CANVAS

With the rise of Coronavirus and online options for college classes, Canvas has been a staple tool for students taking online classes and even with online assignments. Canvas, similar to Google Classroom, is a program that allows teachers to assign work through the web instead of wasting time printing and wasting paper. It allows students to be notified of when assignments are due and even allows them to take quizzes and test online. With most of the world being forced to do everything digitally Canvas allows access to Zoom through ConferNow which allows for teachers to schedule lectures and meetings. Canvas also allows you to message other students if needed. Without Canvas, school online would be incredibly difficult, and although Google Classroom is a solid option for courses in elementary school through high school, Canvas has more features such as users being able to directly embed LTIs such as Flipgrid.

Although Canvas is better than Google Classroom in terms of the number of features, Google Classroom's interface is simpler and easier to understand than Canvas's. Google Classroom, being a Google program, also makes it slightly easier to turn in assignments using Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. Canvas's user system can also use some work as well. Canvas may have the ability to allow you to see other students but it's obscure. There's no way to search for other people unless they're in your class and most people don't even know of the profile feature. Personally, I don't believe there are many problems with Canvas except that they should redo its design because to me it seems a bit bland and that they should make its interface a bit more simpler since it can be confusing to navigate through.

Learning & Teaching: Various useful features, e.g., upload/download files, page creation, announcement and discussion and valuable apps containing ubiquitous tools, like MS Team meetings, Panopto, Vimeo, YouTube, Dropbox etc.

Assessment: Huge variety of Quizzes, secured quizzes, quizzes SWOT statistics, lockdown browser, Assignments, anti-Plagiarism tools, Moderation, Marker Allocation, Grades,

Research: Conferences, collaborations, Canvas digital forum support.

Assessment of students: sorting may not be sync'd with local university database. i.e., downloaded grades and university's marksheet contains names of students starting differently. Imaging if you have 300+ names! this causes sorting issues while assessing online.

Quizzes are great but cannot create duplicate questions, some time academic need this feature. Also because quiz question can be an Essay therefore, this type of assessment must include anti-plagiarism tool (i.e., Turnitin etc), not available in Quizzes but only in Assignments.

Reference Manager and Library tools are not available but can be added, e.g., Talis, StudyNet etc. These features are necessary for cognitive learning and cresting your own Library does help. I need to use either Endnotes or Mendeley as an external app on my desktop or on cloud.

Its good to use integrated Email tool but its not linked to outlook or other email app. I cannot send email to other people outside my module, i.e., cannot do cc to manager, examiner etc but I need to permanently add in the list of people.
Also cannot add images etc in text but can attach files. Also cannot format the text but just plaintext is allowed. You cannot add http link to a text.

One thing I love is that unlike Brightspace/D2L, Canvas has continued to develop and gain new features as long as I've used it. I also like how easy it is to transfer course materials from one course to another so that classes I teach each semester, or every other semester, can be easily copied over.

Some of the more advanced/useful features aren't always easy to use, and there isn't great documentation from Canvas. In fact, most of the documentation I've found has been from other university's websites.