Marg Canvas LMS

I like the integration with turnitin.com for grading- makes it very easy to have students submit online assignments that are checked for plagiarism.

This is a truly terrible program- it amazes me how over and over the grading and assignment functions manage to be completely counter-intuitive- all of your needs must be anticipated because the course you design and assignment types have no flexibility once you create them. The grade book is a nightmare. It has a spreadsheet in the making, but you can't add any columns, or add any of your own weights.

Example of my gripes: I created an essay test with the 'quiz' function- the students were informed to choose 2/3 essay questions to answer. However, it was setup in such a way that each question had to have a specific amount it was worth, and the total had to be the sum of all parts- i.e. it is impossible as far as I can tell to have an optional question. I thought "i have used several other platforms (blackboard etc. and can just change it all through the gradebook". That was naive because other programs don't have a gradebook forged in the bowels of Hades, created to be as useless as possible. So the students take the test, they have a grade on a scale of 1-100 but the points say it is out of 150. At the end of the course, I try to create a weighted column thinking I could do, i dunno, a simple goddam operation like in excel or any other spreadsheet where I can just add the 2 tests in the category and divide by 200 points and that would result in a correct final grade. Instead, there is not way to create anything without going through their initial module/assignment category page. I can't do that now, however, because it would require me to delete the assignment and all of the students responses (!!!. Seriously incompetent design. Since there is no way to change the weight, I went through and manually added for 40 students the average of their grade from the 2 test so the average % would be the same. However, after finishing that complete waste of time, I found that there was no way to use %, it was only going to add raw points from test 1 & 2 and then weight them into a % for the final grade. Therefore, it was impossible to do what I wanted in even the somewhat easy way, the only way was to make the other test worth 150 so that they were worth equal amounts, and make sure the extra 50 had the same average. I am wasting so much of my own time because they have the least user-friendly and customizable gradebook I have ever encountered across several platforms. It is horrible. My options for the future are to just create an 'assignment' rather than a quiz so I have more flexibility, but rather than individual questions I will just have to put the assignments in 1 block for them to write the assignments in 1 block. No program should be so lacking in customizability that I should have to already be a canvas savant to not end my semester having a headache and spending way more time than was saved over the course, just fixing all the problems caused by their terrible program.

Just don't- really. It is not a good product- it is not very customizable, once you create a course one way it is difficult to make changes, there is no direct way to change the gradebook or create various types of adjustments, they require labor-intensive redesign, which you often can't do mid-way through the course because assignments are so lacking in customization, you would have to delete assignments and start from scratch, thus getting rid of existing grades and assignments because they are all linked. It is horrible. I am taking the time out of finals grading to light up some forums to punish this terrible company from making my life unnecessarily hard with their terrible product.

This is a truly awful program. I would rather use almost any other system- and would much rather use an excel spreadsheet for a gradebook than the incredibly inflexible and uncustomizable nonsense you have designed. Your work is an embarrassment, Canvas.

Canvas provides a platform for my digital resources for my students. It has an iPad app that is relatively functional and allows for uploads of rubrics and grading directly in the LMS. I particularly like creating that I can put students in groups on Canvas and grade a group project using one rubric, that is visible to all students in the group. Canvas is a huge platform with lots of capabilities (like in-app quizzes, grading, written and spoken feedback, etc

Canvas is so enormous that the functionality of many of it's capabilities is relatively limited. In a 1:1 iPad school, the many problems with the App and very limited capabilities of the app are causing our school to look elsewhere for another LMS. Canvas has not been able to keep up with updates of other services (ie gradebooks and loses functionality each time another service has a big update. Their service team has not provided us with solutions to many of our issues and is relatively non-responsive.

Look elsewhere

All teachers use the same LMS to provide resources to students. Our students know how to use Canvas since all teachers use it.

I am an avid Google Classroom fan. However, my school district uses Canvas. With that being said, not everyone isn’t he district has completely adopted Canvas.

Canvas is not user friendly. Although it has some cool features it isn’t easy to look out or use.

Canvas would be much more appealing if it was a more simple layout and required less preparation beforehand.

I have not found that Canvas is beneficial for myself or my students.

How easy it is to use and learn, I came into my role having no background with Canvas and I was able to pick it up easily and now train others on how to use it.

Being a US company, Canvas caters to the US a lot and is fantastic for US customers. Sadly we are based in the UK and a lot of the features aren't available for us yet. If they are, they cost us a lot of money which sadly isn't in our budget.

Do a proper switch from your old system, the switch from Moodle happened before I joined and wasn't handled great so a lot of the staff didn't really get on board with Canvas. Therefore I am having to re train staff on the basics even now.

We use Canvas as our central hub for the college, tutors store all course content on there and learners can catch up with any work missed.

I like being able to access all of my class assignments in one place. It makes it easy to know where to submit assignments, it provides one place to look at syllabi and know what assignments are due, and I like how you can create settings to have any messages or announcements sent on Canvas to your email as well.

There is not much that I dislike about the site itself - however, I do have some teachers that find it confusing in terms of publishing information and knowing whether or not they have set the class up correctly so that students are able to submit assignments. Therefore, some of my teachers do not utilize Canvas much, and that can be frustrating to have some teachers using it and some not.

I access grad school assignments on Canvas. The main benefit is having all of my class information in one place from semester to semester.