{"id":4950,"date":"2012-05-10T18:30:41","date_gmt":"2012-05-10T22:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=4950"},"modified":"2012-05-10T20:48:58","modified_gmt":"2012-05-11T00:48:58","slug":"why-i-recommended-canvas-as-an-lms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=4950","title":{"rendered":"Why I recommended Canvas as an LMS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My role in the group evaluating LMS options ended yesterday, and I don&#8217;t know the recommendations of other individuals in the group, though I get sense of where we&#8217;re headed as an institution. For my part, after looking at Blackboard 9.1, Moodlerooms\/joule, and Canvas, I recommended Canvas. We have a lot of transitions to plan at this point no matter what the institution&#8217;s choice is, and Canvas is relatively new, but I am confident I made the right recommendation. Some thoughts I&#8217;ve had in the last week, as I&#8217;ve built the summer course structure into Canvas (this is a face-to-face offering of an upper-division course in Schools and Society, what&#8217;s also sometimes called Social Foundations&#8211;I&#8217;m using the &#8220;free to teachers&#8221; version of Canvas, unless\/until there&#8217;s a contract between USF and Canvas this summer):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>That took about a quarter of the time it would have taken in Blackboard.<\/li>\n<li>That took about a quarter of the time it would have taken to build in Respondus and upload to Blackboard.<\/li>\n<li>I look like I&#8217;m in some 1960s movie, but it took about three minutes to record a short video greeting for the whole class that&#8217;s the first thing they see.<\/li>\n<li>Oh, I can spend half a minute to leave a ten-second video greeting for each student after they accept the email invitation into the course.<\/li>\n<li>Hmmn&#8230; okay, I can see a workaround to get what I want to happen (a sequence of assignments, so students have to complete a quiz on plagiarism before they can upload papers, but without having unnecessary girders\/infrastructure showing).<\/li>\n<li>I think I&#8217;ll give them hints about Canvas and let the interested students show the others what they can do.<\/li>\n<li>On second thought, I may definitely want to show the &#8220;What if?&#8221; feature in Grades and talk about it explicitly.<\/li>\n<li>Anticipated grading workflow: paper copy of rubric, scribble notes and a two- or three-sentence script for each, then use Speedgrader on &#8220;mute assignment&#8221; to score papers and use script from paper rubric to record a video comment. (Students will get the paper copy, too.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I will be very curious to see how much they pay attention to the online version of the outcomes and grading scales. On the one hand, it&#8217;s transparent where I have clear expectations. ((On another assignment that&#8217;s unique to my section, students will construct the grading criteria\/rubric within the categories I establish.)) On the other hand, students pay attention to such things differentially (sometimes judging that if instructions are very complicated, they&#8217;ll be discussed in class).<\/p>\n<p>And now, I need to pay attention to the basics of running a compressed six-week course and ignore the temptation to play with Canvas some more&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My role in the group evaluating LMS options ended yesterday, and I don&#8217;t know the recommendations of other individuals in the group, though I get sense of where we&#8217;re headed as an institution. For my part, after looking at Blackboard 9.1, Moodlerooms\/joule, and Canvas, I recommended Canvas. We have a lot of transitions to plan [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-1hQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4950"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4953,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4950\/revisions\/4953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}