Starting Academic Year 2023-2024, UST will shift to Canvas, ending a deal with Blackboard, its learning management system (LMS) for two decades.
Seven other Dominican-run schools will also make the switch.
Instructure, Canvas’s developer and publisher, announced its partnership with schools under the Dominican Province of the Philippines on Thursday.
“[UST] will move from its previous LMS to Canvas, prompted by the need to improve content sharing and collaboration between their network and increase efficiency in grading and achievement of learning outcomes,” Instructure said in a press release.
Instructure said the Canvas platform would be “easy to use” and offered effective communication, grading, and data capabilities.
The open-source LMS also provides access to data and analytics to instructors, which could help them make more personalized feedback to students, it said.
Asst. Prof. Anna Cherylle Ramos, director of the UST Educational Technology Center (EdTech), said the University decided to switch to a different LMS based on feedback from both students and teachers, obtained through a survey.
Ramos said UST deemed Canvas the most “robust and intuitive learning platform” that would promote meaningful teaching and learning.
“UST has engaged in an official partnership with Instructure to advance with forward-thinking solutions that provide everyone with access to a high-quality education supported by an equally powerful learning management system,” she said in the Instructure press release.
Fr. Wenifredo Padilla III, O.P., the acting assistant to the Rector for information and communications technology (ICT), said Canvas would help students and teachers interact better in hybrid learning.
“We trust that this partnership will continue to propel us to greater heights by fostering more pedagogical innovations on campus and enable instructors and students to interact more seamlessly within and outside of the classroom as we transition from fully online to hyflex/hybrid modalities of instruction in the post-pandemic era,” Padilla said in the press release.
The switch to a new LMS will cover some 56,000 students across eight Dominican schools, including Colegio de San Juan de Letran – Calamba, Colegio de San Juan de Letran – Manaoag, and Angelicum Iloilo, Instructure said.
Since 2003, Blackboard Inc. has been the University’s LMS, helping make UST the first institution in the Philippines to implement e-learning on a large scale.
Through Blackboard, the University first used the e-Learning Access Program (e-LEAP) in delivering modules for the National Service Training Program’s Civic Welfare Training Service (CWTS) and Literary Training Service (LTS).
In 2018, the UST Cloud Campus was introduced by Blackboard and EdTech, and it became the platform utilized by the University for offering online and asynchronous classes, which proved to be vital during the Covid-19 pandemic.
