In the leadup to the commencement of semester, most of my time was spent setting up teaching materials in Canvas. Canvas is the new learning management system (LMS) at QUT. It has a much better user interface than blackboard, and it has a different way of handling content. I’m not sure if it is better, but it is quite different. This meant, that there was a learning curve in getting to know the new system.

The university organised for the unit content from Blackboard to be copied into Canvas, and also there were workshops for staff to help them get to know the new system. I went to a couple of these workshops, but they were mostly about knowing how to do things with the new interface, which I didn’t find too difficult.

The problem for me, was that most of my class materials were not in a lecture-tutorial Powerpoint slide format, and it was this format that the new Faculty templates were setup for. Therefore, it was time consuming to work through a new template and a new system and try and work out how to adapt my unit to suit both.

Also, Canvas has a completely different way of managing assessment. I spent a lot of time adapting my previous assessment to fit nicely with the Canvas way of doing things. While I was generally pleased with how this ended up, I’m sure it is going to need finessing once I see how it works for the students.

Next semester I need to do the same process for a different unit, but hopefully it should be a little easier now that I have done this one. I think it will take a couple of iterations of the units before I am happy with everything.