After two years of preparation and a semester of easing into Canvas, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has adopted the service as its official learning management system. However, the switch from Blackboard won’t come overnight. Many students will have to use both programs until Blackboard is discontinued in May 2018.
The transition will be slightly easier this semester than last. Originally, students had to go to canvas.unl.edu to log into their Canvas courses and my.unl.edu to log into their Blackboard courses. Now, both sites will be available at my.unl.edu.
Canvas was first piloted during the 2016 spring semester with 50 instructors and their combined 1,800 students. Throughout the semester, participants provided feedback about the program.
Jeremy Van Hof, the assistant director of academic technology at UNL, has led the transition, working with students, teachers, administrators, UNL technical support and Canvas itself to ensure a smooth migration.
In a survey asking whether UNL users preferred Canvas to Blackboard, most said they did. On a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), faculty sent in an average response of 4.2. Students averaged 3.7.
“Students responded a little lower primarily because they felt like the teachers in the pilot didn’t fully understand the tool yet,” Van Hof said. “It just wasn’t being used to its full capacity.”
While plans have been in the works for awhile, the decision to officially move to Canvas came after a University of Nebraska Board of Regents vote in July. By that point, it was too late to formally introduce Canvas as a learning management system for the fall semester. So, Van Hof allowed professors to request to use Canvas in their courses.
Starting next fall, Canvas will become the primary learning management system, but Blackboard will still be available by request until May 2018. After that point, Blackboard will be shut down for UNL users, and any content stored in Blackboard will be lost.
One Canvas feature students often praise is the ability to receive notifications when assignments or tests are added or graded. Notifications can be received via email, text, push notification through the app or even a Twitter direct message.
Students can customize how often alerts are sent. Each type of notification has a slider, allowing users to pick an instant notification, a daily digest, a weekly summary or no notifications.
Canvas sports several features that Blackboard does not offer. With Blackboard, students could only receive emails at the email address they have in MyRed. With Canvas, students can add other emails and specify which notifications are sent to which account.
Not only can students learn about new assignments on their phones, they can also complete them on that device without going to a computer.
Almost all the schools in the Big Ten Conference are somewhere in the process of switching to Canvas as a learning management system. Canvas reports having more than 17 million users worldwide.