Each year, members of the Teaching & Learning Technologies Team attend the annual InstructureCon conference to learn more about Canvas features and course design as well as share their knowledge with the Canvas user community. This year’s conference will be held in Long Beach, California, and we encourage Emory faculty, instructional designer, librarians, and other Canvas users at Emory to attend!
Known for its quirky themes (like InstructureCarn, Mission: Instructure, Camp Canvas, Student-Centered Learning: The Musical), InstructureCon covers wide-ranging topics for every Canvas user. They include instructional design (gamification, open educational resources, integrations, templates, HTML/CSS), multimedia, LTIs, learning mastery, administration, programming, statistics and insights, assessment, and more. Presentation sessions are given by Instructure staff as well as everyday Canvas users in K-12 and higher education systems across the globe. Proposals are now being accepted for InstructureCon 2019 – if you have a cool project you want to share, submit it here!
Sam Timme, an academic technology specialist with TLT, gave a presentation in 2017 entitled “Finding New Adopters and Laggards With Canvas Data,” focused on writing SQL queries for the analytics database to answer questions about the progress of our Canvas migration. He described the presentation as “aggressively dry.” Yet to his delight, he had a room full of fellow Canvas users interested in data, and they asked some good questions.
Instructure has posted presentations from 2011 – 2017 YouTube, so check out the playlists on the CanvasLMS YouTube channel for a glimpse at what’s on offer. Here is a selection of some of our favorite presentations from past years:
- Student-Centered Learning: The Canvas Way – Jared Stein, Instructure, 2015
- Librarians in Canvas – Alexandra Stark & Diana Perpich, U of Michigan, 2016
- Making the Rubric Tool Work for You – April Millet & Stevie Rocco, Penn State, 2016
- Increase Engagement Through Student-Led Course Design – Robin Bagent, College of Southern Idaho, 2017
Fun fact: This will be the first year the conference is held on Long Beach (or any beach, for that matter.) For the past few years, InstructureCon has been hosted well above sea level at ski resorts in the western U.S., including Keystone, Colorado and Park City, Utah. You’ll see footage of beautiful Keystone in the Highlight Reel from InstructureCon 2018.
Header Photo by Andrei Stratu on Unsplash