By Kaylyn Kluck
[email protected]

Officials from the Information Technology Services Office are hoping to take ICON to the next level by powering it with a new software called Canvas.

The University of Iowa has used ICON [Iowa Courses Online] for 10 years as a system to share coursework, submit assignments, take quizzes and more.

Up to this point, ICON has been run by the learning management system Desire2Learn (D2L), which will soon be replaced by Canvas. UI Colleges will be moved to the Canvas system one at a time starting this summer, and the integration is expected to finish by Spring 2017.

The shift to Canvas is also due to UI’s membership in Unizin. Canvas is a vendor contracted with Unizin, said Maggie Jesse, the senior director of the ITS Office.

Jesse described Unizin as a “consortium of like-minded higher education institutions that have joined together to start creating a new vision for digital and learning ecosystems.” 

Currently, eight of the 14 schools in the Big Ten make up part of the 22 higher-education institutions of Unizin.

“To be at a table with this group and think about what we could be doing in the future with really no limits, if we can find the right kinds of software and systems to plug together, it’s a pretty exciting time,” she said.

Jesse said the change is also motivated by ITS’ desire to make it easier for students to manage the day-to-day work courses and provide faculty with a better way to share content.

“Right now, ICON is a pretty decent system, but we really aren’t getting to that next level of analytics and content sharing in the system that we had,” Jesse said.

Annette Beck, the director of Enterprise Instructional Technology for the ITS Office, said it is important for students and faculty to know that ICON isn’t becoming Canvas, but Canvas is becoming part of ICON.

“The engine behind ICON is just changing from D2L to Canvas,” Beck said. “ICON is still going to be called ICON, the only thing that’s changing is when you go into your course it will look a little different.”

While the ICON dashboard will still look the same, some of the changes include the relocation of the navigation bar to the left of the screen instead of the top, Beck said.

She said changes also include the “news” header being called “announcements,” and “content” renamed to “modules.” There will also be a Canvas mobile app accessible on phones, tablets, and laptops.

Jane Russell of the Center for Teaching at the ITS office has been assessing student and faculty response to the pilot program of Canvas since summer of 2015.

“Most of the faculty really liked the general interface of Canvas,” she said. “There is a couple new features that it can offer for grading and rubrics, and those are the features they really liked.”

Canvas has a SpeedGrader function that allows faculty to grade dropbox items very quickly.

Russell also said Canvas will make it easier for students to submit assignments, and the gradebook section, would include a new ‘what-if’ function.

The “what-if” function will allow students to type in potential scores on assignments and the system will predict their potential grade in the class.

“Students overwhelmingly loved that feature,” Beck said.