How Edison State College Uses Canvas for More than Just Courses

Getting folks in the administrative level involved with Canvas early was an important part of getting full buy in

At their college, they have everyone enrolled in Canvas. 

Student organizations and student government and student life groups use the system.

Met with teams of different users throughout the year and as they do that, more groups are reaching out to them and they are doing less outreach.

The college is using the following tools with groups:

• File sharing
• Collaboration and wikis
• Notifications ( especially important to the non course users since they are not often in the LMS)
• Discussions
• Announcements
• Tracking
• Conferences and chat
• EtherPad for agendas
• Adjunct teaching portfolios - actually all portfolios will eventually move to canvas. Faculty put in their data as assignments and the department head uses the Speed Grader to evaluate the portfolios.
• Great way to gather data and could use it to track to outcomes - with the analytics could be very powerful.

They organize these "courses" into sub accounts.

They don't have the people create the courses on their own, as they prefer to work with staff so they are aware of the great tools and how to use them.

They use the Courses structure instead of groups because there is a limitation of 500  mb on groups and that cannot be changed.  Also, courses can be in a subaccount  structure easily.