just go ahead and pop them in the chat, and we'll make sure to either answer them in the chat or we can take them live.

So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to our first panelist, Tonya Cobb, who is currently at the Santa Monica-Malibu Adult Education Center where she is the Canvas and EL Civics Lead. I've known Tonya for a while. I know that she is a very busy person, very busy woman.

She's held a number of positions in adult education during her career both on the K-12 adult Ed side as well as the community college side. So I'm going to turn it over to Tonya, and Tonya is going to tell us more about what is going on with Canvas at Santa Monica-- Santa Monica-Malibu. Tonya.

Tonya Cobb: It's a mouthful. Can everyone hear me OK? Just, OK. Hi, there. My name is Tonya Cobb. And yes, as Anthony said, adult Ed is a small world. So yes, Anthony and I go way back. So I've been in adult Ed for a few decades. I don't want to say how many decades because that will just tell you how old I am.

But so I have only been at Santa Monica-Malibu Adult School for about a year, but I had been using Canvas long before the pandemic with my community college students. And I used it at that time to-- as I called it in my syllabus to enhance my course, right?

So it wasn't an online course, but I used it to enhance my course. I had a license through that community college and was able to do that. So over the years and since the pandemic and since being trained officially as an online educator, I had a lot of experience with Canvas.

So cut to Santa Monica-Malibu Adult School, and I do have a bit of a list here of successes and challenges. And so that's what I'm going to go through. And that's what I'm going to speak to and hopefully maybe offer you some tips as well as to how to get this rolling at your Adult School program.

So I was ecstatic about the prospect of officially bringing Canvas to Santa Monica-Malibu Adult School. When I first started there, I was in the classroom. And I had already been using Canvas, so it made sense to use it with my adult-- excuse me-- my advanced students. So we did. We, of course, had to go through all the things that you need to go through in order to help students get acclimated to Canvas, and so I did that.

I then taught-- that next semester, I taught them in a hybrid version, and so they did fine with Canvas. So when the opportunity was presented to me to be a part of bringing it to Santa Monica-Malibu, I truly jumped at it. So we began this process around June or so. I do see a couple of my colleagues here.

So I'm so glad that they are here. So we began around June or so. And when I say we, I mean the administrative side of it. So we participated through-- we participated in sort of the admin side of it, right? How to create your instance and how to be-- because I had been involved as a teacher but hadn't really been involved on the administrative side, so we learned all about that.

The two people with me didn't know anything at all about Canvas, and so they were really troupers to join the effort. We were often in the training by ourselves. So that meant that we had to sort of help the Canvas folks, the Instructure folks learn about adult Ed ease, right? So they would be using attendance systems and such that we don't have in adult Ed and we'd have to sort of educate them on, well, it's different in adult Ed.

So it was nice on the one hand to just be there with just us so we could ask our questions and have all our questions addressed. However, we did I think-- it sometimes feels like a bit of a broken record in terms of telling them, well, that's not us. That's not our students. So we began with that start, and then the plan was to then train the teachers.

So one of the things-- I have to go back and forth between my successes and challenges and tips here, but one of the things I wanted to mention about Santa Monica-Malibu Adult is that right away, I knew that we had such support from our consortium. I knew that they were a part of making sure that this happened at our Adult School.

And I was happy with that because that meant that we would actually get it done. So we are a small school. So because we are a small school that has its challenges, right? But they're in my estimation are far more just benefits to being a small school because one of my tips would be to be ready to pivot at all times. Be ready to-- best laid plans. We had plans to roll it out with our teachers and then roll it out with a program at our school.

And we've had to pivot along the way. And it's easier for us to pivot because we are a small school. So we began our teacher training I would say around early September or so. And the way that we began that, one of my tips is to make the Canvas implementation a part of as many meetings as possible, right? Have it be an agenda item where you're always touching on what's going on, what's the progress, what are the next steps.

We have a PLC, and so that became the main thing that we did in our PLC was to focus on Canvas training for the teachers. Of course, along with that came having a budget to pay the teachers. And we will advocate for making sure that you are able to compensate teachers for the training, right?

But not just training like, OK, we've spent a couple of hours learning this particular module, but teachers really need time to play in Canvas, right? They need time to-- and a limit to the time, right? It's not limitless, right? But some time to be professionals and to learn the system. And they can really only do that on their own time. So building that into the budget was really important.

Again, I have to shout out my school in the sense that-- and again because maybe it's a small school, but each and every time and there have been several where I've said can we pay teachers for this or that, something that was not a part of our budget, and the answer has always been yes, we can.

