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At my institution, we use Canvas across the entire campus. We used a different platform when I was a student, so Canvas was an adjustment for me to switch to as a staff member. A colleague of mine suggested Canvas to our central Distance Learning office a few years ago, and the agreed to look into it as an alternative platform. It took a while to implement, but has been great! With the new switch to remote learning due to social distancing, Canvas has been more valuable than ever. We are utilizing it for classes and coursework, as well as organization and information sharing. We are engaging students through video, and sharing resources with constituents. I am certain that we would have a myriad of issues with any other provider during this time. I'm very thankful we have Canvas!
- Canvas allows users to personalize pages and ensure institution brand is kept true. Our Canvas pages look just like everything else our institution creates.
- Canvas allows for multiple users to full sites, that have different permissions. This allows us to assign teachers, teaching assistants, and other student users. Everyone has access in a different capacity, to make different changes, so management is easy!
- Canvas allows students to share documents within their classes, so no need for outside document-sharing platforms. Students in the past were using Google-Docs to create "group work" material that could be edited in real time. Now, Canvas allows students to access that material directly from the site. This makes remote group work run much smoother!
- I use the Canvas App as a part-time graduate student, and the functionality in the Discussion Board posts is a little off. I have to post discussion board posts often, so I find myself entering the information from my phone sometimes. After one or two sentences, the text lags behind. I'll be 3-4 sentences into a thought, and the text is still finishing the first line. This requires me to stop and let the text catch up, which often breaks my train of thought. I've noticed the same thing on my iPad - so I think it's strictly an App issue.
- Canvas has so much to offer, that it can be overwhelming. When I was first assigned as a TA of a course, I had no idea where to start. It's not that Canvas is not user-friendly, but it definitely has a level of understanding that must be done before you can even begin. I wouldn't just assign a student to start using it and assume they could "figure it out", which means that we have to allow for training to be done when we expect anyone to use it. This just means a little more time and energy on the user, which is sometimes not always possible.
- Using the People tab within a course is kind of pointless for me. This may be a setting at my institution, but when I look at the "people" in my class, I can't actually contact them. I can pull up their profile, see what sites they are enrolled in, their bio and their "links" - but there is no secure "send message" button from this landing page. I think that is a missed opportunity. I know there are other ways to send messages, but it seems that it would be pretty useful to add a contact button on the people tab.
February 20, 2020
Paint Your Ideal Class with "Canvas"
Canvas is being used by all faculty and students at Kansas State University. It is used to organize classes in an online platform. It allows students to download and upload assignments, and it allows professors to grade assignments as well as organize grades in a timely manner. To conclude, it gives faculty and students alike remote access to the class material.
- It organizes students' grades in a timely manner.
- It gives students notifications about upcoming assignments.
- The notification feature could be improved upon as the professor has to put the due date as "midnight" otherwise the assignment will be automatically erased from the platform.
- The audio recording feature has its technical issues. I have never been able to use it correctly.
Canvas is a learning management system. It houses everything for all of my courses. This includes my face-to-face, hybrid, and online classes. Canvas helps me organize my course into modules. In each module, I have information pages, discussions, assignments, and assessments. Canvas also includes a calendar and gradebook. Moreover, Canvas has a messaging system so I can message students in my courses.
- User friendly: I found it easy to figure out how to use Canvas
- Variety; there are a variety of types of assignments an instructor can create
- Organized: the tools help you organize your course
- Sometimes messages are delayed
- It does not have it’s own video conferencing tool
- Would be nice if there was a way to message groups of students based on a risk factor
March 20, 2020
Canvas is great for new online learners
I use Canvas for a graduate program I am enrolled in. All of my classes and professors work through Canvas to support online learning. It's a useful platform. Most importantly, as someone who has never done online learning before, I find the platform easy to use. It allows me to access all of my school work in one place.
- Organization.
- Communication with professors.
- Hosting online materials.
- If you send a message to a teacher, there is no record of the message until they write you back.
- The Zoom features are confusing.
- Not all of the teachers are as tech savvy as the students. This is user error, but more training would be helpful.
Our whole organization utilizes Canvas for student classes. It helps students understand what assignments they have, their grades, etc.
