LMS Adoption in Large Complex K12 Implementation

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good morning everyone, thanks for joining us on this beautiful fall day in Niagara! I’m Kenneth Chapman, VP Market Research for D2L, and I’m honored to be here with Jim Reshke and Rob Dunlop from the District School Board of Niagara (DSBN) to talk about adoption success stories in a huge provincial implementation across diverse school boards. A bit about D2L – we’re a software company out of Kitchener, founded in 1999 by our CEO John Baker. Our mission is to transform the way the world learns, we do that by working with the best and most innovative organizations not only in K12, but also in higher education and corporate learning. We provide an LMS as well as analytics, gamification services, portfolios and much much more. But all of that technology is in service of students, and that requires adoption. I’m not an educator – I was ‘raised by wolves’ in the field of education after joining D2L in early 2003 while still doing my undergrad. Everything I’ve learned has been through listening to those educators that are actually making these transformations themselves. I am fortunate enough to travel around meeting the best minds in learning and want to share some of what we’ve learned within Ontario, and in general.
• #3: Today I want to give an overview of the goals and challenges presented to the province, and how they and others have developed strategies to drive significant adoption of the LMS even in elementary and ‘non reader’ grades. Technology implementations are expensive, they take up precious time, and generally come with high expectations for return on these investments. Critical to the success of any edTech implementation is figuring out how to get teachers to justify spending their valuable time on a new piece of technology, or new way of doing things. After all, it’s teachers who design learning for students, and they have precious little capacity outside of working with children in the classroom. After I talk about the ministry, some best practices we’ve learned – we will hear from Jim and Rob on their approach within DSBN in getting some truly phenominal uptake of the LMS (79%) in a blended environment. Can you guess where they saw the greatest adoption in their board? You’d assume high school, right? Nope… Kindergarden?!
• #4: It sounds cliché – but having a partnership between the ministry and D2L was a critical ingredient. In this case partnership meant: - Shared goals for the project - understanding of joint strengths and weaknesses - open and transparent dialog as issues and changes come up - complimentary skillsets – technology / educators / administrators / change management
• #5: TELO stands for Technology Enabled Learning Ontario, and it is the branch of the Ministry of Education that runs the provincial elearning and blended learning initiatives AATO is TELO’s French counterpart Together, TELO and AATO represent 72 school boards and 2 Million Students D2L began working with TELO in 2006 to provide every teacher in Ontario with access to Brightspace products
• #6: D2L and TELO have three main goals, which they are achieving through access to Brightspace products, as well as other integrations and Ministry-created resources TELO did right what many get wrong in large scale technology projects – They deeply understood their goals for the project, their resources, their constraints With these high level goals in mind they have a ‘True North’ to align to as the inevitable bumps in the road and distractions came up
• #7: The Ministry has provided every teacher in Ontario with access to something called the vLE – The Virtual Learning Environment This vLE is centered around three Brightspace products: Learning Environment, ePortfolio, Learning Repository The vLE also includes integrations like Google Apps, Office 365, OSAPAC (which includes Turn it In, Gizmos, and others), and the OERB (Ontario Electronic Resource Bank) Because the Brightspace environment is so customizable the ministry was able to ‘make it theirs’ – avoiding comprimises and confusing workflows on the part of teachers and students in favor of making the tech do the work A great example of this is with elementary students – the ministry wanted their elementary students to have the same ‘home room’ concept in their online space as in their classroom. So rather than have students login to Brightspace and go to the school’s homepage, or straight to a course, elementary students now go to a ‘homeroom’ area that they are familiar with as a starting point.
