Students put on a great show for the new Canvas VLE

The Edward Boyle auditorium at St Hilda’s college was the scene for a very different approach to information sharing at Oxford on Wednesday 30 January. The Canvas@Oxford programme, which will deliver the new virtual learning environment (VLE) across the University, performed a play in front of an audience of academics and administrators. The play showed how Canvas can be combined with the flipped classroom teaching method to deliver engaging and non-traditional teaching experiences. Deanne Clarke and Jemilat Kazeem played the roles of first year students on Professor X’s Chemistry course. Events took place over an imaginary 3 week period, and the students were shown completing various tasks in Canvas, including submitting assignments, taking part in quizzes and using the Student app.

Both Deanne (Somerville College) and Jemilat (St Edmund’s Hall) are in fact studying Chemistry at Oxford, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination for either of them! Although fun to do, the play had a serious purpose in that it created a scenario that allowed the audience to see how Canvas could actually be used in a teaching and learning context. ‘It’s exciting to be part of something that’s new at the University’, said Jemilat. ‘I was really pleased we were able to help’.
‘It was also easy for us as we both use Canvas on our course. The play was a learning experience for us too, as it showed some features we hadn’t used before’ Deanne said.

Canvas is currently being used by nearly two thousand students on twenty seven programmes of study in an early adopter phase, and will be rolled out to students on first year programmes of study during Michaelmas term 2019.