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Hi.
I'm Wade Maki from the philosophy department.
And I'm teaching ethical issues in entrepreneurship
using Canvas.
Canvas is pretty easy to use.
It's clearly organized.
And has far less clicks than a certain alternative
we're all familiar with.
One of the things I was never able to do
with a certain Canvas competitor,
was try mobile based learning.
And with Canvas, it's been really easy
for me to create quizzes and things that are mobile device
compatible.
So all of my students who always have their phones with them,
can simply do work and access things that way.
And that's something that I wouldn't have tried otherwise.
My first disappointment was that Canvas's design philosophy
is one in which there's a standard setup
for the left menu names on the links.
And so unlike Blackboard, where you
could custom rename anything you wanted
and link to any area of your course, with Canvas,
you're stuck with their naming theme.
Which I understand they do because then
you have consistency for students and between courses.
But I like to customize a little bit.
I find Canvas very comparable.
Most LMSs have very similar features,
and most of their designs are roughly intuitive.
Canvas might be a little more easy to access.
Quicker to learn.
It's hard because a lot of us are used to Blackboard.
And if you are used to Blackboard,
it seems very easy to do things without thinking.
But if you were brand new to Blackboard, you would never,
for example think to look under Customization, Properties
to make a course available to students.
That's not intuitive design.
And Canvas has certainly improved upon that.
And I don't think anyone at Canvas
was paid by making you click an extra few times in the way
that I think Blackboard makes money
every time you have to click OK.
Canvas is certainly a viable choice for UNCG.
Long term, Canvas is a newer product.
The code is going to be much more stable.
The things that are plugged into it
seem to work more effectively.
Blackboard, being an older product,
you're going to have more problems
as they keep adding new and new features on to what
is a decades-old base code.
Canvas is also more affordable than Blackboard.
And I don't have to tell you, the faculty, how important it
is that we reduce costs anywhere but our jobs.
And if switching to Canvas helps do
that, then I'm all for Canvas.
One of the things that surprised me about Canvas,
is when I went to do chat sessions with students,
as a test, it didn't make me install
a whole bunch of plugins like Java
and other things, which tend to have problems
with different computers.
And sometimes it doesn't work on a Mac
or it doesn't work on a PC.
I've really found, out of the box, Canvas worked pretty well.
One of the things that surprised me about Canvas
is how rarely I had to install plug-ins,
like Java and other things, on either a Mac or a PC
to get it to work with Canvas.
Whereas with Blackboard, installing Canvas--
Whereas with Blackboard, installing plug-ins like Java,
seems to be a regular and often problematic
source of confusion, not just for me the faculty,
but for my students.
Because any time you have to add steps
to a student to get to where you want to send them,
a certain percentage are going to fail.
And that means more work for us.
The student response to Canvas, so far,
has been what I think is the ideal student response.
Nothing.
They've used it.
And they haven't complained.
They haven't said they couldn't find anything.
Now while they haven't said they liked it,
whether they liked or not wasn't important.
The fact that they've been able to use it in the ways
that I've assigned them to use it and have not been confused,
have not been lost, and that has been totally new to them,
is really impressive.
One of the things I think faculty
need to know about Canvas, is while it is a streamlined tool,
it is a simpler tool.
Which means part of the reason you
gain an ease of use for faculty and students
is it may not have every complex option that somebody somewhere
would want, like Blackboard, where Blackboard
is designed for everybody.
That means there's so many things in there
that almost none of us would actually use.
Which often creates confusion and problem.
So sometimes, you may find Canvas may not
do some advanced feature, but it covers the basics.
It covers them clearly, simply, and effectively.
I was really impressed with the ability
to edit content directly in Canvas
and make changes and then organize those changes
in modules, without having to click through a lot of menus.
One example of the simplicity of Canvas compared to Blackboard,
is with announcements.
When you post an announcement in Canvas, once you post it,
it goes out, and the students get a notification of it.
In Blackboard, you would first have to say, I'm sorry,
you didn't put an end date for this announcement.
You have to remember to tell it that.
And then you would have to check separately
whether you want it to be emailed or not.
This shows how Canvas is more simple,
but also gives you a little less fine-tuned control.
When you make an announcement, it's
essentially fire and forget.
Once you hit post, you know that it's
going to be there when they log in.
But they're going to get it wherever
they've asked to get it.
And that is another huge feature of Canvas.
It allows the user control over what they get notified of,
when they get notified of it, and what method
that comes from.
Whether they want that via email, or via text message.
And that kind of user base control philosophy
is very different than the top down management of Blackboard.
Blackboard is very much a 2000-era technology.
It's designed around email and top-down control.
Whereas the millennials and post-millennials
we're getting today, think email is
like what their grandparents use.
They like text messaging.
And canvas allows them to select those options of communication
that are most effective for them.
And it's very much a post 2000-- And it's very much
a tool for today, rather than based on the design philosophy
from 15 years ago.
Canvas is one of the fastest growing LMS
competitors in the market today.
Blackboard has recognized this.
And we shouldn't forget that Blackboard
has seen the threat of Canvas and other competitors.
And Blackboard is doing a lot to try to catch up.
Two features Blackboard put in recently
that all faculty should know about.
First, post first.
The ability to prevent students from seeing what's
on the discussion board until they've made their posting.
This prevents them from cribbing and copying
from other students.
Second, in-line grading.
No longer do we have to download papers from Blackboard,
grade them on our desktops, input the grades,
and then re-upload them with comments.
All of that can be done within the system.
Canvas can do that too.
But faculties should remember that Blackboard
is doing a lot to catch up.
And those features are real big improvements to Blackboard.
Another problem area for online instructors
has been the inability to time-release quizzes and exams
for students who get extra time in a way that's convenient,
other than creating copies of quizzes and exams
and manually setting them.
Which of course, just creates more work and more opportunity
for error on part of faculty.
Both Canvas and Blackboard have done a good job
of coming up with new ways of doing that.
One of the other features that I've really
come to appreciate in Blackboard,
is the way you can use adaptive release
to do creative quiz functionality.
For example, I have designed my course so they taking one quiz
opens the next one for the student.
And that's another neat thing that Blackboard enables
you to do that most faculty don't know about.
What I like about Blackboard is the customizability
and the familiarity.
The customizability to be able to rename a left menu
to be whatever I want, and to have it
link wherever I want it to go, that's very important to me.
That may not be as important to most users.
And it may in fact confuse some students
who prefer Canvas's more unified system.
The other thing about Blackboard that I like,
is the familiarity.
That I intuitively know where to go
because of 15 years of using the thing.
Now this may or may not be a reason
to keep or move away from something,
but it is something to consider.
The tool we know does have certain advantages.
But Canvas is definitely worth a look.
It's a viable competitor.