Abstract:

The development of information technology has urged the enhancement of other fields. Education is not an exception, especially higher education. Accordingly, learning management systems (LMSs) emerged as collaborative and intelligent systems which support learners and educators. This study is performed at a university in Sweden. The university faced to the challenge which was the diverse flora of different IT systems combined with the old learning platform being perceived as outdated. For this reason, Canvas was chosen as the new LMS at the university. Thus, the study aims to discover how the university implemented Canvas in the organization to resolve the obstacle. With the Canvas implementation process, this research exposes the decision-changing process about LMS to draw a holistic picture for the implementation process with the detailed activities, the involved stakeholders, and the stages lasting from 2016 to 2018. The study is based on interviews with four people including decision makers and other stakeholders who have been in charge of the implementation and documents. The interviews are conducted after six months as of the implementation completion. To reveal the implementation process in an intelligible insight, we also demonstrate the expectations of the university on Canvas before the implementation to figure out how Canvas helps to deal with the previous difficulties. Additionally, we investigate on what basic assumptions the design of the implementation was based, list the involved stakeholders with their commissions in the process, and inspect the ways they implemented and accomplished Canvas within the organization. The outcomes of the study manifest what have been done so far and what are needed to be done in the future, so the decision makers have deeper insights of the entire process, whereby they are able to make superior decisions of the improvement. The co-workers, on the other hand, have invaluable knowledge of the organization in which the decisions are to be implemented, as a result, the co-workers ameliorate how a decision should be implemented to produce the best performance. The synthesis perspective addresses the possibility of merging the perspectives of top-down and bottom-up. The study is viewed as a bullet trajectory to exhort researchers within this field to generate more innovations of intelligent systems in general and LMS in specific. Additionally, the research fosters universities or academies which have not applied LMS to their organizations to implement LMS with the purpose of learning process and education quality enhancement.

Keywords:

Learning Management System, Canvas, Learning Platform, Implementation Process.