Supply, Installation and Support of Canvas Virtual Learning Environment

Tender description

This is a license renewal of an existing key product used to facilitate Student Learning. Instructure has been supplying the Canvas VLE System to the University of Birmingham for over ten years following a thorough options appraisal. Lot 1: This is a license renewal of an existing key product used to facilitate Student Learning. Instructure has been supplying the Canvas VLE System to the University of Birmingham for over ten years following a thorough options appraisal. Canvas is fundamental to Students' daily interactions with their learning materials, and we have worked with Instructure and our in-house teams to ensure the system has been developed to meet Birmingham's requirements. There are multiple connections and integrations between Canvas and other university systems and platforms including data import feeds from the student record system (Banner) via an in-house VLE administration platform 'Canvas Admin' in order to manage student course enrolment; data import and export to the 'Canvas Admin' platform in order to support VLE administrative functions, manage student enrolment, course creation, lecture capture automated processes, and reporting functions; student engagement analytics data export to in-house data warehouse and analytics dashboard; calendar export to our MyUoB student app; and integration with several additional tools and platforms used for teaching and learning including, Panopto Lecture Capture, Zoom Conferencing, Roll Call attendance, and a suite of assessment tools. The system is in use across the whole institution, on distance programmes and on our trans-national programmes and campuses. In addition, Canvas holds current and past course learning materials, assessment content, and manages access to current and past lecture recording content. The size of this archive is significant. The plans to extend the current contract for a maximum period of up to five years. This time will be used to fully assess and review the requirements on our full VLE ecosystem allowing a full review of our existing digital estate and a consideration of the benefits of other tools which we have enterprise licensing for such as the Microsoft 365 suite of tools. This work will be overseen by our Digital Learning Advisory Group (DLAG), Digital Steering Group (DSG) and senior academic and professional services sponsors. A significant amount of internal investment in terms of developing training materials and supporting users has taken place since adoption. Removing or replacing Canvas at this stage would adversely impact our immediate strategic goals, would directly have a detrimental impact on the staff and student experience and would require significant time and staff resourcing. Since Canvas is integrated with Banner (our student record system) we also need to plan any change around our ongoing Institutional student administration upgrade programme (StARS). Business ownership of Canvas across University of Birmingham is managed by our Higher Education Futures Institute (HEFi) with Service Ownership managed by IT Services. The Business Owner will need to undertake an options re-appraisal and associated procurement process 18 months before the end of this five-year period in order to obtain the best future fit in terms of requirements and also value for money