I think students will find it easy to use.”īlackstone said students in her spring and summer courses had an overwhelmingly positive response to using Canvas. “I’ve used Blackboard for years now and while it’s generally met my needs, I find it difficult to navigate and clunky. “I found the interface well-designed and intuitive,” Blackstone said.
She said the experience was “very positive,” and even requested an extension on the pilot in order to use Canvas in her summer course, which she received.
Canvas unt full#
Notable features for faculty include a “speedgrader,” which Canvas said would allow faculty to grade faster, a calendar with which students can schedule appointments with professors and full integration with Turnitin assignments.īethany Blackstone, associate professor of political science, was one of the faculty members who piloted Canvas in spring 2017. “Blackboard is more suitable for a college environment.”įaculty will have access to a variety of new features in Canvas which UNT says will allow for a more efficient experience. “I personally don’t like Canvas,” Gay said. Gay said he had a hard time using the Canvas app, and that the layout of the Blackboard website is cleaner. One of the advantages of Canvas, as identified by Pluscht, is that many schools and colleges which feed into UNT use Canvas, so those students come in with experience with the system.įreshman business major Tariq Gay has experience with both Canvas and Blackboard, having used Canvas for high school and Blackboard for dual enrollment courses at Tarrant County College. “The worst thing is trying to be productive and you can’t. “Blackboard always seems to have technical difficulties,” fashion design sophomore Kiara Brown said. Like Blackboard, Canvas also has a mobile app. In Canvas, students will be able to access a what-if feature that allows them to input scores for assignments and see what their course grade would be with that score.īecause it is cloud-hosted, Canvas does not have regular website maintenance downtimes, allowing students to use the website whenever they need. Pluscht said the first year of using both LMSs will cost less than previously using only Blackboard due to discounts, and that the cost of Canvas will eventually be about equal to what Blackboard had cost. The university’s contract with Blackboard is set to end on Aug. These are currently the only courses which are being offered through Canvas. All four chose to continue their courses in Canvas. Those four are PSCI 2316, CJUS 5700, AEAH 4614 and INFO 5713. Of the 11 courses piloted in the spring, four are offered in the fall. Once it was clear students and faculty preferred Canvas, the decision went through various stages of approval before being recommended to President Smatresk by the Information Technology Planning and Prioritization (ITPP) committee, who approved it. You shouldn’t have to spend all your time trying to figure out what buttons to push.” “The type of feedback we’ve gotten from faculty was that virtually every process required fewer clicks,” Pluscht said.
Patrick Pluscht, director of CLEAR, said the response was overwhelmingly positive. While the university planned to pilot both Blackboard Learn Ultra and Canvas with faculty and students during Spring 2017, Blackboard was not ready in time, so only Canvas was piloted. UNT set out to find other cloud-hosted systems and discovered Canvas, an LMS which has been leading national adoptions in recent years. The university has been using Blackboard and previous iterations of the product through various transitions since 1998. The UNT Center for Learning Enhancement, Assessment, and Redesign (CLEAR) decided to review potential options for new LMSs after its current LMS, Blackboard, announced the introduction of their new cloud-based product, Blackboard Learn Ultra. UNT has signed a five-year contract with Canvas beginning Sept. The university plans to make the full transition to Canvas by Spring 2019. 22 it would be switching Learning Management Systems (LMS) from Blackboard to Canvas.
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