July 11, 2013. We are delighted that many faculty are wanting to be early adopters of Canvas. We will be giving all faculty a Canvas class shell for their Fall on campus classes so you can begin experimenting with the system and transferring course material from Blackboard. For those of you that have the time and ability to do this in time for your Fall 2013 classes we will "publish" the classes (make them public and available to students) when they are appropriately set up.
However, for those of you who will not have time to set up a Canvas course for your on-campus class in time for Fall 2013, we will simply leave that Canvas course "un-published" (i.e invisible to students) and your students can use your Blackboard site. During Fall 2013 we will provide information sessions to assist faculty with this transfer and creation process.
For online classes we are helping just a handful of faculty convert their Blackboard classes to Canvas until we give more detailed training in place - which will occur during Fall 2013. Only those faculty who have piloted their classes in Canvas already will be continuing to use the new system for their online classes during Fall 2013.
We hope that during Fall 2013 after the training most of the online classes will be transferred to Canvas ready for Spring 2014 implementation. This will give some room for last minute transfers prior to the cessation of our Blackboard contract on July 31, 2014. Our team will be helping with this process as well.
TIMELINE
We are currently setting up the Canvas system for campus-wide operation, and are having a further three-hour meeting with Canvas technical people next Thursday (July 18, 2013) on these issues. We are hoping that by July 22 we can give every instructor an "un-published" class shell for every Fall 2013 class in which to experiment. In the mean time, however, (if you can't wait until July 22) if you wanted to get started, you could try the free version of Canvas and create some of your class content, ready to be copied over to the Biola Canvas class when available. You can do this from: https://canvas.instructure.com/register_from_website?lead_source=Free_For_Teacher_Request
Ron Hannaford, Ph.D.
Director of Distance Learning