CASE STUDY

Texas A&M University supports an ever-growing student body of 70,000+ students. We sought to create a template that was able to be used by every faculty member in the global campus regardless of the delivery mode used in the classroom.

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The nature of education at Texas A&M

In the fall of 2018, Texas A&M University created the Office for Academic Innovation. The main goal of this office was to transition the university from the previous Learning Management System (LMS) eCampus by Blackboard to Canvas by Instructure. After the transition was complete, the office would not only continue to advance and support the LMS, but would begin creating new online programs for undergraduate and masters degrees.

With the introduction of COVID-19 during the process of transitioning from eCampus to Canvas, our office was given the deadline to move almost 13,800 courses online after COVID-19 was upgraded to a pandemic. We successfully transferred 57,871 of our students and 2,988 faculty members (that were not already teaching online) to virtual classrooms. And did so in just seven business days.

What the user demographic looked like

The majority of Texas A&M faculty fall within the 30-45 age range, with the 50-65 age group representing the second-largest demographic. While it’s common to design for the majority, we prioritized the users who would face the greatest challenges—those less familiar with digital tools or more likely to encounter barriers. By focusing on their needs, we ensured the solution was intuitive and accessible for everyone.

While the Office for Academic Innovation never worked directly with students, they are at the forefront of everything we needed to consider as a university. The up and coming generation of students are incredibly tech savvy, but have a lower attention span than ever before. We had to create something that met that need of functional and flashy.

The goal was to make the experience the same for every student no matter the modality or location they received their education at.

Why one template?

The Texas A&M University Canvas template was created to simplify course management for instructors and improve the learning experience for students. Its purpose is to establish a consistent, high-quality standard for the online learning environment across all courses at Texas A&M.

This template is automatically applied to all Canvas courses and features a pre-designed homepage with accessible links, student resources, guidance on module organization, and a syllabus template. These elements help faculty meet the minimum syllabus requirements and maintain best practices for course design.

The Steps to Implementing Canvas

To best serve the Texas A&M community and to ensure a quality online teaching and learning environment for our faculty and students, our team elected to utilize a data-driven approach to target small groups of faculty and their associated courses, building to the end goal of having all faculty utilizing Canvas by the end of Summer 2021. This approach ensured we appropriately mobilize resources, and could take critical implementation milestones generated from each wave and apply important lessons learned to subsequent waves.

My role as Lead Designer

As the lead designer, I was responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining the template for Texas A&M University’s instance of Canvas. Collaborating with a team of course designers and stakeholders, I created a template now used by over 70,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff across the university’s branch campuses.

My role required a balance of user experience and interface design expertise. Following the initial launch of the template, I led a comprehensive redesign to refine its look and feel for the university’s first major Canvas rollout during the fall 2020 semester. This redesign—requested to be designed, tested, and implemented within just two weeks—was successfully delivered, though the condensed timeline limited the opportunity for extensive user testing typically required for such a large-scale system. Despite these constraints, the template has become a foundational tool for the university’s academic community.

Summary

After the first semester of Canvas being fully implemented here at Texas A&M University, we selected a targeted group to receive this survey, our academic liaisons. Our hope was to see through this lens on a larger scale what the university was experiencing and to directly improve the next iteration of the template.

The Challenge

Making the transition to a new Learning Management System is not an easy navigation for faculty and students alike. Over the timeline of implementation at Texas A&M, I had the opportunity to hear both the Faculty and Student voice. This form was the first step of many to create more proactive UX dialogue and improvements.

The Goal

Through this feedback form, the goal was to receive tactile feedback on issues and wishes users had for the Texas A&M Canvas template, and communicate that feedback directly to the team designing the next iteration of the template.

Canvas Template Feedback

When designing products, we tend to design in a frictionless flow; where it removes impediments to immediate action and focuses on increasing conversion at all costs. This approach doesn’t consider the deeper story of how we can design and build experiences that are also enriching and fulfilling, and was they very same mistake make with the first template.

We collected user feedback from faculty on pain points and what we could do to provide them with a better tailored experience.

Overall Findings

We received 72 responses from faculty teaching across Texas A&M's 16 schools, colleges, and branch campuses. The Texas A&M Canvas template achieved a 62% overall satisfaction rate, reflecting its pedagogical usefulness. Based on the feedback gathered, we made continuous improvements to the template to further support student success at the university.

Within the 62% satisfaction rating, 44% of respondents found the third-party tool offerings useful. As part of the new LMS implementation, we established a streamlined process to review and approve third-party tools, which we refined over time. Faculty also provided feedback on the template's customizability and identified gaps in training resources. We incorporated this input into our efforts to align with Texas A&M's teaching and learning mission.

Changes Made

From this survey we were able to make edits such as changing the structure from modules to weeks. We selected the weekly buttons be the default option for the Texas A&M-wide template after receiving extensive feedback that it was easier to navigate through classes with time rather than subject. This allowed for the template to work across all modalities supported university-wide.

Additional changes were restructuring and slimming down the included files, moving all extra custom assets to be housed on our website as downloadable assets, creating more specific channels to explain how to use the template, and provisioning separate templates for branch campuses.