eLearning has been a part of EvCC for approximately ten years. According to Jeff Iannone, Interim Director of eLearning and Instructional Design, “eLearning is a lot of different things, if we were to break it down, the first thing is that we provide assistance for faculty and students with the usage of the learning management system or the LMS, that is Canvas.” Yeah, all those fees you pay along with tuition go to funds that support eLearning.

At the beginning of the quarter, there were only two staff members, Iannone and an intern, an international student, making it difficult for them to begin working with all the students that were requesting their help. As of right now, there are currently three people working in the eLearning department, including the interim director, an intern and a program specialist. The program specialist’s first day was this past Oct 28.

As many EvCC students know, Canvas has its good and its ugly side. Students are still trying to figure things out with this almost brand new system both as newcomers and as returning students, adapting to the updates.

One of those students, Stephany Martinez, started here at EvCC fall quarter, and said, “professors are just confused really, and don’t know what they can do with [Canvas].” In reality as Iannone puts it Canvas is “now normal,” meaning both students and faculty had been using it for a few years, to be exact Canvas has been around EvCC for three years now.

eLearning also helps with web enhanced classes, hybrid classes and online classes.  Doing everything online seems to be taking over our lives, and has become very trendy. Due to this, there has been a higher demand for online classes at EvCC.

Maria Elena Gutierrez, a second year student, explains how this quarter she is taking sociology online. She said, “I hate it, she’s so disorganized, she never tells us what we are supposed to be doing, so pretty much you are on your own.” Regardless of the disorganization Gutierrez states, “I am only online on Wednesdays to do discussions … I would say it’s a pretty easy class.”

There is also other students such as Zach Michaud, a third year EvCC student, who is currently taking one online class, and has taken two others in the past. Michaud, describes online classes as “very self-guided, very self-motivated, easy to fall behind if you don’t follow the bar, and they have a tendency to have more of a work load.”                 Nevertheless, Martinez, Gutierrez and Michaud would take or would continue to take online classes.

Yet, there’s other few students who would never take an online course. Second year student, Ihab Salman, said “I like to be physically in class instead of just staring at a screen.” Even though most of his homework has to be turned in into Canvas, Salam still prefers traditional classes.

The eLearning staff doesn’t really know how much students like or dislike Canvas, “we were planning to do over the summer a survey to students for that exact reason, because we felt that now we’re at a point that students and faculty have been using it for a while. We just wanted to see how’s it going with Canvas,” said Iannone, who went on to say “… unfortunately we didn’t get to that survey, because we had a lot of personnel changes so that had to be put in the back burner.”

The survey is ready to go and the staff is just waiting for the right moment to release it. In addition to the student survey, they also have a faculty survey, this will help eLearning in future improvements, to see where they can better help the online student experience.