DU recently announced that beginning in fall quarter 2014, students and staff will switch to Canvas as their new learning management system. Staff will likely have access to the new system by the upcoming summer quarter.
According to Alexander Karklins, an instructional technology support specialist with the Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL), the change was primarily prompted by several technical issues reported by students and staff since the fall of 2012.
“It resulted in some outages, and some slowdowns during a very busy part of the quarter,” said Karklins. “Blackboard support was able to resolve the issues but it kind of took a long time. It prompted us to really take a look at alternatives out there to make sure we have the best possible learning management system for DU.”
Several pilot trials of Canvas have been held by the OTL using both students and staff to test the program. According to a report from the OTL trial periods, “When asked to select a preference among the Learning Management Systems, 94 percent of instructors chose Canvas[…]78 percent of students preferred Canvas over Blackboard or eCollege.”
Cassie Jones, a first-year business major, conducted a survey of her own on Blackboard usage, and among 35 students surveyed, 51.43 percent of respondents to the survey rated Blackboard to be “average.”
“I would say that means most people are indifferent towards [Blackboard],” said Jones.
According to Jones, another piece of feedback was how different browsers were unable to sustain Blackboard sessions and crashed after a certain amount of time, or were not able to access it at all. Karklins spoke to this, stating that the safest browser to work with Blackboard was Google Chrome and the worst was Internet Explorer.
Blackboard will remain usable throughout the upcoming school year to allow instructors to transition to Canvas. Karklins further commented that while the OTL sees Canvas as an improvement over Blackboard, there are still professors who use alternatives to Blackboard like WordPress, and he encourages them to try Canvas.
“Though Canvas had some very positive reviews, I think there’s not one system that’s perfect for everybody,” said Karklins. “It might not be the full answer for them, and if they find what they’re doing is very effective, they can continue to do that. I think give it a chance. It has some very cool options, and it’s very customizable.”
