Cisco Webex Education Connector and Canvas LMS for the Virtual Classroom

Virtual learning is increasingly more important, and the need for the best remote learning experience is top of mind for educators and faculty. Every day more of the interactions between students and faculty are digital. Many of them occur via a learning management system (LMS).

An LMS allows students to check grades in real time, receive notifications about discussion topics and review the work of peers.

Because an LMS is already a part of the student and faculty workflow, we wanted to show what would happen if you integrated Canvas with Cisco Webex and Webex Teams utilizing Cisco's Webex Education Connector. This integration would allow for better real-time communication all from within an application faculty and students are already familiar with.

Instructors can setup their virtual classrooms with Classroom Collaboration backed by Cisco Webex Teams, virtual meetings and office hours backed by Cisco Webex and access analytics to include attendance.

Classroom Collaboration is backed by Cisco Webex Teams to allow for real-time one-to-one or group chat functionality. Instructors can communicate with the entire class, small groups or with individuals. Likewise, students can create their own spaces to collaborate on small group projects or one on one with other students. All of this is accomplished without leaving the Canvas interface.

Virtual meetings

Virtual meetings backed by Cisco Webex allows for live video meetings. These meetings can be scheduled, started and joined all within the Canvas interface. Meetings can be scheduled to occur one time or on a reoccurring basis. Video meetings can be attended from the device of choice by participants.

Office hours

Office hours allow instructors to define the days and times they are available to meet with students one on one in a virtual office setting. Once days and times are defined by the instructor, then students will have visibility and will be able to schedule Webex meetings by selecting their desired day and time.

When a student selects an available time, a Webex meeting is dynamically created and shared with both the student and instructor. That time will then be removed as an available option to all other students.

Analytics

Analytics allow the instructor to see the utilization of the different topics we previously discussed. It will show the number of teams spaces created, meetings scheduled and office hours booked. Having this information readily available will allow the instructor to better capture the engagement as a whole from the class.

The Cisco Webex integration within Canvas also provides the ability to track attendance based on participation within Webex meetings scheduled through the Canvas interface.

This integration enhances the capabilities of a university or school LMS platform by integrating Cisco Webex and Webex Teams in a tool faculty and students are already familiar with. School faculty and students are given flexible options to communicate before, during and after class.

If you would like to learn more about Cisco Webex Education Connector and other supported learning management systems, WWT can assist. WWT has vast experience helping educational institutions. WWT can deliver multiple technologies needed to enable and optimize remote learning. 

Additionally, we can offer a no-obligation one hour overview of the technologies and solutions that it takes to enable remote learning solutions at your organization.