CANVAS Reviews

I've used a couple of alternatives both as a student and as an educator and this has by far the best user experience. This one helps going straight to what you need to do with it. I like how it doesn't try to add a lot of functionality that no one will ever use. The features it has are great and the way to access them just makes sense. When we changed to Canvas, we all agreed at my institution that it was one of the best decisions we have ever taken.

I would like to have the option as an admin to disable some features. Take forums as an example, my students use social media for pretty much anything or some other stuff. That fact that forums are there is nice, but if you won't ever use it, I would like to be able to remove it.

I like the sidebar the most since it doesn't take up a lot of space on the page and is clear about what it has.

If you don't download the app, you won't be notified of any missing assignment; it would be nice if it sent a notification to your email. For example, my class requires us to post on the discussion board but there is never a notification if someone has commented or replied to your post.

The card view seems pointless to have since it's an extra and unnecessary step. I would prefer the list view to have the classes in different colors instead of different pictures with the same blue overlay.

The first thing I noted about Canvas is that when creating content, the page looks like an MS Word document. This makes creating pages with content easy as the learning curse is very gentle. There is very little need to be technical. It is more a matter of formatting rather than getting to know the software platform itself.

The dashboard is clean and modern with easy navigation on the left sidebar for courses, account information, calendar, inbox and help. Your default home is your published and unpublished courses. On the courses tabs, are announcement and conversation icons that notify if a course has issues you need to attend to in a specific course.

The settings menu is straightforward with nothing cryptic even for non-technical people.

Setting up courses is a breeze with a 'Course Setup Checklist' button available inside each course shell you create. There is a walkthrough for each element of a course from content to publishing your course. If you have an existing course you can simply import the course with several formats supported including but not limited to Blackboard, Moodle and zip. For educators at various institutions, they can just import and customize where the need arises for the different institutions.

Assessment types include quizzes and assignments. It also integrates easily with other services like Google Drive, Office/Docs and others.

Video elements management needs improvement, the thumbnails are poor quality and very small. There is no option to edit them. To get a good visual of Office elements needs embedding the content hosted somewhere else. Natively on the platform PDF and PPT display poorly with just vertical scrolling. Exporting An exported courses from Canvas is in a custom format that is not compatible with other LMS platforms. This makes it hard to move between platforms. There not much customization of learning elements compared to other LMS available. Some of the support documentation is dated and needs updating.

A very powerful platform with a low threshold for adoption and ease of use. Our instructors rave about the intuitiveness of the course builder features and functionality. Since the pandemic, nearly all of the institution's thousands of courses have content online in Canvas - including the traditional in-person classes.

Integration with our student information system required some additional outside services to that students, courses, and grades could be synced in real time in order to give students immediate access once enrolled for the class.

This software is very well organised with minor issues. I think as a user of 2+ years, I am extremely satisfied with the software. Although there are some minor improvements to be made, I believe that this software is the future of remote higher education.

I think my major complaint about this software would be the fact that hiding and/or deleting certain courses' cards/lists isn't an option. When one year is over and another begins, half of the courses still on my dashboard can be considered clutter and are no longer needed. I think another feature that would make organising easier is editing the name of the course on my dashboard. Organisations usually title their courses in the same format with minimal changes which does make it harder to differentiate from one another. Adding subtle features that allow for personalising your dashboard without compromising the content of the courses would be helpful, I believe.

Canvas is useful because I can see all of my coursework on one platform that is simple to use. I can organize my courses on the home page as I like, and when I click on the course, I can see modules, assignments, and tests attached to the course. Documents load very easily on Canvas, and I like being able to "preview" documents posted before downloading them.

I have two complaints about the Canvas software. First of all, the mobile version does not work well. I never downloaded the Canvas app, but did try to go on the website on my phone. The text was so small and the menus on the left side of the screen did not load well, so I could never use my phone to get on Canvas without the app. My other complaint with the software is that whenever anything was graded for a course, even if it was an older assignment, I'd get a notification. Perhaps this is just the settings set by the instructor and not Canvas itself, however.

Very user-friendly interface, easy to find what you are looking for with clear icons and titles being displayed.
For general areas such as courses, dashboard and calendar they are easy to use, and you can even add reminders to your calendar besides those posted by teachers.

Sometimes, once you are inside a class within the software it may vary drastically from teacher to teacher. The software allows for customization therefore it can cause confusion for students for there is not only 1 format to visualize the classes.

1) Easy to use as a teacher. Once you get the schema of how the software works and accept its ways and limitations, then you can really use it to your advantage within that framework.
2) Integration with other softwares. Canvas integrates with many other LTI providers, but everyone is slightly different, so you need to be willing to pay the price to learn how to integrate things carefully.
3) Speedgrader is nice. I've seen better ones in other LMSs, but Canvas Spreedgrader is pretty good.
4) Training and support. You can find, if you search carefully, tons of training resources for Canvas.

1) It's easy to create things that clutter your course, system almost without knowing.
2) The assessment engine is quite limited. The new quiz engine is still too buggy to use and has been way overdue.
3) I hate that there is not an autosave feature, specially when building quizzes. More than once, I accidentally save the quiz without saving the individual question and loose a ton of work.
4) It's almost impossible to find your grades across multiple courses. You have to go to each course individually and click several places at that.

