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The Daily Northwestern DAILYNORTHWESTERN.COM
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
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NU to drop Blackboard for Canvas system By Rebecca savransky daily senior staffer @beccasavransky
Northwestern will transition from Blackboard to Canvas, a course management system with more flexibility and user options, the University officially announced Tuesday. The transition, which has an expected completion date of August 2015, will take place over the course of the 2014-15 academic year, after undergraduate and graduate classes participated in Canvas pilot programs over the past year. “Faculty found that Canvas has a more modern user experience, a very clean design and what’s probably most important, was much more adaptable to a variety of different educational practices and ways of promoting communication and engagement in a class,” said Bob Taylor, senior director of academic and research technologies. “The enthusiasm from faculty was very high.” The official announcement was made after the Learning Management System Review Group, consisting of faculty and staff members, compiled four recommendations for the adoption of Canvas that were brought to the Educational
Should Northwestern switch to Canvas?
*Faculty percentages exceed 100 percent due to rounding Source: Northwestern’s Learning Management System Review Group Infographic by Jackie Marthouse/Daily Senior Staffer
Technology Advisory Committee. The group’s recommendations included beginning the transition immediately, conducting comprehensive training during summer 2014 on the new interface and forming a “steering group” to ensure a successful transition. Survey results from students
and faculty who engaged in Canvas pilot courses over the past year also showed overwhelming support, with more than 70 percent of students requesting the switch from Blackboard to Canvas. An even greater percentage of faculty supported the transition. Students also found the interface relatively simple to learn
J Street U discussion brings ‘Peace Partners’ to campus
daily senior staffer @JeanneKuang
the daily northwestern @olivesocean
Nathan Richards/Daily Senior Staffer
COME TOGETHER Ghaith al-Omari looks on as Ori Nir speaks at the Peace Partners discussion Tuesday night. The discussion, hosted by J Street U Northwestern, a group advocating for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, featured individuals with perspectives from both backgrounds.
Nir said he feels many Israelis have ceased to care about the conflict, not because they are heartless, but because they have endured so much violence and have come to see it as normal. He said the only way for the conflict to be solved is for both Israelis and Palestinians to step away from the numbers and get involved. Al-Omari shared a similar view, saying that until he traveled to the West Bank, a territory that shares a border with Israel, he believed the accepted Palestinian belief that Israelis were at fault for the conflict. He then went to Palestine as a human rights lawyer on a conflict negotiation team and spent a great deal of time with Israelis. “It became obvious as time progressed
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that this is a conflict about two people who have a very legitimate claim and narrative,” al-Omari said. “Although I will never accept the Israeli narrative, it is valid.” Both Nir and al-Omari said the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians want peace and support the two-state solution, but don’t believe that it is possible because of lack of trust. In addition, they said a large degree of separation between Israelis and Palestinians has deepened the divide. Weinberg junior Josh Boxerman, the co-founder of J Street U NU, said the event was based around the organization’s slogan: “Pro-Israel, Pro-Palestine, » See J STREET, page 6
» See CANVAS, page 6
NU to examine White House suggestions By Jeanne Kuang
By Olivia Exstrum
J Street U Northwestern, a student group which promotes a two-state solution in the Middle East, hosted an event on Tuesday focused on how to effectively discuss the conflict by allowing both sides to voice their opinions. About 100 students, faculty and community members attended the discussion, titled “Peace Partners: Israeli and Palestinian Perspectives,” which featured Ori Nir, a former Israeli journalist and current national spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, and Ghaith al-Omari, an executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine. The two represented the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on the conflict, respectively. “You can’t deal with this conflict by denying the other,” al-Omari said. “You will never be able to understand it if you can’t accept the other view and claim. The only way we can move forward is through partnerships.” Nir and al-Omari shared their personal experiences, both in youth and adulthood, and talked about how they shaped their views on the conflict. Nir grew up in Jerusalem. He recalled a day when he was covering the conflict and multiple civilians died. During the midst of the clash, a young boy approached him crying, thinking Nir was his father. “It was a realization that we were dealing with real people, with real suffering,” Nir said. “It may seem obvious, but it really shaped my attitude toward the conflict and who I am.”
with nearly 80 percent of students reporting that learning Canvas took them about 30 minutes, noting an in-class demonstration and online tutorials helped to ease the transition, Taylor said. “That’s a pretty high vote of confidence for the students,” Taylor said.
In the past, faculty have brought requests to NU Information Technology requesting a system with a greater number of options in order to better accommodate educational goals, Taylor said. “(Blackboard) wasn’t letting them innovate in terms of their teaching and learning activities as much as they thought they should be able to do with an educational platform,” Taylor said. Canvas is much more adaptable and has greater flexibility, a quality faculty appreciated in creating new course websites, he said. Taylor added Canvas had better mobile support and received updates much more frequently than Blackboard. Over the course of the next year, there will be organized workshops in order to help staff and faculty learn how to use the system and convert their classes from Blackboard to Canvas. To facilitate the transition, a Canvas transition team will be created to advise faculty and the University on the best ways to teach the system and how to most effectively convert classes from Blackboard to Canvas. This committee will be chaired by
In response to the White House’s release Tuesday of detailed recommendations for how colleges should react to sexual assault on campus, Northwestern officials said the University’s current sexual assault policies align with the report’s suggestions, but administrators plan to further analyze the document. The report was released alongside the launch of NotAlone.gov, a website that provides information and statistics about sexual assaults on college campuses. It was compiled by the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, which
President Barack Obama established Jan. 22 to address the recent surge in sexual assault complaints on college campuses. The report cites the statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted in college. It details ways to combat the trend and provides resources for each recommendation, asking colleges to conduct campus climate surveys, train community members in bystander intervention and respond with flexibility to students’ reports of sexual assault, among other practices. “When one of its students is sexually assaulted, a school needs to have all the pieces of a plan in place,” the report said. The report also reaffirms » See WHITE HOUSE, page 6
Police charge 4th man with sexual abuse of teen By patrick svitek
daily senior staffer @PatrickSvitek
A nine-month investigation into a case involving an Evanston teen who solicited sex on Craigslist has ended with four arrests, police said Tuesday morning. The process started in August of last year, when police learned that a 14-year-old boy had posted an ad on the website looking for sex, according to authorities. Police said his parents worked with them to figure out who
had answered the ad. Investigators also used emails, other computer records and cell phone billing information to determine who replied to the posting, according to authorities. As a result, four Chicago-area men in their 40s and 50s were arrested over the past four months, police said. The most recent arrest came Friday, when Glenn A. Lapidus, 46, was taken into custody at his home in Chicago, according to authorities. Lapidus, of the 2000 block of North Bissell Avenue, has been charged with five felonies: » See CRAIGSLIST, page 6
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