University of Washington

IMPROVING THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE A Canvas of Possibilities Enriching the learning— and teaching—experience UW Tacoma Professor Riki Thompson engages students with the latest technology tools. S tep inside one of Professor Riki Thompson's UW Tacoma Rhetoric and Composition classes, and you're likely to see small groups of students working collaboratively. Whether they're writing chapter summaries or building annotated bibliographies, they can tackle the same document simultaneously, while Thompson actively supports them in real time, underlining or crossing out passages to make her points. This approach is possible because of one of the features integrated into Canvas, a next-generation learning management system (LMS) being widely adopted at the UW. "It's great to have students be the drivers," Thompson said. "The whole class can share the experience of critiquing, editing, and refining." Document sharing is just one example of Canvas's rich array of intuitive features. Canvas simplifies course management, assignment submission, scheduling, and grading, Thompson said. Canvas not only makes teaching more efficient, it enables faculty to experiment and innovate. That's why the Board of Deans and Chancellors and the Teaching and Learning Technology Oversight Committee have endorsed its adoption as a unified LMS for the UW. "The neat thing about Canvas is that it's not static. It's about being active and collaborative," Thompson said. "It's great to give students immediate, personal feedback that goes beyond the red pen. I've always used collaborative tools, but they weren't as well integrated into the LMS as they are with Canvas, and could be confusing for students." 2 UW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Canvas is one of several major UW-IT efforts to improve the student experience. "Because of the Provost's 2y2d teaching and learning initiative, we've adopted a whole range of technologies like Canvas, Tegrity lecture and presentation capture software, and ViDA virtual desktop access," said Tom Lewis, UW-IT's Director of Academic & Collaborative Applications. "Students are more and more digitally savvy. We want to stay a step ahead and provide them with cutting-edge, transformative tools." Most other Washington state public universities and community colleges have recently followed the UW's lead and adopted Canvas as their LMS, Lewis said. "This provides significant cost savings for everyone. It also creates a uniform, seamless experience for students throughout the state." Nationally, the UW is sponsoring Canvas as an Internet2 NET+ Service, a portfolio of cost-effective and easy-to-access services tailored to the unique needs of Internet2's 221 higher education member institutions. "Leveraging Internet2 technologies can make collaboration easier among universities," Lewis said. "Imagine professors from Penn State or Harvard logging in to Canvas to help teach a UW class, or students from different schools working together simultaneously on a project." At the UW, Thompson's students are embracing this collaborative approach. "Companies like Microsoft consider working collaboratively to be the norm," Thompson summed up. "Canvas is one tool that is helping us teach our students key skills that will help them succeed when they leave the UW."

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