“I really like Canvas, and I hope Rice adopts it,” explains Rachel Kimbro, an associate professor in the department of Sociology regarding her pilot of this Learning Management System (LMS) for her Medical Sociology (SOCI 345) course. Kimbro is one of several professors this fall who are piloting Canvas, an LMS option that is being explored by a joint group from the Digital Education Advisory Committee, the Office of Information Technology, the Office of Digital Education, and Fondren Library. As a way to assess the teaching and learning needs of Rice’s unconventional campus, this partnership is examining the aspects of an LMS that are most useful to professors on campus as well as the transition process from OWL-Space to Canvas. For the past ten years, Rice professors and students have utilized OWL-Space as an online classroom venue where resources, quizzes, exams, chat rooms, announcements, grades, and more have been shared amongst classes. Just as the students using the technology only change once a year as a class exits and a class enters the Sallyport, OWL-Space is only updated annually, too..
Sample Canvas course web site
During this process, Canvas was deemed a potential candidate. Unlike OWL-Space, Canvas is updated every three weeks, which means that it is constantly adapting to best serve the needs of its audience of constantly growing minds. Last summer, a few professors piloted Canvas during their courses, and, this fall, a few more professors were invited to test Canvas and see if it satisfies their needs. For instance, Dr. Renata Ramos chose to pilot Canvas for her Biomedical Engineering Instrumentation Lab (BIOE 385) because it sounded like it boasted a good user interface to best meet students’ needs.
One month into the semester, students in both Ramos’s Bioinstrumentation Lab and Kimbro’s Medical Sociology have responded positively. “It’s easier for the students,” Ramos explains, “OWL-Space had a lot of ways to store data that was not helpful, but now with Canvas it’s easier for students to see and find announcements and calendars.” Additionally, she used to have a lot of additional files in resources on OWL-Space which would result in many questions about where the files were from students, but she has not received many inquiries about it this semester and thinks its easier for them to find this information on Canvas. Meanwhile, Kimbro’s sociology students are required to take daily quizzes and have seamlessly transitioned into using Canvas for these assignments as well as for uploading their papers. As the semester continues, collaboration between the Digital Education Advisory Committee, the Office of Information Technology, the Office of Digital Education, and Fondren Library will gather more student feedback on the pilot experience.
Not only is student opinion critical, but professors’ feedback is also pivotal as they spend vast amounts of time preparing for their physical classrooms as well as their virtual classrooms. Ramos reports that she likes her experience thus far, although she found it challenging at first. One of her favorite aspects of Canvas is that she can control when students see information in a lesson: “It is good for sequential lessons or for organizing lessons. I enjoy that students have to complete things sequentially before being able to complete things or view subsequent aspects of the lessons. I really like that.” At the same time, she has found some sides of Canvas frustrating to adapt to such as the inability to hide rubrics in quizzes or taking time to find features she is accustomed to using quickly on OWL-Space. Kimbro also experienced a transitional learning curve for a couple days and found the “Inbox” feature a bit confusing, but she has overall found it “easy to use” and a smooth process. Kimbro expands, “Grading papers is made almost enjoyable with the built-in annotation features! It’s so easy to mark up student papers and provide feedback, right in the interface. My Teaching Assistants and I are able to simultaneously grade and offer feedback quite easily.”
As with any change, there are some challenging steps in transitioning to a new virtual classroom. However, as Ramos and Kimbro have noticed in their experiences with Canvas in their respective science and humanities courses, Canvas is a viable candidate for Rice campus’s Learning Management System. The pilot professors, the Digital Education Advisory Committee, the Office of Information Technology, the Office of Digital Education, and Fondren Library will continue to evaluate the pilot courses this semester and through an expanded pilot in the the spring with more faculty by surveying students and professors. In the end, the objective of an online classroom space is to best serve the professors and students of Rice University, and this campus wide collaboration is focused on attaining this goal. For more information about the Canvas pilot, visit http://www.rice.edu/canvas/.
Sample Canvas lesson page