During the Summer ’15, Fall ’15 and Spring ’16, Canvas, a learning management system (LMS) was piloted in over 61 courses. During the pilot, feedback was gathered from faculty and students as to how Canvas met the needs for teaching and learning at Rice University. The newly formed Information Technology Council Academic Technologies subcommittee, chaired and seated with faculty members, talked to their colleagues about what they use in an LMS. After much discussion and feedback, the committee unanimously voted to recommend the university move to Canvas as its LMS beginning in Fall ’16. To read the committee’s recommendation report or for information on using Canvas, training, and migrating courses from OWL-Space to Canvas, visit our web site.

Dr. Susan McIntosh displays the Homo naledi casts which were printed on Rice’s 3D printer merely one year after being discovered.

In October, Dr. Susan McIntosh’s Introduction to Physical Anthropology (ANTH 203) students sent her links to articles about the discovery in South African caves of skulls from a new form of Homo, Homo naledi. While she was already aware of this archaeological discovery, she was excited by her students’ enthusiasm for breaking news related to her course.

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“I really like Canvas, and I hope Rice adopts it,” explains Rachel Kimbro, an associate professor in the department of Sociology regarding her pilot of this Learning Management System (LMS) for her Medical Sociology (SOCI 345) course. Kimbro is one of several professors this fall who are piloting Canvas, an LMS option that is being explored by a joint group from the Digital Education Advisory Committee, the Office of Information Technology, the Office of Digital Education, and Fondren Library. As a way to assess the teaching and learning needs of Rice’s unconventional campus, this partnership is examining the aspects of an LMS that are most useful to professors on campus as well as the transition process from OWL-Space to Canvas. For the past ten years, Rice professors and students have utilized OWL-Space as an online classroom venue where resources, quizzes, exams, chat rooms, announcements, grades, and more have been shared amongst classes. Just as the students using the technology only change once a year as a class exits and a class enters the Sallyport, OWL-Space is only updated annually, too..

Sample Canvas course web site

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A professor of Computer Science, Dr. Devika Subramanian has been at Rice for 18 years. In her research, she develops data-driven prediction algorithms using artificial intelligence and machine learning and applies them to problems in engineering, natural sciences as well as the social sciences. Her algorithms have been used to predict mortality in patients with chronic heart failure, the risk of hurricane wind damage to individual homes in Harris County, as well as outbreak of conflict in the Middle East.

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