Canvas from an administrator side is incredibly easy to work with. Installing addons takes just seconds in comparison to the fear I experienced in installing anything in Blackboard, and the confusion I experienced trying to set anything up in D2L.
One of the deciding factors in moving forward with Canvas was ease of use for our faculty and students. If Canvas was not easy to use our transition would have been near impossible.
It's mobile app is excellent for students and they are in the middle of improving their faculty mobile app now.
They have an incredible Community that has asked most of the questions you have and someone has provided the answer you're looking for. There are also folks that create customizations and share those with everyone to help improve your workflows. They also let you in on the development process and share with your their progress and let you beta test things for them.
I love having a beta server, test server and production server to work with that is always up to date.
Lots to love about Canvas.

There are some features that are lacking from Canvas that we are attempting to work around or build customizations for.
1. Set Discussion boards to need grading after x number of posts. Right now it says it needs to be graded after the first post and will not notify the instructor once they have submitted the required amount of posts. This isn't as big of an issue when there are due dates but a majority of our courses do not have due dates.
2. It's Outcomes capabilities are lacking. They have plans to improve on this but it may be awhile.
3. They are releasing a new quizzing tool in 2018 which we are excited for but are worried about how we will need to go about migrating quizzes.

The platform is very easy and flexible to navigate so, you can be sure that you’ll never be lost while searching for the material you need. Besides, you can add text, upload pictures and videos without difficulty. In addition to this if you know how to work with HTML code you can have the design you like. The next thing that I like about Canvas is that you can communicate with your teacher and fellow students easily. You can send an email to your teacher or start a chat with your classmates. Canvas is used by educational institutions for two purposes: either for creating courses that are taught exceptionally online or for blending the traditional way of teaching with online one. This platform is especially useful for students who always need to find all the material on their course online, including the textbooks, lectures, homework, individual works and of course, their grades and attendance. Canvas makes collaboration between teachers and students more effective and fruitful.

It is fascinating to know that the Canvas app is available on mobile devices. However, the app needs some improvements because some features are still not available there and notifications sometimes don’t pop up.
The platform successfully cooperates and works with third-party vendors. However, I should mention that some programs do not work well and obviously they need to get improvements.
And finally, there sometimes some glitches may occur but I wish the platform could work more smoothly.

I've been using Canvas as an instructor at a university for the past 7+ years. The best thing about Canvas is that it's better organized than Moodle, which I've also used. I encountered Canvas when I came to work at my university. Before I started my job I was only familiar with Moodle, which I thought was an awful ed-tech application. I found Canvas to have a better interface, and was easier to navigate as a user. As an instructor, there are all kinds of features that you can use to set up a class, foster engagement, track student progress and assess completion of assignments. You can set up discussions, assign students to groups and even enable them to meet virtually. Canvas also works well for asynchronous learning in that you can create a course that is self-paced and students can step through each assignment on their own time.

The biggest challenge with Canvas is that it's not easy to use, unless you've been trained and know what you're doing. I had to learn Canvas completely on my own and it was a bit of a nightmare, even for someone like me who is very comfortable with technology. It's not entirely intuitive, especially when you're building a course from scratch. It's basically a website and you have to learn how to link pages, websites, documents, etc. You don't need to know how to code or use HTML, but it's still very painstaking to set up a class, even if you copy a previous class from year to year and just need to update it. The grading feature was also "updated" and it's more annoying now and less easy to use. The one big drawback though is the interface in that it's not all that graphical. You have to learn work arounds to make the interface more appealing to students. It's still better than Moodle! But still, it would be great if they could make it more like a real graphical website and less like a Word document on a website.

We use the Free for Teacher edition. When it comes to setting up courses, having assignments, files, students, deadlines, and grades set up, it's pretty simple. Not a lot of trouble getting things put together. You can integrate videos, there's a conference capability called Big Blue Button that allows all the members of the course to video in with each other and you can share screen and everything. It has been a big help allowing our students to have a portal to do their assignments, and connect with everyone in the class.

One of the nuances to Canvas that is difficult is limiting what teachers can see. By that I mean we have two different types of courses that we run.

One is an individual cohort of a few students and a director. The only way to make these closed down to just these members is to create a duplicate of the course and put those members in. Not a terrible thing, but then the courses start to stack up with all the different cohorts you have going. Plus, there's not really a way to have any updates filter down into all the same semester courses. So if we want to make an update on Semester 1, we have to go into each individual course and update it. There's also no way to update deadlines when you copy a course. So I have to change every assignment's due date so it fits in the new semester's timeline.

The other kind of course that we have is an open course that anyone can jump into, and then we assign a TA to grade certain students. The problem with this is that there's no way to limit the TA's view of who is in the course. So it shows them that there are dozens of students' work that needs to be graded in their To-Do List and makes it difficult for them to know when their assigned students have actually submitted anything. Haven't been able to find a work around for this yet.

The ease of being able to attend my lectures and webinars online, from anywhere with a wifi connection, makes it very attractive. I can submit online with ease and allowing me to store all my information in a single place is a big plus. My interaction with my lecturers has been seamless and offers a range of great features. Allowing me to store all the information on the Canvas platform, which makes my work a lot easier and saves time.

Not the most user friendly and I struggled to navigate on the platform. Video quality isnt the best at times(no, my wifi connection was just fine) but having said that , i would still recommend Canvas from my personal experience of having used it over a few years.