So we started rolling it out in September. We intentionally had the first couple of meetings be face to face. It's one thing to learn how to do something in a learning management system. Sure, maybe if you're familiar with it you can learn how to do it online, but I really wanted to start those first few meetings being face to face so I could touch the computers with them and such.

And so we did that the first couple of meetings. We went through the modules. Each meeting, we had some level of homework, something for the students to do-- or excuse me, for the teachers to do but they were students and addressed questions and such. So we did that.

There are in the Canvas teacher training module, I think there are a number of modules, but we intentionally only did the first few, the first four because the latter ones tended to be a little more technical. And you really needed to have students in the actual Canvas classes, and we weren't there yet. So that brings me to one of the challenges.

So the spirit of this, which we started with, on our every agenda, I had a quote by Richard DuFour, which is to learn by doing, that the spirit of this is that we are going to learn how to do this by doing it, not that I'm going to come in and show you how to do it and then you go off your merry way and you just do it, right? But that we're learning by doing.

By having that spirit, it helped I think with teachers-- and it's so important to have their buy-in, right? With teachers feeling OK with not being able to do it correctly with dare I say failing, right? But that they-- we're learning-- we're here to learn together, and we are going to learn it by doing it.

And if it takes us to do it again and again and again, then that's what we're going to do. So that I think created some level of buy-in, some trust as well, which I think that you need when you are trying to implement something so big, so unknown to so many people. So we had the meetings, the trainings, teachers would do their homework.

The plan was that along the way, the administrative folks and I would be trying to figure out how to begin rolling it out with students, right? That we would have an import specifically from our attendance system into Canvas. That presented some challenges, and we just weren't ready. And that's OK.

So we decided to start small and start with just one program. And that's the EL Civics program. There are-- to give you an idea as to how small our school is, there are two teachers in the EL Civics program. We are understaffed as well, so we are missing one teacher. So we decided that's a relatively small group of students.

There are a number of materials on Canvas and all of the materials that I created for EL Civics. They're all on Canvas. So let's start there and eventually we'll enroll those students either manually or by import into Canvas. So that was our intention. But along the way, we needed to pivot again because we just weren't ready.

So being able to do that and having teachers feel comfortable doing that has been really great. Again, one of our successes I would say. Thinking outside the box I would say has been one of our successes as well with trying to implement it specifically with EL Civics.

If you're familiar with EL Civics, EL Civics is performance-based assessments. And so that's a little different than what you tend to see in Canvas. You tend to see assessments or tests that are multiple choice or students are writing. Well, that's generally not EL Civics.

So being creative in terms of how we created assessments and lessons for the EL Civic students has required us to think outside the box a bit. We are now sort of faced with what to do now because the teachers have been trained. They are-- some of them, one of whom I would say the most excited instructor is here with us today, they're raring to go, right?

They're ready for the next step, which is to have students enroll and to start to make Canvas a part of what they do. But we're-- the institution is not quite ready for that. So how to manage momentum I would say is one of our challenges. So if you-- you use it or you lose it, right?

And so I don't want the teachers to lose the momentum of not the knowledge but also the desire to want to implement Canvas, right? So we're trying to think outside the box and find some creative ways for teachers to still be engaged and for those teachers who are ready to have their students to train their students and to have students enrolled in Canvas to do so.

So I'd say that's where we are. Training all teachers and staff but then focusing on one area at a time, I think I've said that, but that's one of the tips I wanted to present, advocating for teacher prep and planning time, all staff, really, having a dedicated and experienced person working on Canvas.

I thought that was me, but I'm not sure that that is me. So it's really about bringing a team, right? And that has been really one of our strengths of it, say, at my program is that each person, each member of the team brings something that they-- their expertise, right?

So yeah, I know Canvas. Yeah, it can create lessons and such and design instruction. I love to do that. But that technical side and what, for example, ASAP needs and how to deal with TOPSpro and all of that is not fully my expertise. So to have someone on the team that can do that and speak that language has been critical.

It's been very collaborative and very what do you need, what does the-- what does admin need, what do the teachers need in order to be successful with this? Use of sandboxes, so Canvas, one of the things that Canvas-- that you can do in Canvas is create basically a play area. I mean, it's literally called sandbox for that, right?

So people can play in it. So making use of those sandboxes with the teachers I think has been one of our successes and one of the tips that I would offer you. In terms of the-- let's see, anything else that I have here? Helping my teachers I think understand that the possibilities in Canvas are endless.

I would say I've been using Canvas for I don't know, seven years or so, and I'm still surprised at what you can do and how creative you can be. I love that. As an educator, what I love most is really the designing part of lessons, the creative part. I'm not creative in any other way other than lesson planning.

