Canvas is Comprehensive and User Friendly
I have had the opportunity to use canvas as both a student and a professor, providing unique insight to its features and nuances. This …
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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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- Assignments (41)9.090%
- Course authoring (41)8.989%
- Mobile friendly (40)8.585%
- Course catalog or library (38)7.171%
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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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Atomic Apps for Canvas LMS, Webinar recording from #CanvasLive August 2017
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How to Use Video with Your LMS | Powtoon's Canvas LMS Integration
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Creating demo users in bulk for Canvas LMS
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Canvas Demo Slam
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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
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Canvas Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | Global |
Canvas Downloadables
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.
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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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.
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October 29, 2015
What Instructors and Students Can Learn Using Canvas
- Syllabus makes it easy for an instructor to communicate with students on what will be required of them throughout the course providing a chronological order of assignments/events.
- Discussion Board allows the instructor and students to interact asynchronously deploying text, images, audio, or video and attach files. They may be graded or non-graded.
- Student Groups facilitate semester/term-long projects for students to communicate and iterate on documents, share media files, create discussions and collaborate synchronously.
- Peer Reviews enable students to comment on work by their peers. A tool that allows communication between students. An instructor can require students to submit their assignment before reviewing their peers.
- The video guide heading has labeling for All Users, Administrators, Community, Instructors, Students, Observers, Canvas Commons, and Canvas Network. Video tutorials are essential for answering instructor questions, guiding students on the use of assignment overview and submission, using chat or collaboration along with working in groups, peer reviews, and taking quizzes. Tutorials represent the Canvas features that include Asynchronous/Synchronous Learning, Classroom management, Live-Video Conferencing, Mobile Learning, Skills Tracking, Social Learning, and Testing/Assessments. Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) interface (approved by the institution). For example, facilitate academic textbook publishers’ robust learning/assessment tools to interact within an instructor’s course, etc. Assistance from our institution provides telephone and one-on-one Canvas support from our instructional designers at the Center for Faculty Excellence or Information Technology Services (ITS). Yet, we have experienced challenges using Canvas.
- Canvas and Turnitin services undergo scheduled maintenance. It is important for instructors to schedule course work accordingly to offset problems during scheduled maintenance. Our institution publishes this information when an instructor or student logs into Canvas. IT remains proactive by providing access to the Canvas release notes for the latest features and upgrades in conjunction when the upgrades occur.
- We have yet to experience the perfect LMS. Canvas has its share of challenges. Instructors find difficulty when communicating to students using Canvas within a specific course having multiple course sections. For example, working in an undergraduate health course that has three similar combined sections, an instructor must initiate a conversation from the Canvas “Inbox” specific to each section, and is unable to communicate with all combined sections from the primary health course.
- Upgrades and changes within the LMS during a given semester/course term provide a mild annoyance for instructors. For example, Canvas made a location change (i.e., allowing students to attach a file to a discussion. Permission was moved from the instructor view within a discussion to the course “Settings,” then “Course Details” tab and moving down and selecting the “more options” link and clicking on the radio button “Let students attach files to discussions” while then selecting “Update Course Details” to enable this option.
- Another challenge is having the instructor and students remain current with software upgrades as it’s integral to ensuring a successful experience with the Canvas LMS. For example, a Spanish instructor wanted her students to record a video within Canvas of students speaking Spanish as a video assignment. Multiple issues presented themselves since Canvas requires the most recent upgrade to Adobe Flash Player and web browsing software to accomplish the task. When students used on campus computer labs, current updates were not equally applied throughout the labs. A similar challenge followed with student’s personal computers, consistently keeping their software up-to-date to accommodate specific tools within the Canvas LMS. Recording within the Canvas environment is functional when one is running the most current upgrades to their web browser and Adobe Flash Player. Collaboration and interaction with our instructional designers and ITS resolved the above instructor/student video assignment challenge.
- Intuitive Design
- Modern in-line engagement functionality, 3 click video recording
- Tier 1 Support is phenomenal
- Cloud based, enabling frequent and continuous updates for product evolution
- High performance (no system slowdown) and solid uptime
- Undelete functionality, (if instructors delete content it can be undone)
- Strong course calendar system
- Canvas support guides and documentation are extremely helpful
- Mobile apps perform well, Speed Grader is a faculty favorite
- Linking to content is easy within courses
- The Quiz/Assessment options are terrible and have forced us to bring in third party vendors to mitigate testing shortcomings on the native platform. (1 - Mandated partial credit on multiple select and matching quiz question types (no all-or-nothing) , 2 - cannot preview a quiz, 3 - cannot view all questions in construction if total exceeds 25, no question headers for question groups, no easy way to randomize questions, 4 - no ordering question type, 5 - no delayed quiz reviews without unmuting assignments)
- Frequent updates make us reliant on referencing Canvas documentation, we cannot create branded support materials due to the volume and frequency of changes.
