Eight courses test-drove the LMS platform this past semester

By Alison Roach
Image courtesy ofSFU.ca

With the end of the semester approaching, the first stage of the Canvas implementation program is drawing to a close. Canvas is the learning management system (LMS) that has been chosen to replace WebCT, and was tested by eight SFU courses this semester as part of a pilot project. This summer, implementation will expand, and up to 5,000 students will use the platform.

The eight courses selected to test the program were chosen for their variety — the course cover a wide range of faculties and class sizes. The pilot courses are an upper division business course, a upper division communications course, a graduate criminology course, a 100–level and a graduate education course, two upper division english courses, and an upper division philosophy course. The largest of these was the communications course, with 50 students.

“These [faculty members] are people who volunteered, and were picked in some cases because we knew they might have some challenging situations to deal with,” said Lynda Williams, a learning technology analyst and manager at SFU’s Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC). The Learning Technology group at the TLC has been providing support to these test courses throughout the semester, along with SFU IT Services and the Institutional, Collaborative, and Academic Technologies group (ICAT ).

Preliminary reviews of Canvas have been mixed, but positive overall. “Some of the very reasons people love Canvas are reasons that other people don’t like it,” said Williams. The LMS itself is highly customizable, allowing faculty to add different Learning Tools Interoperability apps (or LTIs) in order to integrate different types of enriched media into their respective Canvas pages. An instructor can pick and choose which LTIs they wish to use. ICAT is now working to see which LTIs will be formally supported by the university, largely dependent on which functions will be most used by faculty members.

One of the biggest selling points of Canvas is its frequent update cycle. The platform is updated approximately once every three weeks at the moment. Williams explained, “Canvas is plastic, in a way that no other LMS that we’ve used is.” Williams emphasized that Canvas evolves continuously, and things users don’t like about the program may be solved with the next update.

Running the program does put heavy strain on SFU’s IT department, as SFU is the only institution in Canada currently running the open source program. Canvas also has to be run on the university’s own servers, due to a piece of BC legislation that restricts the university from sending information to the Cloud: the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, or FIPPA.

FIPPA restrains post-secondary institutions from sending information they have gathered from their work with various parties to the Cloud without specific permission. So programs such as Google Docs or Microsoft Evernote are unusable, because FIPPA stipulates that all information must be stored on a server in Canada. Williams stated that obtaining permission from students is cumbersome.

“This is something that a lot of post-secondary institutions in BC are getting more and more agitated about,” said Williams. “Why are we being held back by this legislation that’s there to protect privacy, but as an unintended by-product of good intent, is actually crippling educational technology for postsecondary institutions?”

FIPPA also means that SFU cannot make use of the other most attractive feature of Canvas: its mobility. Designed to be app-friendly, SFU is unable to use this aspect of the LMS.

“Canvas is an intrinsically smart, savvy, mobile intended LMS. It comes with an app, and if you run on the Cloud you can have the app,” said Williams.

The lack of an app has proved to be the biggest frustration for students in the pilot courses, according to Professor Mary Ann Gillies, and Senior Lecturer Nicky Didicher, both in the department of English.

“One of the big selling features of Canvas is that it’s accessible, but we can’t get the cloud version because of legal issues, and that means that the version we have will not work very well on tablets, or android, or Blackberry, or smartphones,” said Didicher. “For people who aren’t using laptops in the classroom but want to use handheld devices, this is a bit difficult.” Gillies, who teaches from an iPad, echoed this frustration.

Despite this drawback, both Didicher and Gillies reported that students did like Canvas better than WebCT, and most frustrations came from what they had previously been used to on the latter. The native discussion board for instance is quite simple, and does not allow for sub–topics. But as Williams explained, there are four different possible LTI plug–ins that could replace the discussion board with a different model.

“ With Canvas, the shell is there, you just need to add things. It’s pretty flexible,” said Gillies.

Things that students did like in Canvas were that it was possible to open two tabs or windows, and the browser’s back function worked, both problematic in WebCT. Canvas also includes a more complex gradebook that allows students to monitor exactly how well they’re doing in the course, and to calculate which marks they need to achieve a certain grade.

This summer, the Canvas implementation will expand, with up to 5,000 students using the platform, including those in distance courses. By fall 2013, half of LMS courses will be delivered in Canvas. The process of supporting faculty and students throughout the implementation will continue until the LMS has been completely implemented.

“We deeply respect the issues that instructors are having with things that cost them time and trouble, and we’re doing everything we can do to help those issues,” said Williams.

“We’re juggling with knives and we’re running while we’re doing it.”