Presented by:
Crystal DeJaegher, Associate Director
Teaching and Learning Technologies
University of Notre Dame
Steven Varela, Director
Teaching and Learning Technologies
University of Notre Dame
Date @ Time: 4:20 - 5:00 pm
Room: M104
Session Description
Learn how Notre Dame's Teaching & Learning Technologies (TLT) team built "Canvas Legends," a recognition program driven entirely by student nominations, to identify and celebrate the instructors who've found the "secret sauce" for making Canvas work for learners. We'll walk through the five pillars that define a Canvas Legend, the rewards architecture that makes recognition meaningful, and how we turned 150+ student nominations into a strategic roadmap for faculty development.
What this session is really about
Here's the thing nobody tells you about LMS quality checks: faculty tend to tune them out. Technical checklists and top-down reviews tell instructors what to fix, but they rarely tell them what's working, or why it matters to the people actually enrolled in the course. So we took a different approach. Instead of reviewing courses ourselves looking for ideal models, we asked students: which instructor uses Canvas like a “Legend”?
That question generated over 150 detailed nominations in a single semester, and it changed how we think about faculty support. In this session, we’ll show you exactly how we built the program, including the wording of the nomination, to the five pillars we use to define excellence (organization and clarity, effective use of Canvas features, communication, innovation and aesthetics, and accessibility). We will also discuss the recognition in more detail that gets faculty genuinely excited, including digital badges, letters from Instructure, and a campus celebration event.
We’ll show you how we scaled the idea beyond individual faculty into department-level awards, and, perhaps most importantly, how we turned the nomination data itself into a compass for planning our faculty professional development.
You'll walk away with a replicable, low-cost framework you can adapt for your own campus: a student-centered nomination prompt, a clear set of criteria, a lightweight rewards structure, and a plan for mining the feedback for institutional insight.
This one's for you if…
- You work in academic technology, instructional design, or faculty development and want a recognition model that doesn't rely on top-down reviews or extra budget.
- You're looking for a way to surface what students actually value in a course, and not just what end of semester evaluations, or instructional reviews may measure.
- You're responsible for planning faculty professional development and want data that tells you what to prioritize.
- You want a scalable model that works for both individual faculty and entire academic programs or departments.
Resources
Check back after the conference for updates, slides, and the session recording.
See you in Louisville!
Got a recognition program of your own, or a question about how the nomination data translates into real professional development priorities? Please drop it in the comments! We’d love to hear what's working (or not working) on your campus, and we’ll do our best to work your questions into the session itself. See you in Louisville!
