Canvas LMS: a great way to provide an online course experience!
January 10, 2019
Canvas LMS: a great way to provide an online course experience!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Canvas
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.
- Unfortunately I cannot comment on this aspect of Canvas.
I have previously used eCollege LMS which was a Pearson product. It was an older LMS and had not been sufficiently updated for some time. Canvas is a much better product with more features and a better designer/student experience.