And the possibilities are just endless. I'm just floored by how much you can do. I've participated in a lot of-- as has the team at Santa Monica-Malibu in a lot of the training portal that's offered to you. Many of those I have been sometimes there and I'm the only one there.

And I love that because then I can get some one on one support. It's been wonderful. I've made use of those helplines as well, so have my teachers. So that's all been very useful. And again, I'm just amazed at how much there still is to learn. I think that is all-- the last thing I would say would be what our next steps are.

I think I mentioned it, but our next steps would be to roll out Canvas in full to a group of students, whatever that may mean. That may mean, as I said, rolling it out, enrolling them and training them. There are some good-- along the way, I went to CATESOL Anthony. And at that-- their particular adult school had-- or I don't know. It's out there somewhere. I can't remember what agency has it, but anyway, a sort of training for students that was really adult Ed-friendly.

And so I haven't shared that with Santa Monica yet, but that's sort of what's on the radar, helping ESL students primarily learn how to use Canvas and to then incorporate that into the classrooms whether it be one classroom or one program or something to get that ball rolling and then to, again, keep that momentum with teachers so that we don't use it and have to retrain somewhere here soon. I wasn't watching the time, but I hope I didn't go over my time.

Anthony Burik: Thank you so much, Tonya.

Tonya Cobb: Absolutely.

Anthony Burik: Thanks for kicking off the panel here with a lot of great ideas about what you've been doing so far at Santa Monica-Malibu. If you do have questions for Tonya, go ahead and pop them in the chat. But I think what we'll do is let's turn it over to Alfred Miller from Berkeley Adult.

We'll hear from Alfred, and then maybe we'll just take a pause for any questions for Alfred and Tonya. But go ahead and put this in the chat as well. We'll keep this train moving here. So Alfred, why don't you tell us what's happening at Berkeley Adult.

Alfred Miller: Sure. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. My name is Alfred Miller. I am from Berkeley Adult School. And similar to Tonya, I actually started with Canvas before we joined the pilot. As an instructor with adult students, I always kind of had the concept of an LMS in my mind. And we are-- like most K-12 schools, they tend to be Google-oriented. And our students do not receive a Berkeley Adult School email, so using Google Classroom was out of the question.

So years ago, I don't remember how many years ago, I started researching all the different LMS's and came across like Schoology, Edmodo, all these different ones. Moodle was out there. But I kind of landed on Canvas, and they had a way to use it for free. So I started to dump on my course materials in there. And then all of a sudden, when the pandemic hit, I was in pretty good shape.

And then during the pandemic, we get an invite from the CDLC-- CDLP or whatever saying, would you like to join this pilot? And I was like, oh, yeah, why not? I already kind of know it, so they asked me to be an admin. So I have two roles with Canvas that I do teach with it and I have many courses in it myself plus I'm the admin. So I'll tell you a little bit about the admin side as we go along as well.

But when we started the pilot, we were in the first group that started in around-- we were invited in January of '21 I think it was. We started to get some trainings from Instructure kind of late around April, May I think it was, maybe March. I don't quite recall. Those were quite good. I heavily encourage people to use the Instructure trainings.

The people that they partner with do very, very good job. They put you in a sandbox. They let you play. You get the experience from the student side. So one really strong recommendation is for anybody designing courses, Student View, they have this thing called Student View. So when you design your course, you could look at it through Student View. But that's not always enough.

You make yourself a mock student with your personal email or something, so you see it from the real student side. And that's more pleasurable because you'll see the real experience, especially if you're doing things like linking to Google Docs and such because if they're not signed into Google and all that, the Student View doesn't let you do that.

So that's one little tip I'll give you right off the bat. But so we did the trainings. And we had a person at our site, a data person who was going to help link our student management system. And we happen to use ASAP, not sure if everybody else here uses ASAP as well. So we kind of had the idea all along that we wanted to connect our student management system to Canvas.

We didn't know exactly at the beginning, you know, how we wanted to link students and all that, but we wanted to at least create the linkage with it. So that was linked pretty early. But as we learned, as we went along the process going through trainings, we had approximately-- we handpicked a few students at the beginning. We're a relatively large school.

I'm not sure of the size of Tonya's school, but we have approximately 70 or so teachers. So I'm not sure if that's around the size she is, but we're around 70. So we knew we were not going to roll it out to 70 teachers in one day or in one semester or even one year. So we know we're taking this quite slow.

So we handpicked a few teachers. And we, unfortunately, for a couple of teachers, we picked a couple of our brand new to Berkeley Adult School and said you're going to use Canvas. And one of them was actually a Google Classroom user high school teacher. He jumped right into learning it, and his classes are pretty amazing. He's doing it with students. He started in fall of right after that year of learning, so he jumped right in with students.

