INSTRUCTURE - CANVAS CLOUD CATALOG - BUSINESS JUSTIFICATION.pdf

September 16, 2026

To Whom it May Concern:

REACH MS is the MS State Personnel Development Grant and is tasked with providing training and professional development for K-12 educators around the state. We are currently a staff of six, and while we are officially housed at the University of Southern Mississippi, we are spread throughout the state to best meet the in-person needs of schools.

In addition to in-person training and coaching, we provide online training for educators as individuals or as school teams. When we first began our online program during Covid, we pieced together, training in one place, communication in another, grades in a third and resources in another. As a small staff, juggling several platforms to complete one task was overbearing. The REACH MS online training became popular very quickly. Not only does it train educators, but it also gives them FREE opportunities to take courses that will help them with their recertification.

CEU, OSL and SEMI credit are available to those who successfully complete our training. Most importantly though, online training began to reach educators whose schools cannot afford to send them to an in-person training that requires travel and time away from the classroom.

The online training was so effective that five years ago, REACH MS went to USM and inquired about using the University Canvas platform to hold and manage our training. Because our users are not USM students with USM email addresses, we were told that would not work, but we could pursue our own instance of Canvas. We did just that. Our catalog of training now includes three levels of Positive Behavior Intervention Strategies, Social and Emotional Learning, three levels of Early Childhood Education, Dealing with Challenging Behaviors of Students with Significant Cognitive Disorders, Universal Design for Learning, and more. We also partner with MS Hearing- Vision Project to offer courses for teachers of children and youth who are deaf and blind and have many educators from the MS School for the Deaf and MS School for the Blind who are actively learning with us.

In Canvas, we can house the written material, the recordings, videos, resources, grades, and communication all in one place. While there are other learning management systems available, Canvas is by far the most advanced with integration of apps that allow us to include activities which require participants to complete before moving on and allow the kind of reporting we need for our Annual Performance Reports. In addition to the needs of the REACH MS staff, Canvas is widely used and recognized around the state by educators who are familiar with it, because they

REACH MS

Mississippi’s State Personnel Development Grant

University of Southern Mississippi Phone: 601.266.4963 118 College Drive #5057 Fax: 601.266.4978 Hattiesburg, MS 39406 Email: reachms@usm.edu Website: reachms.org

Realizing Excellence for ALL Children in Mississippi use it at their own schools. This knowledge allows educators to begin training right away without having to learn a platform.

As REACH MS begins a new round of funding this year and has new schools and educators with whom we will be working, having to move over 50 well-established training courses from one platform to another would be nearly impossible. It would affect the time available for in-person coaching, and therefore it would affect the quality of our work.

In summary, REACH MS needs Canvas to do our work effectively and appreciates your consideration of our request to renew it for three years.

Sincerely, Executive Director, Center for Research to Practice in Education