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Canvas

Canvas

Overview

What is 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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Canvas has proven to be an invaluable tool for various educational institutions and organizations. Users have praised Canvas for its …
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Helpful Platform for Students

9 out of 10
January 07, 2022
Canvas has been integrated into one of my businesses as a virtual and in-person learning tool to help students (and professors!) study …
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Great LMS

10 out of 10
November 05, 2021
Incentivized
We used it as a Learning Management System--I posted assignments and grades on Canvas, and students could use it to check their daily …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 13 features
  • Assignments (41)
    9.0
    90%
  • Course authoring (41)
    8.9
    89%
  • Mobile friendly (40)
    8.6
    86%
  • Course catalog or library (38)
    7.1
    71%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Unavailable

What is 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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.instructure.com/contact-us

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

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What is ProProfs LMS Software?

ProProfs LMS is a learning management system software that is designed to help instructors create and deliver online training courses. The LMS offers both businesses and educational institutions comprehensive training solutions by allowing them to create online courses, complemented by tests,…

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Product Demos

Atomic Apps for Canvas LMS, Webinar recording from #CanvasLive August 2017

YouTube

Starting with BookWidgets in Canvas LMS - Demo for beginners

YouTube

DEMO: Tentacle Insights for Canvas LMS

YouTube

How to Use Video with Your LMS | Powtoon's Canvas LMS Integration

YouTube

Creating demo users in bulk for Canvas LMS

YouTube

Canvas Demo Slam

YouTube
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Features

Learning Management

Features of LMS and LCMS systems, related to designing, administering, and consuming learning content in an educational, corporate, or on-the-job context.

7.7
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

What is Canvas?

Canvas by Instructure is a cloud-based learning management system for every stage and style of education. Available to institutions of all sizes and types, from individual K-12 classrooms to universities to companies with a blended or fully virtual environment.

As the hub of the digital learning environment, Canvas offers complete LMS functionality, including standards-based grade books, course content authoring, customizable student assessments, mobile communication, video learning, and digital badging.

Canvas LMS integrates with an institution's existing SIS and other teaching tools. With over two hundred different LTI tools educators can customize courses and monitor engagement with classes or individual students. Canvas also has mobile apps to keep everyone informed and connected, on the go, on any device.



Canvas Features

Learning Management Features

  • Supported: Course authoring
  • Supported: Course catalog or library
  • Supported: Player/Portal
  • Supported: Learning content
  • Supported: Mobile friendly
  • Supported: Progress tracking & certifications
  • Supported: Assignments
  • Supported: Compliance management
  • Supported: Learning administration
  • Supported: Learning reporting & analytics
  • Supported: eLearning
  • Supported: Assessments
  • Supported: Live online learning
  • Supported: In-person learning
  • Supported: Micro-learning
  • Supported: Video learning
  • Supported: eCommerce
  • Supported: SCORM-compliant
  • Supported: Social learning
  • Supported: Gamification
  • Supported: GDPR Compliant Learning
  • Supported: Single Sign On (SSO) Enabled Learning

Canvas Video

Canvas 101

Canvas Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesGlobal

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Blackboard Learn by Anthology, Edmodo, and D2L Brightspace are common alternatives for Canvas.

Reviewers rate Assignments highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Canvas are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(276)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Canvas has proven to be an invaluable tool for various educational institutions and organizations. Users have praised Canvas for its user-friendly platform, effectiveness in managing distance courses, and seamless integration with other vendors. It has been widely adopted by universities, community colleges, and high schools as the primary learning management system due to its intuitive interface and ability to bridge the communication gap between instructors and students.

Canvas has been used for a multitude of purposes, including online degree programs, blended courses, and supplementing face-to-face classes in educational institutions. Human Resource services have utilized Canvas for assessing new employee skills and providing information to employees. Student Services have used it to promote clubs and other services, while the library has used Canvas as a platform to provide information about their services and obtain feedback.

Canvas has also been used by administration committees and faculty committees for discussions, dissemination, and data maintenance. It has served as the central hub for organizing assignments, sharing content, managing grades, and supporting hybrid distance learning models. Instructors have utilized Canvas to post announcements, assignments, theory slides, Zoom Meetings, as well as give points and feedback. Canvas has provided a dynamic and student-friendly interface that encourages interaction and engagement among students.

Furthermore, Canvas offers a mobile app that allows students and instructors to access course content on the go. This feature has greatly enhanced the flexibility and accessibility of online learning. Additionally, Canvas has been used by universities as a replacement for other learning management systems due to its frequent updates and robust features. Its versatility supports a variety of course types including online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses.

Overall, Canvas has been widely adopted across various educational institutions due to its ease of use, versatility, and ability to deliver content effectively. It has become an essential tool in delivering quality education regardless of location and promoting student engagement through its range of features such as discussion forums, assignments, embedding Google docs, sharing files, speed grader for assessments process, integrated rubrics, and more.

Frequent updates and evolution: Users have expressed their appreciation for the frequent updates and evolution of Canvas. Some reviewers have mentioned that these regular updates demonstrate the platform's commitment to continuously improving the user experience over time. The consistent release of new features and bug fixes every three weeks ensures that Canvas stays current and addresses user needs.

