In-Depth Canvas LMS Review: Features, Pros, and Cons for Learning Designers (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Heard of Canvas? It's one of the top learning management systems out there. This video is an LMS review of Canvas by Instructure. Bianca Raby here. Full disclosure, for many years now Canvas has been my personal favorite LMS. Why? Well mostly because as the name suggests it provides a blank canvas. Most seasoned learning designers like myself love to have flexibility in the way that we design and this is Canvas's big value proposition. It is designed for you to customize it. However this can also be seen as a negative for some cash strapped organizations or early career LDs without access to a coder. So Canvas is not for everyone and my list of awesome and not so awesome for some things I'm about to share will shed some light on why. Oh and for new LDs out there Canvas is designed for volume and assessment. It's a comprehensive LMS and therefore its features have to be made to delight providers who have thousands of students, complex cohort delivery models, multiple courses and compliance requirements. Five awesome things about Canvas. Intuitive interface. Canvas's use of modules makes it easy to navigate for both students and you. It also allows you to customize learner progression and the rich content editor really is what you see is what you get. So you always get a clear picture of the published results as you are designing. Assessment. You name an assessment type and Canvas can do it. Speed grader also does exactly what the name suggests and it lets you speed grade. Blueprints. Know you'll need multiple versions of a course or running different cohorts? Well Canvas lets you create a blueprint or a master and sync up to other courses so that you have a single source of truth. This allows for quick changes across multiple versions of a course. Canvas studio. An amazing feature that lets you make a video active instead of passive. Add questions in the video and prompt discussions below. Studio also provides a free captioning service. Canvas community. You have a question? Well someone else has already posted and received a bunch of answers. The Canvas community is a gold mine of tips and tricks. Five not as awesome for some things about Canvas. Complexity. This is not an LMS for beginners. It's a rabbit hole of nuance and does take time to get a handle on. You don't know what you don't know when you open it up so it can feel overwhelming. Styling. To create an amazing student experience or SX in Canvas you will need to know some CSS and HTML as it can be very bland. Cost. As far as buying the tech subscription goes it's comparable. However hiring or learning the skills needed to utilize all of its features can feel expensive especially at the beginning. Discussions. Due to the module design discussions cannot be embedded into pages. This means a hyperlink is there instead and the student navigates away from the content if posed a discussion question. Navigation. There are three main ways to navigate in Canvas and this can cause some confusion with students. Account navigation, course navigation and then a series of breadcrumbs. Not to mention many of us LDs design homepages that have their own navigation built-in. So what do you think? I would love to hear the most awesome thing about Canvas is for you or what you see is the biggest challenges for you as an LD. If you've enjoyed this video then please be sure to click like, subscribe to the channel and hit the bell to be notified of new videos and also check out this video to learn more about LMSs and platforms. Thanks for watching and until next time Stay awesome.