2019 Can•Innovate Recap

On October 25, 2019, CVC-OEI/@ONE hosted the third annual Can•Innovate conference, to support the effective design and teaching of online courses through the use of Canvas. The first conference, in 2016, was held on-site at American River College. In 2018, the decision was made to convert the event into a free online conference to reach more faculty (particularly part-time faculty who often do not have funding to attend conferences), staff, and administrators.

The 2018 event was very successful, with more than 1,000 attendees and an overall satisfaction rate of 4.4 out of 5 stars. For a thorough debrief, read our summary article from last year. This year, the Can•Innovate scaled even further, reaching more than 1,400 people with an overall satisfaction rating of 4.5 stars. Our program included a keynote by Kona Jones, a national thought leader in online education, and a spotlight session by Jory Hadsell, Executive Director of CVC-OEI. Dr. Hadsell provided an overview of the impact CVC-OEI is having in the California Community College system to increase student access to high quality, fully supported courses. This includes increasing the number of quality badged online courses through local Peer Online Course Review (POCR) and the expansion of the CVC Exchange Cross Enrollment Link (ExCEL).

The growth in attendance, however, did not come from our online audience. Rather, it is attributed to the significant increase in the number of colleges that coordinated a group viewing room. In 2018, 32 colleges held a group viewing room (and we also had 5 regional hubs). In 2019, we chose to eliminate the hubs and focus on providing more support resources for group viewing room coordinators. In 2019, the number of viewing rooms increased to 65 (a 103% increase).

Within the attendee demographics, we saw the largest increases in full-time faculty (639, 37% increase from 2018), part-time faculty (493, 32% increase from 2018), and administrators (101, 30% increase from 2018) and a 16% increase in classified staff (147). These numbers demonstrate the value of free, online professional development.

Here is a detailed overview of the attendance data from Can•Innovate 2019 if you'd like to dig in deeper.

Thank you to everyone who played a role in the success of Can•Innovate this year. We had excellent speakers who volunteered their time to share their teaching practices, as well as session hosts and co-hosts (including many volunteers from colleges), behind the scenes support members, and a statewide advisory committee who worked tirelessly to coordinate the event.

Digital Learning Day 2020 Update

The CVC-OEI will not be coordinating a centralized CCC Digital Learning Day program in February 2020. However,  there are many ways your college can still be part of this national event. Here are a few ideas:

If you have any questions, please send an email to support@cvc.edu.

Pages vs. PDFs: The Simple Way to Cure Accessibility Headaches

The HTML environment (meaning pages in a Canvas course) is the most user-friendly for both screen reader devices and mobile devices. On top of that, remediating Word, PowerPoint and PDF files to make them accessible is not something many instructors know how to do. In this episode of Byte-sized, we’ll show you the best way to resolve that dilemma.

Watch this short tutorial on how to do the "copy and paste to Canvas" method.