Canvas - making life easier for instructors, students, and support staff
September 25, 2015
Canvas - making life easier for instructors, students, and support staff
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Canvas does not use version numbering
Modules Used
- Entire product
Overall Satisfaction with Canvas
Canvas is the Learning Management System in use across our entire campus. Our university transitioned to Canvas 3 years ago, after many years of using Blackboard. Initial use was primarily for online courses, but use has grown over the past couple of years as instructors have become more comfortable with the product and aware of its potential.
- 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.
- Saved time on creation of support documentation.
- Increased availability and ease-of-access of course materials for distance learning students.
- Increased efficiency for instructors when grading student submissions, as well as providing students with instant feedback.
In general, our users have found Canvas to be much simpler and student-friendly than Blackboard. In addition, the rapid development cycle under which Canvas operates means that improvements and new features are deployed much more rapidly. From a support perspective, it has been much simpler to integrate 3rd party tools with Canvas, due to the open source framework.