Faculty have two responsibilities to their students using Canvas:

appropriate curriculum design
facilitation.

Online instruction is not "traditional lecture gone digital, audio or video.

" Interaction among students, between faculty and students, and between the students and the learning materials, (including the larger community on the WWW) as managed by the instructor makes or breaks the class. When a faculty makes the transition from traditional to online, he/she does not retain the role of "distributor of information" in a teacher-centered classroom.A transition to a learner-centered environment must occur.

Some of the responsibilities of an online facilitator include:

Course planning and organization.
Ability to create an atmosphere of collaborative teamwork.
Students will depend on one another for a large portion of their learning.
The facilitator needs to know how to work as part of this team as well as help the students work with each other.
Construct questions that will have a variety of intellectual levels, varied in their instructional purpose and be open-ended.
Set the agenda and provide leadership and direction without controlling the class.
Find a balance between leading the group and creating an environment where students themselves meet the learning objectives.
The leadership model becomes one of dynamic facilitation, which is a shift away from an authoritarian style toward a more democratic style.
Develop methods for learner feedback and reinforcement.
Sequence the presentation of content and pace the material so as to avoid content overload.
Personalize instruction to be relevant to the needs of individual participants.

Technology is the final component

Successful use of technology is determined by its ease of use, the degree to which it remains a tool rather than the focus of learning and mostly that the technology remains transparent. Technology is a means to deliver the education, and for successful learning to occur, the technology must be as seamless as possible. Ways to ensure that the faculty must first be comfortable the particular technology before implementing it in their courses and that students are required to participate in an orientation program before the course begins in order to familiarize themselves with the tools that will be used in their course.

Another technological issue that must be addressed is that the technology used to deliver instruction must accommodate the lowest common denominator in the class. Minimum requirements are necessary to participate in online courses (i.e. access to a computer and reliable Internet), however, not everyone has the latest computer model or Internet access. Equity of access to technology should be taken into consideration when designing courses using online learning methods.