Week's End Report - Feb. 10th

Tip of the Week!

As you will undoubtedly notice this blog post is a few days late. Last week our regional SuperUsers attended training in Richmond on IvyLearn (our new Canvas Learning Management System platform). Here are a few highlights from training:

• https://ivytech.instructure.com is the web address to use for accessing IvyLearn
• Google Chrome is the preferred browser, though Canvas supports all browsers two versions back
• https://guides.instructure.com is the home for user guides for both instructors and students
• Canvas uses feedback from the users to decide what features to develop, ideas can be submitted online https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/feature-ideas
• There's a very strong user community online with a wide variety of resources: https://community.canvaslms.com/

New Terminology

When we make the switch to IvyLearn we will be changing some of our terminology. Here are some terms you will be hearing over the next few months:

• Commons - A community comprised of content shared by other users, content found within Commons can be imported into your IvyLearn courses
• Files - Each user and each course has a "files" section where documents can be stored; instead of loading a file directly into a course you'll create a link, thus a single file can be reused many times
• IvyLearn - This is the name Ivy Tech has chosen for our Canvas platform
  
• Learning Management System (LMS) - Currently Blackboard 9.1 is our LMS, we are switching to the Canvas LMS platform that we will call IvyLearn
• Modules - In Blackboard we used the terms "session" and "class session" to describe the individual portions of our courses, in IvyLearn we'll be using the term "module".
• Pages - in Blackboard we had "items" within our class sessions, IvyLearn uses "pages"
• Publish - IvyLearn allows you to create and manipulate content in your live courses without your students seeing it; your content isn't available to students until you "publish"

What's Great about IvyLearn

1. Modules link to pages within a course, this means our pages are dynamic. I can link to one page many times from the same course and when I make a change to a page all of the links pointing to that page are automatically updated
2. Courses are more customizable, there are more places to put your personal mark on your course
3. Updated look and feel
4. Users can preview documents (.docx, .pdf, .ppt) within IvyLearn instead of having to download them
5. "Requirements" can be created (similar to Blackboard's Adaptive Release) allowing users to create prerequisites for items
6. ... and much, much more!