- Assigning work
- Sending messages
- Displaying grades
- Differentiating for particular students
- Setting up groups for the teacher's side of things
- Not intuitive
At Northwest, Nazarene Canvas is used as our learning management system. I use this at NNU as a student. I previously used Canvas from the admin side, where I was putting in classes and helping teachers create content. Canvas allows teachers to publish their courses online in a user-friendly platform. Students can then engage with the course material and each other throughout the class. Canvas also allows students to submit homework online and for teachers to publish grades so that students can see it.
- Ease of student use
- Completed assignment tracking
- Journal function
January 13, 2020
Canvas Makes Learning Effective
Canvas is used to offer online and hybrid courses for students. It is used across the whole organization.
- Creating different course sections with effective course design.
- Creating assessments and learning measures tools.
- Work on third-party application integration especially browsers compatibility.
- Make more cost affordable for schools and Universities especially for those interested to switch from higher-cost LMS
October 29, 2019
Canvas is a pretty good LMS.
Canvas is the default LMS we use at CWU (our university).
- Canvas is extremely flexible. I think that is both its greatest strength and perhaps a bit of a weakness.
- Canvas is getting better at allowing instructors to duplicate individual assignments. That's a big improvement.
- Canvas integrates well with Crocodoc for online paper commenting and grading.
- Canvas has great import functions.
- It would be great if we could deal with multiple assignments at a time.
- Better visibility of how students see a course would also be helpful.
- Searching for rubrics is really bad. The rubrics from the current course should default to the top. As it now works, the user has to search through every course ever taught to find a rubric.
October 17, 2019
Canvas is a teacher's best friend.
I am using it as a learning management system to teach four courses at Ball State University. All professors will be required to use Canvas starting in the fall semester, but I adopted it early to test and create my courses for the last two semesters. I am also taking a class where we are using it as our learning environment.
- User experience
- Organization and ability to create a course
- I love the modules function
- It's compatibility with Banner
- The speed grader could be improved
- Extra credit assignment feature would be nice
Canvas is used by the majority of faculty at the University of Florida. It is a great way to keep in touch with students outside of the classroom as well as an effective method of posting grades. If you decide to use Canvas for your class you can be as involved with it as you choose to be. There are tools which allow you to have message boards/group chats, you can post assignments, rubrics, videos, etc. Being a university professor in today's day and age you must have some sort of online platform for your class. Canvas fulfills all your possible needs said platform and more.
I have seen other instructors post take-home exams on Canvas as well which gives you the option to have automatic grading (one less thing to worry about as an instructor) for exams.
I have seen other instructors post take-home exams on Canvas as well which gives you the option to have automatic grading (one less thing to worry about as an instructor) for exams.
- User-friendly. It is very straightforward to use.
- There are lots of functions at your disposal.
- The layout is aesthetically pleasing.
- There are really any technical issues.
- Providing walkthroughs on how to carry out certain tasks could be helpful.
- Allowing instructors to use the 'what if scenario' for grades to gauge students' outcomes.
- Making profile pictures bigger so they are easier to see.
January 10, 2019
Canvas LMS: a great way to provide an online course experience!
TCS Education System is a non-profit organization that uses Canvas for all of its five affiliates. We have an Instructional Design team under the Academic Affairs Department that designs all of the courses. The majority of courses are totally online, however, we do have many blended and on-ground courses that also use Canvas. Canvas solved a problem we had with our previous LMS, which was costing us a lot of money as well as not providing the flexibility and up-to-date design technology that we wanted for our students. We have been very happy with the quality of the product as well as the professionalism and helpfulness of the Canvas staff.
- Canvas does a great job of integrating many third-party vendors. We use vendors such as Flipgrid, Padlet, and Storyline to help enhance our student experience in the online classroom.
- Canvas is very user (designer) friendly. It uses a simple Rich Text Editor that is easy to create text, insert pictures and video and enhance the text. With that comes an HTML Editor which is very useful if you have knowledge of HTML. This provides the designer with the flexibility to design more than just plain text on a page.
- For the student, Canvas is also very easy to use and organized well. The Modules listing provides students with an "outline: of the course and helps keep them working in a linear fashion (if that is what you want). There are also direct links to assignments and discussions so students can see all of the specific assignments at once. The grade book is also very easy for students to read and interpret.