So it was pretty amazing. But kind of long story short, we went through the trainings. We had around approximately 10 people handpicked. I happen to be one of them, a couple of other people. And of those 10 people, pretty much eight of us ended out using it with students in the fall of right after getting those trainings. So they built their courses pretty quickly over the summer.

We have a curriculum specialist at our school, so she helped a couple of the people with some of that as well. So we built the courses, did the trainings. When we reached around October, we started to do it at one of our little staff development days. We said, hey, there's this opportunity out there called Canvas. So we planted the seed with our staff saying, you know what?

There's this thing out there you might want to use, especially since we're still somewhat in a pandemic and such, but it's a different tool to give your students access to everything. And our school was really preaching this idea of access, giving your students access to your materials, access to you at a lot of different ways and a lot of different channels.

And Canvas really offers that through emails, all that kind of great stuff and different connections you could do through Canvas to meet with your students and provide office hours, et cetera, all that kind of cool stuff. So in around October, we did a little bit of just kind of announcing it out there saying it's an opportunity.

And then in January of '22, we-- and actually in October, we added a few students-- I'm sorry, a few more teachers then. So we added, I don't know, maybe four more teachers approximately into Canvas. They started to try to learn it. A couple of them used it with students. A couple kind of didn't but kind of saw interest in it just got busy and such. But when we reached January, we had another sort of staff development day.

But after that, we offered a Canvas opportunity anybody who wanted to explore it. So we had around 13 teachers wanted to explore Canvas. So I did weekly trainings for about six weeks. So I happened to do the trainings as well, not just manage all the rosters and everything on the admin side.

But I did a bunch of the trainings and let them play in a sandbox and tried to pick it up from there to gain some momentum. And it's really come on strong this year, ironically, that in the fall of this year, we probably added-- actually in the last few weeks, we've added five or more teachers actually building their classes, and a couple of them started using it with students already. So it's kind of exciting.

It's actually starting to gain the momentum we were hoping that eventually it was going to be a slow rollout because we knew we couldn't do it very large. And we didn't want to handpick programs. So I'm CTE. I teach computer-based skills. So I'm doing it with some of my students.

We have some academic teachers using it. We have a lot of ESL teachers using it. And our ESL program uses a thing called-- their book or system is called Ventures. I'm not sure if other folks in the room here know about Ventures. But it comes with a shell you just dump into Canvas. They're already pre-made.

Just similarly, if anybody used the old LMSs like Blackboard and such in the past, you could actually export your Blackboard stuff and just import it right into Canvas. So you don't have to redo a lot of work. So if you're lucky that whatever curriculum you use has what they call a shell, you might be able to bring it right in and manipulate and add in your flavor to it if you know what I mean.

You take what they give you and you're like I kind of like that thing, kind of don't like that thing and really add on and tweak the course to make it to be what you want it to be. That's part of the joy of Canvas to me is that you can make your course have tons of things in it, but you get to control the utter flow of your course as well as what people get to see by publishing and unpublishing items, moving modules around.

So you can really dictate what you want students to be able to see because you might have certain classes where this audience feels like they're going to need more of this. I'm glad I put it into Canvas. It's there and available, but I don't have to publish it unless I think this group might need it.

So Canvas does give you a lot of great control over how you flow your course. And the other thing that I would say is all of our teachers do use it in different ways. As I mentioned, we have a lot of our programs using it. Me, for example, it's more kind of like review. It's more supplemental to what I do in a class more so than I drive my whole course through it.

But the nice thing about it is you could dump in your entire course and even not use it with students and just use it as your own presentation technique with students. Adding students is a whole other level. And that does take, like Tonya said, somebody has to help get the rosters in there if they're not coming in through your SIS system. Also, that's what I have to do. I end up managing our rosters, but it's not that bad.

And what I really love to do with the rosters is I make it as easy for the teachers as possible. So I purposely get their roster in for them, and I rewrite every student's password to a very simple word, "password." So it makes it very easy for our English language learner students to get in.

They don't have to say, oh, no, what password did I make? What's that crazy email that came from Instructure? I don't get it. And you basically get them a nice easy password. And in fact, you don't even have to use emails to log in if you don't want to. You could use student IDs. You could give them usernames.

So you can make it as easy as possible as you want to help your staff get your students into those classes when they want to. And there is going to be a bit of a learning curve. And we've had many of our teachers who are using Canvas with their students, they've made their nice little handouts and stuff that the screenshots, you click this, you click that to really help them get into their course.