Efficient mobile grading with Speed Grader: Many users have praised the mobile app for grading assignments, Speed Grader, for its efficiency in reducing grading time by 30-50%. Reviewers find this feature convenient as it allows instructors to grade assignments on the go, making use of any available time. By providing a way to grade assignments while waiting for meetings or commuting, Speed Grader saves users valuable time.

Intuitive WYSIWYG editor: The WYSIWYG editor in Canvas is highly valued by users as it simplifies the process of creating and editing content. This intuitive editor appears in almost every tool within Canvas, allowing users to easily create engaging and visually appealing course materials. Its presence enhances the overall learning experience for students.

Difficulty in navigation: Several users have expressed frustration with the navigation within Canvas, stating that it can be confusing and not user-friendly. They have mentioned difficulty in finding desired features and having to click through multiple options before reaching the required functionality. Some users also find the linear structure of Canvas makes it difficult for students to differentiate between lessons.

Lack of customization options: Many reviewers have mentioned a lack of customization options in Canvas. Users have stated that there is a limited ability to customize colors, profiles, and class pages, making it difficult to personalize their experience. Some users have suggested including more basic color options for personalization and providing more freedom for designing a visually enhanced environment.

Challenges with customer support: A number of users have experienced challenges with customer support in the past. They have mentioned issues such as unanswered complaints via email or phone calls, delayed response times, and a lack of availability. While some users acknowledge that customer support may have improved over time, others still express dissatisfaction with the level of service provided by Canvas.

Note: These three cons were selected based on their frequency of mention throughout the context provided.

Users of Canvas have provided several recommendations based on their experience with the platform. The most common recommendations include: getting familiar with Canvas before submitting assignments, taking the time to navigate and figure out the features of Canvas before the semester starts, using Canvas for collaborative work, considering Canvas for higher education settings, appreciating its user-friendly interface, and valuing its seamless experience. Overall, users express that Canvas is a simple yet full-featured solution for online learning, which they find more user-friendly than Google Classroom.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 83)
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Nicholas Judd | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Stefanie Cash | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Christopher Sweets | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
January 17, 2019

The greatness of Canvas!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The paper forms used by technicians were constantly lost or incomplete, and we used Canvas to create our own electronic forms that everyone could simply access on their smartphones. As we became more proficient, we made use of extra features to verify work location addresses by GPS, scan barcodes to save time and prevent typos, add prefix data from other databases.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Mark Labbett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Sarah Ciras Rousseau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
January 09, 2019

Canvas for K-12

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
January 09, 2019

Ins and Outs of Canvas

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Marina Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Jason Hill | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Rita Wheeler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
December 08, 2018

Canvas for Customers

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Linda Varvel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The University of Iowa recently switched over to Canvas in order to manage our online resources for students in various courses. I have found Canvas to be MUCH more user-friendly and easy to use than our past web platform. My grading goes much faster, and I can easily update my course in ways I was not able to before. I attended to short training sessions on Canvas and immediately felt at ease with the program. I highly recommend it.
September 23, 2016

Canvas Review

Sean Petty | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canvas is currently being used across the Maricopa Community College District as the primary LMS for all 10 community Colleges. The LMS provides a technology based solution for faculty to deliver classes in several different modalities. Canvas is used both in online and in-person classes, and has been incorporated into nearly every subject.
September 16, 2016

My Canvas Experience

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our business is a 2 year college. At first, Canvas was intended for use mainly for online instruction. However, because of it's user friendly platform, after a bit of persuasion and faculty input, the academic division decided that all instruction would use Canvas, not only for online, but also for all face to face classes to provide instructional support-grades, testing-(e-tests cut down on the significant cost of paper printing), and for the use of other features, handouts, chat, etc. It is also used by Human Resource services to assess new employee skills and provide info to employees; Canvas is also used by Student Services-to promote clubs and other services, numerous administration and faculty committees use it to discuss, disseminate, and maintain data in one place 24/7; the library uses it to provide information about their services and to obtain feedback about their services-tours, and it is also use as a survey tool by several departments. Nevertheless, the bulk of its use is for instructional purposes.
Raphael Molina | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canvas LMS is our main learning management system for our graduate degree programs. For continuing education, a separate University entity uses Moodle.

We use Canvas to serve over 4500 students and also to provide professional development to staff and faculty. It is also being used for projects management, communities, and committees' work.
Emily Saunders | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have experience writing course materials in Canvas for Russian language classes. In particular I've been modifying some materials originally written in Blackboard to use in Canvas.

I've also worked in Canvas as a student taking graduate courses online. The institution offering these courses (coincidentally) had also recently made a switch from Blackboard to Canvas.
Royce Kimmons | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Canvas to teach online and blended courses related to instructional design and educational technology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Our department uses Canvas along with a homegrown LMS called Learning Suite, but adoption is generally up to the lead instructor for each course. We use Canvas to organize course content, communicate with students, and grade assignments.
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