{"id":3320,"date":"2016-04-15T21:23:31","date_gmt":"2016-04-16T05:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=3320"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:22:32","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:22:32","slug":"canvassed-on-my-own-petard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2016\/04\/canvassed-on-my-own-petard\/","title":{"rendered":"Canvassed on my own petard"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, the California Community College’s Chancellor’s office, through its Online Education Initiative, is offering the Canvas LMS free to all colleges. There is a catch – if you adopt Canvas this way, your college is not allowed to use any other LMS. It’s a Canvas contract. A Mafia-style, old-fashioned, arm-twisting contract.<\/p>\n

Faculty and other “stake holders” have made the decision to recommend Canvas, which surprises me exactly not at all. I spent useless hours on the survey offering my input, very shortly before the report came out justifying the changeover. I had chosen not to be on the committee that decided this (not that I was asked, you understand) because my forehead is already flat from banging it against walls.<\/p>\n

\"alanlms\"So it’s time to learn to use Canvas. Yes, the instructor who wrote about the Insidious Pedagogy<\/a> of the LMS will now be forced to change to an LMS with fewer features, options and control than the one I’m using. I can hear Alan Levine in the back of my head saying, “But Lisa, you only use the LMS solum pro procuratio<\/em>“! Yes, I know. However, when you live in the same house a long time, your stuff builds up. You customize things for you. You move\u00a0the hinge to the other side of the fridge, and cover up that gap in the floorboards with a pretty rug. After awhile\u00a0you can\u00a0move\u00a0through the rooms at night with the lights off.<\/p>\n

So I already know one thing – my pedagogy for my primary sources, the one I’ve published about<\/a>, the main constructivist part of my class, won’t work in Canvas the way it has in Moodle. Like Blackboard (our other wonderful option), Canvas has “rubrics”, but neither lets you rate or grade a full screen of posts at once, as I do with Moodle’s dropdown ratings. Instead, it’s multiple clicks to grade each post.<\/p>\n

I have tried every feature in Canvas (and Blackboard) to make sure I can’t do this in a similar way. I am using Moodle ratings rather than grades or rubrics – that’s what makes it simple. They translate automatically into percentage grades. And you can’t use ratings in Canvas or Blackboard like that – neither system allows instructor-only ratings<\/p>\n

So up to now, I’ve been grading, with relative ease, about 35 \"moodleratings\"posts per week x 7 classes. I will simply not be able to\u00a0grade 245 posts one at a time every Thursday in Canvas. They’ll have to put me away.<\/p>\n

Similarly, all the writing assignments have been graded on an open forum with drop-down ratings. -><\/p>\n

No can do.<\/p>\n

So, the list of Canvas shortcomings compared to Moodle continues (please, if you know different, correct me!):<\/p>\n