- Even though Canvas works great with third-party vendors by integrating them right into Canvas, there is room for improvement on this subject. There are still glitches with certain programs as well as programs that simply do not work well with Canvas.
- The Rich Text Editor is a good selling point for Canvas, however, it could use an upgrade There are features that could be implemented that are not there and it can make designing a dynamic page difficult.
Canvas is used by our entire institution as the means for delivering course content, assessing student work, calculating grades, and providing actionable feedback to our learning community.
- Canvas integrates with 3rd party vendors extremely well. We have multiple vendors and publishers connected to our instance of Canvas. These integrations allow our instructors to use additional tools such as McGraw-Hill Connect, Kaltura, Box, Office 365, Google Drive, and many more to deliver course materials and pass grades back to the Canvas grade book.
- Canvas has a cascading approach to its organizational design. We can manage roles, permissions, LTIs, etc. at the root account level or within any sub-account. Each sub-account inherits its parents’ attributes. Managing all these items is made incredibly easy by leveraging SIS Imports of .csv files.
- Instructure keeps its Canvas documentation up-to-date on the Canvas Community. Canvas Community users share knowledge, offer help, and provide valuable insight into best practices and approaches for everything from administering Canvas to course design.
- Canvas has extremely reliable ‘up time.’ Because Canvas is SaaS-based and hosted in the AWS environment, we have experienced very little down time. In the very rare instances we have had outages, we’re usually back up and running extremely quickly.
- I would like to see Instructure continue to focus on improving the user interface and functionality for the Canvas roles and permissions. In the summer of 2018, they made vast improvements to this area of Canvas, but they still have a little work to do. I’d like to be able to manage ‘sub permissions’ within the top-level permissions for each role. I’d also like to run a report/export of the roles and permissions, make edits in a .csv editor, and then upload the updated roles/permissions via the SIS Import tool. This would alleviate the time-consuming process of managing roles permissions by hand.
- I’d like to see more LTI integrations that are set up like the Box integration. The Box LTI integration is accessible via the user’s profile page and allows the user to access content in Box via a native Box window that is embedded in the page. Most LTIs are only accessible via an actual course. Instructure has the potential to turn the user profile page into a hub that allows the user to jump in and out of multiple apps, whose provisioning and authentication is handled by Canvas
- Instructure needs to create a permission that manages the access to a course’s start and dates. At our institution, we have to programmatically hide the start/end dates for courses from instructors, so they don’t open courses early or leave them open after the semester has officially ended. Canvas customers should be able to treat the opening/closing of a course (not the publishing) as an administrative task only.
- Canvas admins should also be able to restrict who can control the course visibility and course format functions in the course settings. At our institution, we have committees and processes in place to determine these attributes. Allowing faculty to edit these options creates confusion for students and administrators.
January 19, 2019
Canvas is the perfect training system too
Canvas is a great learning management system that allows for training and teaching to take place anywhere in the world because it utilizes web apps. Our marketing department uses Canvas to help train our sales staff on new products, features, and other items we need the team to be aware of. Since most of our staff is remote, Canvas offers multiple options to ensure that our staff is up to date on learning.
- Announcements
- Communication options within the app
- Building of modules
- Random glitches can occur
- Navigation can be tricky
- Being able to go back to previous versions
January 18, 2019
Canvas is the best LMS currently on the market.
We use Canvas to host programs for the majority of our 18 partners. Canvas is our first choice of LMS for all partners we support, and we strongly discourage the use of any other LMS. Students find Canvas simpler to use than any other LMS, and it presents fewer barriers to learning than their competitors.
- Easy to use interface for students and faculty. No need to switch to "Edit Mode" or any other different views to make changes.
- Well defined APIs make administration easy.
- Intuitive design lets students start on course materials right away, without having to take time to learn the system.
- Instructure can be slow to address admin-only issues or change requests due to the community voting on issues.
- Submitted assignments or assessment attempts cannot be removed at all, so if a student makes an erroneous submission it will always be visible.
- All or Nothing question types do not have a choice for all or nothing points grading.
- Exam settings are not available/appropriate for high-stakes testing.
January 10, 2019
Canvas Allows for More Freedom for Educators
Our high school is using Canvas with junior and senior classes to help ease the transition from high school to college. I have been using it since we piloted it, and find it very intuitive and also very customizable. It is a great product to share resources and lesson plans with students while still allowing for individualization.