- E-Portfolio's are very poorly designed and have caused extreme implementation challenges.
- The online collaborative environment Big Blue Button currently has some browser compatibility issues with Firefox, and desktop sharing does not work on Chrome.
- There is no method to have students peer review large files, (like uploaded presentations/videos). Instead, students have to upload to another system like Dropbox or Google and link their content.
- Canvas has a very weak mail platform, there is no rich text editor or signature options.
- The data is not very accessible despite API availability. The company created an additional product called Canvas Data to charge users to access their own data.
September 30, 2015
Canvas review
- Canvas is a great tool to organize information in a clean and logical manner.
- The application is user friendly in that it is easy to find information that needs to be addressed.
- The GUI is instinctive and clean. Users can easily locate and add items to the program.
- I would like to see some additional support information for the system. If a user gets lost it can be difficult to get back on track.
September 26, 2015
Good as it gets right now
- Structures and organizes course material
- Is easy to navigate for students
- Offers tools to provide interactive teaching
- Offers easy tools to use for design and development
- Not very visually appealing
- Doesn't offer freedom to design a more visual environment
- Discussion forum is a bit static
September 25, 2015
Canvas LMS offers flexible and customizable course design options
- Organizing Content in Modules
- SpeedGrader feature for grading and student feedback
- Allows for course level and global customization
- The Gradebook needs improvement
- Ability to edit css for mobile
- Quiz feature needs to have more options for question types, alternative questions, and extra credit questions
September 25, 2015
Canvas - making life easier for instructors, students, and support staff
- Canvas is very intuitive for students to use, and requires little to no orientation or support.
- The online Help documentation is so robust and up-to-date that it reduces our workload enormously. We no longer have the need to spend hours developing support materials for instructors because Canvas does such a great job keeping theirs current. This is especially important with a product that changes so often.
- The Canvas Speedgrader is a favorite tool of our instructors. The ability to view student submissions online and make both written and media comments makes their lives much easier.
- Attendance is something that is missing from Canvas. There is a tool called "Roll Call" that is the current solution, but it is somewhat difficult to use and has reporting limitations. An easy-to-use attendance tool would be a big win.
- Students can submit multiple versions of an assignment and instructors can comments on each submission. However, students cannot see prior submissions and comments online. They can only see the current submission, thus they lose that valuable trail of feedback.
- Making large scale changes (such as date changes) in a course is cumbersome. Each item must be opened, edited, and saved. Having a single editable screen with dates would save instructors and course designers a lot of time at the start of each quarter.
September 24, 2015
Canvasing for Canvas?!?
- Outcomes in Canvas are fantastic, especially when enabled by rubrics for grading.
- Video integration using Kaltura was great for submitting quick video feedback on assignments.
- The no-folder approach is great in Canvas. Everything is visible at the first and second level to students and instructors.
- The visibility of points, due dates etc. in the module view was just fantastic.
- Canvas did not support SCORM. This was a major drawback for some. We solved the problem by hosting our tutorials elsewhere, but it was a painful workaround.
- The Blackboard course porting was not smooth. We took this as a positive though and an opportunity to redesign our courses from the ground up.
- Canvas was not very responsive to customer feedback and new feature or error correction requests. They were very focused on their goals, but the sequencing of these did not always match with client priorities.
September 23, 2015
Canvas is Awesome!
- Canvas integrates very well with third party tools and vendors.
- Canvas is cloud-based which allows for updates every 3 weeks without any downtime.
- The content creation tools for users are very easy to use. Most users can create content just like if they were writing an email.
- The system has innovative tools, such as SpeedGrader, which allows grading in a breeze.
- Being cloud-based, there are times that an issue with the cloud will bring down most or all of the system for all clients.
- The company is still young and trying to figure out the best way to communicate with clients, while still having a personal small company feel.
September 23, 2015
Canvas! Because it is the best out there!
- Speedgrader. The opportunity for Instructors to grade several assignments at a go!
- Peer Review.
- Groups: Instructors can create groups - mini integrated courses within courses.