• #8: The roll out of Brightspace technology began only with eLearning (and as of last year, TELO was called eLO – for eLearning Ontario) In 2011, we worked with TELO to expand our initiative to include Blended learning at the high school and elementary school level In 2013, the Creating Pathways to Success Ministry policy required the use of portfolios to document learning in K-6 students. We expanded our offering to use our ePortfolio tool to allow every student in Ontario access to a digital portfolio where they could document their learning and track their progress In 2015, we began working with school boards to move professional learning and development resources to the vLE Takeaway: As with any large-scale roll out of an educational technology, we did not try to do everything at once. With TELO, we began with eLearning – an initiative that all schools were undertaking to provide access to secondary school courses to students who could not come to a traditional classroom for a variety of reasons. As we watched the needs of the province grow, and as teachers became more comfortable with the vLE, we shifted to include other components and increased our adoption in new ways.
• #9: When planning for a successful adoption of an educational technology, there are five factors (or pillars of adoption) that need to be considered: A goal and the plan to get you there – We take a Plan, Achieve, Measure approach. If your goal is 25% adoption by the end of the first year, you need a goal to get you there with resources, barriers and how you will overcome then, and a timeline of tasks. The right team and leadership – Having the right team in place is important. You need a solid collaboration between teachers, consultants, leadership, and IT. Just as important is having an executive or administrator sponsor, who can help push forward when certain decisions have been made Innovation - Teaching with technology is not new, but it has required a paradigm shift. Teachers are encouraged to be innovative in their use of technology in the classroom – we need to take the same approach in our adoption strategy. Professional Learning – We cannot underestimate the need for professional learning and training. In order to have teacher evangelists, who love using the technology and will tell others to use it, you need to foster awareness and enablement. Being innovative is also important here – some of our school boards have decided to take their professional learning and development, for example health and safety training, and put it into Brightspace. This a great approach, allowing teachers to use the technology for their own learning before trying to apply it in their classrooms. An integrated learning solution – There are tons of technologies out there, and we want teachers to use the products they love in their teaching. One way to encourage adoption is to put all of these products and technologies in one, easily accessible location, like the vLE.
• #10: Hamilton Wentworth District School Board decided to put all of the products teachers love to use in one place – “The Hub” The Hub is hosted in the Brightspace Learning Environment, and includes all the tools that teacher sneed to use – ePortfolio, email, Carousels with resources, the school board video channel with training videos for using technology, and integrations like Google Drive Hamilton Wentworth has seen an impressive adoption of 66% since beginning to use the Hub
• #11: Wellington Catholic District School Board had an obstacle: They did not have the resources in place to train every single teacher in how to use Brightspace using the traditional methods of face-to-face training sessions or workshops. Instead, they developed a scalable training model that trained one mentor teacher from every school in the board. These mentors were leaders in their schools, and they were tasked with going back to their schools and training at least 4 of their colleagues on Brightspace. This exponential training model continued, and now Wellington Catholic is at 55% adoption in just three years! Conseil scolaire du Novel-Ontario had a great approach to professional development training. They had their pedagogy consultants put all of their training resources on Special Education, Professional Growth, and other development opportunities into the vLE. Teachers had to access the Learning Environment to see these resources, and the school board found that more and more teachers began asking if they could use Brightspace in their own classrooms. This modeling approach had a great impact on adoption!
• #12: This Ministry policy came into effect last year and is being implemented across the province this year. School boards are using ePortfolio, which they have free access to, to create digital portfolios for their students. Students can document their learning and track their progress, and their portfolio can be accessed each year, throughout their entire school career.
• #13: Now we’d like to welcome Rob Dunlop of DSBN, a school board that has had fantastic growth (and will also be hosting our Brightspace Connection event in St Catharines next week). DSBN has 79% adoption of the vLE, and Rob is here to share some of their specific successes and strategies. Welcome, Rob! [This presentation from Rob was AMAZING – unfortunately for these purposes, it was done as a live demo of their Brightspace LMS as the ‘Presentation Tool’ at the front of a classroom. Rob showed how High School, middle school down to Kindergarden were effectively using the LMS for classroom teaching, parent engagement, and to save teachers precious time while improving their classroom experience.]