- Provides a customizable platform where the user can determine the experience for others.
- Allows for integration with many useful services, such as Drive.
- Is fairly user-friendly and you can use only the features you desire.
- The integration with Drive and Gmail could be more intuitive. Originally I found a workaround for this. I am now able to link shared pages, etc, but it still could be more native.
- The interface can seem cluttered at times, so a way to be able to remove or hide features you don't tend to use would be helpful.
- A way to archive courses in a more accessible way would be helpful.
January 09, 2019
Canvas is the online learning system for me!
Canvas is being used at the university where I attended. It is used by the university as a Learning Management System for online learning at college. Canvas provides an easy platform as another avenue for teaching and learning where teachers set up their course and students easily navigate through the class. Canvas allows easy communication between the professor and students individually and as a group. Students can submit their work and received feedback from their instructor with ease.
- Canvas is easy to navigate for both the instructor and student.
- Skeptics of online learning claim that it limits the ability of students to communicate with their professor or the social interactions with fellow students. My experience was the opposite. I felt closer to my professors and colleagues because of the diverse ways Canvas allows for communication. There is email, chat options, and ways to set up groups to work together. Professors can add video lectures if needed. I loved the experience.
- Canvas provides various ways for professors to create and set up their courses. Instructors can offer video, links to specific readings (documents), set up groups to work and perform together, and more.
- Canvas allows the business, instructors, and students to design the way it looks.
- Instructors need to take the time to learn all that Canvas allows them to do. If not, the course could be quite dull.
January 09, 2019
Canvas is the learning management system for today's student!
Canvas is the LMS for all of Moberly Area Community College. We are an educational institution, so it provides the service of delivering online, hybrid, and even on the ground course material.
- Speedgrader helps instructors cut down on grading time.
- Provides communication between students and instructors or administrators
- The multitude of media and apps that can be used in Canvas creates an enhanced learning environment for students. We use Turnitin, publisher platforms like Connect and MyLabs, and many other tools that easily integrate and can be accessed from Canvas.
- The new quizzing (quizzes.next) interface needs some work. We need to be able to electronically proctor these quizzes with Lockdown Browser and we cannot do that right now since the quizzes are delivered through the assignments area.
December 11, 2018
A Product I love using every day
Canvas is being used across the entire university as its official Learning Management System. It is an incredible tool that allows instructors to organize their course content in any format they want, but still, have consistency across all disciplines. Students are familiar with the interface and need not learn a new interface for each course. In short, Canvas in the foundation for building well-organized and streamlined courses for both student and instructor.
- Its ability to copy course content into a new shell saves hours of time!
- Its ease of use and streamlined interface makes it very intuitive.
- Its ability to add a grading rubric saves hours at the end of the semester by automatically assigning letter grades to students.
- It's mobile app needs improvement as it often misses notifications and assignments
- It's messaging system is clunky
- It's quiz/test interface could offer more advanced settings. It's too basic
January 16, 2019
Powerful LMS for Effective Online Learning
Spending a lot of time utilizing an LMS system myself within my current school district and having to be knowledgeable on most LMS systems, I had to evaluate how Canvas stacked up against other popular systems such as Schoology and Google Classroom. I use Canvas outside of my school organization. As with most learning management systems, the goal is to help provide a platform for blended learning, where students are able to manage their digital selves, track homework assignment, interact with the teacher and students, and submit work digitally. For teachers, this helps solve problems with missing work that needs to be turned in physically, or during the creation phase as teachers struggle to integrate technology into the classroom and design more digitally engaging lessons and activities for students.
- LTI integration. This is particularly useful for teachers creating digital lessons and activities so that can embed other digital tools within their canvas materials.
- Collaborative in nature. Easy to navigate and engage in discussion with students and teachers.
- The Calendar view. Teachers are use to utilizing agendas and Google Calendar for daily routine like a planner. This give you an overview of your course highlighting various assignments, quizzes, tests, etc.
- An easier way to manage and/or organize materials and be able to share them with others.
- A way to track what learning objectives are being met.
- Integrated badging system to create and award badges for gamification elements.
January 19, 2019
Canvas has been a revelation for our university
Many departments across our university are using Canvas. Canvas is used by our faculty to communicate and interface with students i.e inputting student grades. Students interface with Canvas to find information about their classes and courses.