- It would be great to be able to "collect" discussion threads.
- A major part that is missing is a "Blog" tool. Yes there are LTI's that can be integrated but that gets tricky.
September 23, 2015
Successfully Navigating the Digital Space with the Canvas LMS
- One of Canvas' strengths is its "Discussions" feature, which is the most robust of all the LMS tools I've seen. Students can easily share ideas in discussions created either by them or by teachers, with options to reply in threads, include rich text, and attachments. The system allows for thorough conversations to take place entirely within the digital space of the LMS.
- Multiple types of assignments can easily be submitted through the Canvas LMS, including voice and/or video responses using the media recorder tool that are of great use for language study.
- The "Speed Grader" allows teachers to quickly sort through submitted work, while grading and adding feedback that students can see immediately. It's one of our faculty's favorite features of the Canvas LMS.
- Canvas offers a wide selection of LTI plugins that can be used to customize a school's instance of the LMS. For example, Quizlet flashcards can be directly embedded in Canvas pages and reviewed by students.
- Canvas offers a great mobile app giving our students easy access to the site.
- Canvas offers "peer review" within discussion, where students are assigned other student work to evaluate. While the idea is fantastic, the system of assignment and notification needs some work before it's as useful as other features of the system.
- It can be difficult to work with subsets of students, as one may do when teaching multiple sections of a class.
- The Canvas gradebook is evolving quickly and has become quite useful. But it needs a few more tweaks before it is ready to replace other traditional gradebooks.
September 23, 2015
The LMS for Student-centered learning
- Canvas is very user friendly. The tools are simple to use, yet powerful and robust. There is not a large learning curve, even for users with little technical skilsl. Thirty percent of our students don't feel they need any support or training to use the system. Our faculty adoption rate in the first year was twice that of our previous system and continues to grow.
- Canvas support is great. They are responsive to their user community. They also are honest, transparent, and communicate well with their clients. They provide clear user guides and videos that are kept updated so that we don't have to create them. We can send links to the particular guides to our users to solutions to their problems or to provide just-in-time learning. Even as they have grown rapidly, they have kept the very open, supportive culture that I find so refreshing.
- Canvas includes many of the tools that were add-ons for our previous system with additional costs, such as video capture and streaming, outcomes tracking, and eportfolios. The variety of tools and ease of use is allowing our faculty to explore innovative pedagogies in a way in which they are comfortable. We no longer need to have a large group of faculty do a major pilot because of the expense of getting a particular system. We also don't have to support multiple systems that don't always work well together. No more concerns about whether an upgrade to one system would create problems with another system.
- Canvas is constantly improving and adding new features, usually based on requests from the user community. It can be a challenge to keep up with the new features every 3 weeks, but the incremental change is less disruptive to our faculty and students than a major upgrade every 1-2 years. Bug fixes are much faster in this way as well. I have seen major improvements in how the system works and meets its users' needs since our initial pilot in 2011. I like being able to contribute my voice and our user case scenarios to feature requests in an open forum and know that I am helping to shape the system that we use.
- Canvas is easy to administer even if you don't have a large support staff. You do not need database programmers or people to write scripts for everything. If you have people with those skills you can certainly leverage the system to do wonderful things, but it is not necessary. A small school, with a small staff can manage the system and get very positive learning results.
- Canvas still needs to work on their reporting features. This is something that they are actively addressing and have a new system coming soon that I hope will close the gaps between what is currently available and what we need.
- The ePortfolio tool is clunky and not as useful for program level evaluation as other systems. It is designed for student personal portfolios, or perhaps for a course portfolio. It requires work arounds to create an evaluation tool that can be used to track a student in a program over a period of time.
September 22, 2015
Canvas is for Students
- Instructure, the makers of Canvas, are brilliant folks with an excellent mission—to be better than Blackboard and to offer their LMS service for free. You gotta love that.
- The rich, yet intuitive, features are exactly what I needed as a college-level educator.
- Canvas is an open-source software. That means it's designed for modular flexibility. If you have a third-party app that you want to include yourself, there's a way to do that. If you are low-tech user, you can rely on their frequent updates to improve your experience.
- The online help community is very active and very helpful. Anytime I have a question, I go to https://community.canvaslms.com/welcome and I can easily navigate to a thread with my specific problem for help. Response times are next to immediate.
- I've met the makers of Canvas at Open Ed and AECT conferences. They are brilliant and cool dudes.
- I had a hard time with the Calendar feature when I copied courses from previous semesters. I think they've improved the experience by now.
- One of the cutting edge features that other services are coming out with, which I haven't seen yet from Instructure's Canvas, is a live collaboration space, where students and teachers can "create" together. (E.g., a whiteboard)
- There were a small number of specific things that irked me when I was trying to push Canvas to its limits. I got on the message board and aired my frustrations and was immediately replied to. Either they put my idea on the "next version to-do list" or they said, "yeah, we're not going to do that [for these reasons]," which I was cool with.
- Canvas makes it smooth and easy to edit assignments and discussions, streamlining the number of places you need to make changes, compared to other LMSes. Changing the due date and points in the assignment itself, for example, updates the calendar, the syllabus, and the learning modules list automatically.
- The discussion forum is streamlined compared to other LMSs, so you don't have to click to multiple pages to view instructions or threads - it's all on one page. We also like that you can "like" posts on the discussion forum.
- The overall navigation of Canvas is clean and intuitive, making it easy to learn and attractive-looking.
- Canvas makes it easy for a course designer or instructor to embed relative links to other pages and parts of the course, and preserves these links when you copy or import the course into another course. This allows us to make the courses more user-friendly and makes course development MUCH faster than with other LMSes.
- The Modules page is a great feature for viewing a course at a glance. It is very helpful to be able to view requirements and due dates and track your progress all on one page.
- Canvas has a strong feature set for allowing communication between users, and in particular between students and instructors. The built in email tool, discussions on course announcements, and the ability for students and teachers to comment back and forth privately on assignments (including an easy to use audio recording tool) are appreciated features among our users, which will hopefully increase the social connection and student support in our online courses.
- Canvas allows instructors and course editors to embed images directly through the WYSIWYG editor, but not students. Students in the course (if they don't know how to embed external images using code) have to attach images, which makes the discussions a little more clunky and less fun (having to open attached files instead of viewing inline).
- The options for adaptive release and gamification in general, including achievement badges, are much more limited in Canvas than in Blackboard Learn. I would like to see more advanced options in this area in Canvas.
September 21, 2015
Canvas - the LMS developers can appreciate
- The Canvas API is easy to understand and use for custom application needs at your business/institution.
- Students appreciate the ease of communicating with instructors and support staff using Canvas.
- Faculty find it is quite easy to do quizzes, tests, and organize their course materials and lectures.
- The Canvas mobile experience on Android is not as good as on Apple.
- Those people who use SMS messages in Canvas get a minimum of 2 texts per announcement - then they have to login. It is a bit cumbersome.
- Canvas needs a better forum/collaborative environment for the administrators and developers to go to talk about the product and get questions answered.
September 19, 2015
Instructure Canvas - 4 Years of Experience
- Canvas is a SaaS cloud application. Instructure pushes new features and bug fixes every 3 weeks, which keeps it current, and evolving. These new features are released in such a way that they are not disruptive to instructors or students, and we can choose when we make those new features available to our customers.
- The mobile app for grading assignments (Speed Grader) has reduced the time it takes for me to grade assignments by 30 - 50%. Allows instructors to grade while waiting for meetings, on the bus, and anytime they have a few minutes.
- A WYSIWYG editor appears in about every tool. It has a file and tool manager that allows you to provide direct links to any connect you have in your course with a simple click. You can provide these in content pages, discussions, announcements, and other places. Makes referring students to content a breeze.
- Students can create their own groups for course project purposes, and can play "what if" scenarios with their grades. For example, a student can see how a particular grade on a final exam will affect their final grade in the class.
- Instructors and students can choose their own notification paths, and how often they receive them. For example if an instructor posts an announcement, students could choose to receive it via email, sms, or other method, and choose if they want them immediately or in a daily or weekly digest.
- LTI integration is the best of any of the Higher Education LMS software packaged. It is easy for a campus admin, or even a instructor to add LTI tools to their course and choose them from a catalog of LTI tools. Everything from integrating full rich text books, open content, youtube, and social media integrators, and publisher content and tools.
- Outcomes - needs to be easier to create, adopt, and assign outcomes.
- Gradebook. It works, but some efficiencies could be added, and certain functions streamlined. I am told the grade book is getting a overhaul and will be released in 2016.
- SIS grade push. - Needs some additional functionality to allow instructors to choose which students grades to push to the SIS.
September 18, 2015
Canvas was the right choice for us!
- Canvas is very user-friendly and well organized. It is easy for students to find their courses, and easy for faculty to put their course materials into Canvas. Most faculty & students learn how to use Canvas very quickly.
- Canvas is very flexible, both on an admin and course level. It makes integration with third-party tools very simple, to allow faculty to utilize tools such as plagiarism detection, test monitoring, video editing, etc. Faculty can design their courses in several ways, to meet their teaching needs. Admins can set permissions for a variety of different types of users. All can be done quickly & easily.
- Canvas support & documentation is excellent. The Canvas guides are always up to date, easy to follow, and contain visuals to help users understand the various features & components of Canvas. Their support staff are very knowledgeable, and help answer questions and resolve issues very quickly. Each support agent has access to our account, so they can provide support for very specific questions and issues.
- Each institution has their own customer success manager. This is a huge benefit, to have someone at Canvas be an advocate when issues arise, to understand your needs, and to be a point of contact for serious matters.
- Canvas is updated every 3 weeks, which is helpful for fixing bugs & issues. And even though they provide clear documentation well ahead of time, it still does make it hard to train faculty & students since some features change in the middle of a semester or course.
- The Canvas roadmap needs to be more transparent. They are working on improving this, but it would be helpful to know which components they are working on and where they stand on the development timeline.
- Since Canvas is so community oriented, it would be helpful to have representation on the direction of the software. There are forums to make feature requests and make comments about upcoming releases, but it would be great if some of us could work with Canvas to have these discussions before a change is planned.
September 18, 2015
With Canvas, interconnection between users has never been easier .
- Design - The design of canvas is very user friendly on both a user's perspective as well as on the back end.
- Functionality - Canvas works great for sending notifications. You get to choose what medium you like most and you receive notifications through that medium. I love that feature about Canvas.
- Communication - Sending messages and comments on threads is incredibly easy. All the canvas system takes is a tiny tiny bit of technical know how.
- Setup - The setup process at our university took incredibly long and we had a lot of people working on it. This is probably the thing that I disliked most about Canvas as we worked hours to get it synchronized with our system.
- Customization - I think that there could be more color customization or user profile settings for how they'd like to view canvas.
- Canvas Support - during the early stages of canvas in 2013, the support team was lacking in availability. I am sure things have changed by now though with how popular it's become.
September 18, 2015
Attractive and user-friendly. Allows new users to hit the ground running without much of a learning curve!
- Canvas is intuitive and relatively easy to use with minimal training. I had almost no training and was able to learn to create course shells and update user information very quickly.
- The interface is clean, friendly, and easy to navigate. The colors, font, and layout used make it easy to look at for long periods of time.
- The Canvas guides are pretty thorough for most questions.
- It would be nice if the search options were a bit more flexible. For example, if I search for EENG121, but a previous Online Course Coordinator set the course code for EENG 121, it won't show up. I'd like search suggestions that are close to what I type to show up if what I search for isn't exact.
- While the Canvas guides are incredibly useful, there are some simple things I can't seem to find in them. Recently, I've searched for information on how to restrict or remove a user's access (specifically a former instructor), which version of Canvas I'm using, how to find which modules we're using, and how to find grades that may have accidentally been deleted by an instructor.
- I create all of the course shells for our faculty. Every time I create a new course for the upcoming term, it adds me as the teacher and sends me an email. I'd love it if there was an option to add (or not add!) the course shell creator to the course so I didn't have to delete myself every time I create a course.
- It would be helpful if there was a way to remove people from a course in bulk rather than removing them one at a time. One method might be to have a checkbox option so the user could delete all checked members of a course.
September 18, 2015
What will you create on your Canvas?
- Student engagement -- Canvas allows students to interact with content, with professors, and with course content quite organically in the learning process. Students may choose to integrate Canvas with Web 2.0 tools, while determining the method and frequency of Canvas notifications.
- Elegant User Interface -- Canvas mirrors many of the Web tools that our students currently use and with which they are already comfortable. The simple, clean UI prevents unnecessary clicks and confusion for students.
- Display of content -- Canvas provides innovative ways for professors to display their course content and for students to navigate that content.
- Assessment & Feedback -- Canvas supports interactive. immediate feedback to students, allowing them to track their learning progress. Professors can utilize a variety of feedback methods: digital annotations, video/audio comments, rubric assessment, and automatic quiz replies.
- Glitches -- even after four years of using Canvas, I still experience glitches in the system. Most recently, the Media Comment tool was not fully reliable when I was recording feedback to students.
- Missed opportunities -- there are some functions that are not fully realized in functionality. For example, an instructor can assign badges to students via the Attendance tool; however, the instructor is the only one who can view the badges tally! The effectiveness of badges hinges on students' intrinsic motivation -- how can they find motivation if they cannot see the badges that they've earned in a course?
- Poor reporting / poor extraction of data -- the Attendance reports that are downloaded from the system are simply horrible to decipher and read. If an instructor must produce a conversation from the Inbox to an administrator/supervisor, there is no easy way to extract these messages from Canvas. The best one can do is take screen shots of the conversation!
- Inbox -- the whole Conversations experiment that Canvas has been performing must end. The Inbox tool acts nothing like conventional email. Professors see the word "Inbox" and expect a traditional email tool. Instead, there is a "bait-and-switch" quality to Conversations. In my four years of training faculty to use Canvas, I regularly received complaints about the Inbox and the challenge of storing, sorting, and managing messages.
September 18, 2015
My thoughts on Canvas
- The interface allows for an easy set of of learning modules with lectures, photos, videos and assessments.
- The product update process is user-driven with a great deal of interaction with Canvas developers.
- Since it is cloud-based, updates are rolled out without down-time.
- There are many "apps" or externally developed utilities that integrate into Canvas.
- On the back-end, Canvas provides a great deal of customization, branding and user options.
- There is a great set of tutorials for users, user groups where knowledge is shared and technical support is drearily available.
- Parts of the customization require knowledge of CSS, and other programming. Providing a user-friendly administration panel would be a plus.
- If not done correctly, course content copying can get messy. I standardized check for file duplication would be great.
September 18, 2015
Canvas has it covered!
- Absolute best alternatives for student notifications - allows students to receive content when and how they desire.
- Ease of use for professors - allows quick drag and drop for uploading.
- User interface is almost foolproof - easy access and easy to read.
- None
September 18, 2015
Canvas is great for us!!!
- Grades are available in real time to the students and can be checked any time, if instructors are current in their grading.
- Automated grading of quizzes and exams. This saves so much time for instructors like me.
- Allows students to access course materials and course content 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. If a student misses class, he or she can still keep up by accessing and completing materials in Canvas.
- We also use the Respondus Lockdown Browser, which allows particular Canvas quizzes & exams to be taken online through a special browser that locks the screen of the computer so other sites, programs, files, etc cannot be accessed during the test. This is a very proactive approach to prevent cheating.
- The question banks and management of the question banks is a bit clunky. Questions get duplicated for reasons I cannot figure out. Also, duplicating quizzes is not possible to my knowledge.
- Randomizing the order of questions on a quiz is not an option.
- Having a quiz randomly pull from a test bank of questions is also not an option.
- Being able to view all of the question details on each question when a quiz has more than 25 questions would be great.
- Ending (terminating) a student's quiz attempt manually is not an option.
September 17, 2015
Canvas LMS learning of the future now!
- Easy to build a course.
- Intuitive navigation.
- It has IOS app.
- There is no simple way to add picture to a discussion post (for student).
- There is no personal journal functionality. By personal journal I mean direct interaction between faculty and student.
September 15, 2015
Canvas! Learning for the 21st century!
- Canvas has a wonderful Files section where you can populate your course by creating folders, subfolders, and uploading all the files for your course into them and linking everything in Modules.
- The Quiz and Assignment sections are very easy to use and when students upload papers via Word documents, the professor can actually mark them online and then return them to the student's via Canvas where the students via the markups and Canvas and the paper does not have to be printed and return.
- Canvas also has a Conferencing system that uses BigBlueButton where classes can be held online and the professor and students can interact via video, audio, chat, and share PowerPoint projections as well as sharing what you are doing on your desktop!
- Canvas updates fairly frequently. Most of the changes are in fact great improvements. However, some are released that there should have been more input from the community before they were implemented.
- I would like to see more options in how to edit modules as they appear to the students. More color options instead of everything being black text in Modules for them.
- More customization options for each univeristy's instance of Canvas.
September 15, 2015
Give it a try! It's worth it.
- Technical Assistance is very helpful.
- Canvas is more user-friendly than some of the other LMS's.
- Generating reports is easier.
- Enrolling students & faculty is integrated with our contact database.
- Creating the gradebook through the assignments nav button is a little confusing for faculty.
- Course filtering would be easier if all schools weren't on the list.
- Having to open an entire term for one course can be very different for faculty & students as they get confused to which course(s) they are enrolled in.