And the other strong recommendation I would do anybody doing course building is-- and you might learn this if you haven't in your trainings already about Canvas, you can control what links they see on the side. And you should really take a lot of those away for especially English language learners, they don't need to see these crazy things on the left that say assignments, module.

They just need the very barebones basic like modules and maybe grades if you do grades. But outside of that, they really don't need to see much else. And you really get to control the flow of everything. So the implementation process in general has gone well for Berkeley Adult School in that we started kind of with a small handful of people handpicked, some other people started to gain interest, and we continually plant the seed.

Recently, just the other day, our academic department had a meeting, and somebody showcased their Canvas course that they've just made and they're going to start implementing this term that started yesterday, in fact. So they got to showcase it a little bit, starts to drum the interest from other teachers. Then they start to contact when will we get trainings? Can you set me up with a sandbox or set me up with the course?

And one nice thing about all the course stuff as well is CAEP does supply a nice little template that people could start with. It has two little sample modules of styles and design for how you can start to design your course. And they even have a course on how to use their template if you ever take the Instructure course on how to use their template or you could design your own.

What I'd like to get to in the final phases of a lot of this, we know as a school we won't get everybody in it. But if we could get most of certain departments like our academic department, we'd be really excited because we have a lot of independent study learners. Canvas is a great tool for that. I have some of those learners taking my Google class.

They don't come at all. It's all asynchronous. They just do it through Canvas. I give them great feedback. I love Canvas for the feedback options. There's lovely feedback options. And some of the integrations we've added recently like IXL and stuff have really enhanced a lot of our teachers having more interest. We use something called IXL for math and writing.

I don't know that much about it, but you can link straight to IXL exercises. It shows in the grade book minimally, but at least it gives teachers an impression of what their students are up to. So that's kind of been our implementation process. And just a quick little thing about the admin side.

It depends how admin-- you as an admin want to do things at your school and how you want to separate it out. Like Tonya said, she might have people that want to help more with the technical side. Some people want to help-- might want to help more on the other side. For us once we connected the student management system, it's actually pretty easy for me to get the rosters in.

I can just go into ASAP, I click a few buttons, and then all of a sudden, people start to appear in Canvas and then I just rewrite their password. So it's not too bad. The only drawback is they contact me if they have to add a student. So they're not getting in instantaneously. You can circumvent that. If you use ASAP any of you, you can actually create Canvas courses from ASAP.

But if you do that from your student management system and create the course and the course shows up in Canvas, then you have to copy in the materials for whomever might need those. So part of the admin side includes some of that copying stuff, managing of rosters, changing passwords as needed and stuff like that. So you don't do stuff always on a daily basis, but you do have a little bit of a role that might come into play with that as well.

So that's sort of I think what I mostly have to say. I'm not sure if anything else needs to be covered. But other uses of Canvas that we did also is that we-- our new teachers, we made a course in Canvas that they go through to learn about our school, learn about the services at our school. So integrating Canvas in more ways like that. I've heard of schools that did their self-accreditation process that way.

They actually made a Canvas thing for their self-accreditation. Staff got their input into certain areas however they did it. So you hear people using it in staff meetings. So lots of great stuff I think in different uses of how you could use Canvas. It's not just only a teaching tool. It's a school-wide tool. That's what I would say.

Anthony Burik: OK, great, Alfred. Thanks so much for that introduction to Canvas of Berkeley Adult. We've had a few questions come through the chat, so thanks for putting those in the chat. Let's take just a pause for a second.

After listening to Tonya and Alfred's presentations, does anybody have any questions so far about what's going on-- what Tonya and Alfred have described or anything that people want to contribute kind of along the lines of what they've shared so far? We can take those in the chat. You could come on mic also. It's a pretty small group. We're all friendly for the most part.

Renee Collins: Anthony, Robert Gomez had the question, I generate ID-based accounts on my free account. What do you Canvas users do to notify students through Canvas without email? OK, anybody want to answer that?

Tonya Cobb: If I understand the question correctly, you have a couple of options with Canvas for them to be notified or where they can-- you can send them an invitation and notify them or not. So I did it as a lesson in my class with my students, so like we all did it together.

So then if students weren't-- for some reason they didn't get the invitation or they did something wrong to get in there, then we could work on it together. So I made it as a part of digital literacy a lesson in my class the first few lessons of the semester. I hope that answered your question.

Alfred Miller: I can try to piggyback as well. In our experience with Berkeley Adult School, if I'm not mistaken, Canvas almost sends out an email no matter what. The only time it doesn't always send out an email is if you add a person yourself in Canvas and you uncheck the box that says email user about account creation.