The district will be switching from the WebACCESS online course management system to Canvas starting in spring 2017.

In hopes to improve the online site and make it easier for students and faculty to use. Canvas will have a better
designed website, making overall a cleaner webpage.

Canvas will also be paired with an app that is better optimized for mobile use.

There are forum pages in Canvas as well, so if a student has any suggestions to improve the site, he or she can post it and other users can vote on the different posts to inform the designers of the site of their feedback.

“With Canvas being a more modern and cloud based system you will be able to access it from more devices,” said
Ricardo Flores, Skyline College Instructional Technologist, on the ease of using Canvas.

Over the summer, there were around 20 courses that used Canvas as the management system. Now, in the fall, there
are more than 150 courses using Canvas to test it out and work out its bugs before it becomes the primary course management system in the fall of 2017.

“I think it could be interesting,” Skyline student Jonathan Blakeslee said, “But it’ll take longer for teachers and students to relearn a website.”

To combat that concern, courses will be taught to the faculty each semester to show them how to best use Canvas for their respective classes.

Right now there is a six week course for faculty to be able to teach online and hybrid classes. Faculty members can also backup the outlines of the course material used for WebACCESS when they do migrate to Canvas, there is no need to rebuild an outline from scratch.

“Canvas has been well received across other schools nation wide,” said Marisa Thigpen, Program Services Coordinator. “It is being heavily adopted with community colleges.”

For the next three years Canvas will be a free service, and a price for future use will be determined at a later date.