- Grade reporting: easy for students to find their grades once posted.
- Analytics on student interaction: now we can view the analytics around how students are interacting with the application and find ways to better serve our students
- Custom notification for course updates: now we are able to create custom notifications for our students when an update is made to a course.
- Mobile app: the mobile app has been a revelation. Now, students can access their course material from anywhere they are.
- Native integration with third-party applications i.e: Zendesk, Salesforce
- Sometimes you have to click through many features before you get to what you are really looking for
- There is no simple way to add one-sentence reading assignments to a calendar
Our entire district uses Canvas. Our teachers use it as a Learning Management System with their students, our curriculum and district handbook are housed in Canvas, and we use Canvas for Professional Learning. It allows 24-hour access to all resources and learning for both students and staff.
- User friendly design.
- Great support through assigned CSM, 24-hour help, and the community.
- Tons of pre-made materials in Commons that you can pull into your own courses to use.
- When you first log in, it can be overwhelming to see nothing in your course.
- When you first start using Canvas, it can be daunting to begin designing and building your course since it is blank when you first start one.
January 16, 2019
Canvas - Our Best Answer to LMS
Canvas is used across the entire school. We use it to manage classes as well as various non-educational purposes like training our paperwork repositories. Canvas helps mitigate issues with online/distance learning as well as our on-ground classes, providing opportunities for instructors and students to work collaboratively on educational processes and goals.
- Housing online courses.
- Providing analytical data of course usage.
- Organization of course materials.
- Availability of communication with users.
- Data can be difficult to manage - need knowledge of API calls and databases.
- Extra products can drastically increase the price.
- Development of background structure needs to be done correctly the first time.
LEISD uses Canvas for a myriad of reasons. Teachers use Canvas in their classroom for blended instruction, campus leaders use Canvas to provide information to staff members, district-wide professional learning is also offered via Canvas. Canvas is versatile enough that it has been used to house curriculum, host book studies, and serve as a traditional learning management platform.
- Customer Service--Canvas has great customer service. I have reached out via phone, email, and their help desk and received prompt reliable service each time.
- Training--Canvas and the Canvas Community has a plethora of training materials available for use. These range from documents and"click-sheets" to video tutorials.
- Innovation--Canvas is not content to sit still. New products and enhancements are added.
- One of the big things I would love to see would be a way for students to annotate PDFs or other documents within the Canvas web platform. The app has an option like this, but currently, there is nothing of equal use in the web version.
- It would also be great if students could highlight questions in the quiz portion of Canvas.
We use canvas for both our students and faculty. We use it to supplement our course instruction so that there is an online learning component with our students and so they have access to course materials from anywhere. We also use canvas to provide required professional development courses for our faculty so they are able to complete them at their convenience and not be taken out of their classrooms.
- The landing page is very easy to understand and navigate to find courses.
- As an instructor, it is easy to setup my classes to include only the sections I need for my students.
- I would like to be able to add more creativity to my class page since I work with middle school students. I would like to be able to make it more inviting to keep them engaged.
- It can be difficult to navigate between pages when you go into a small group section. There are times when you simply have to go completely out of the class and start over.
- We have had difficulty accessing and printing student quizzes after they complete them to be able to include them in portfolios.
Canvas is being used by our organization as a learning management system (LMS) provider. Faculty and students access the content through a link and through a web browser. Our company transitioned from Cengage/Evolve to the Canvas Learning Management System and the other three big learning management systems. Although we train faculty to use our content on Blackboard, Moodle, and Brightspace provided by D2L, Canvas is the LMS that we purchased to launch our content. The business problem it addresses is having a place to store our curriculum and content.
- Easy to use and navigate.
- Mobile friendly.
- SCORM compliant.
- No web design knowledge needed.
- Importing images and videos needs to be more user-friendly.
- Rubrics integration and design needs to be more user-friendly.
- iPad/iPhone app is not always easy to navigate.
Canvas Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
About Canvas
Instructure is an educational software company based in Sandy, Utah. It is the developer of the Canvas learning management system, which is a comprehensive software package that competes with such systems as Blackboard Learning System, SumTotal and Saba.
Categories: Assessment, Learning Management
Canvas Competitors
Canvas Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |