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.