Canvas LMS is a comprehensive learning management system that enhances the educational experience. It offers a user-friendly interface that allows educators to create and manage courses, assignments, and assessments. Canvas enables seamless communication and collaboration between students and teachers. It supports various multimedia formats, making it easy to incorporate engaging content into lessons. Canvas also provides a mobile app, ensuring accessibility on the go. Its built-in analytics and reporting allow educators to track student progress and identify areas for improvement. Canvas LMS can integrate with other educational tools and platforms, enhancing its functionality. Canvas LMS is a powerful and versatile platform that empowers educators to deliver effective and engaging online learning experiences.
| Type | Title | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Learning Management Systems (LMS) | Jul 30, 2025 | Download |
| Product | Reviews, tips, and advice from real users | Jul 30, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Canvas LMS vs Moodle | Jul 30, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Canvas LMS vs SAP SuccessFactors Learning | Jul 30, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Canvas LMS vs CYPHER Learning | Jul 30, 2025 | Download |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cornerstone Learn | 4.1 | 8.3% | 100% | 29 interviewsAdd to research |
| Moodle | 4.0 | 9.7% | 93% | 29 interviewsAdd to research |
Canvas LMS users say the platform has improved accreditation and external monitoring.
We use it for all on-campus and remote course deliveries, all assignment submissions, and all exams, except for medical school exams where you have to do practicals, but even there, you have to record the practical exam results in Canvas. So, it has got wide applicability from standard undergraduate school right up through medical college and hard sciences. We can do everything with it.
We are using its latest version. I don't know how the IT department has deployed it at the university. It is probably cloud-based because they have multiple campuses, but I have no way of knowing.
Its easy adaptability to whatever form or methodology you are using to teach is valuable. It tends to be seamless, and it is very much a self-intuitive product. It requires almost no instruction, and you can be fully up to speed and ready to run on it. You can bring someone in who has never worked with any online learning or LMS system, and in a week's timeframe, they would almost be fully functional because Canvas is so simple to use.
The high-tech interactivity with other software, like ArcGIS or RSA Archer, can be better. It is not as easily compatible with them. You can put apps in it that the students can then access, but the routing of apps through the Canvas system slows down functionality on the other types of products.
As much as I've used it, I don't need any additional features. For what it is used for as a learning management system, it really does work. I haven't seen anything that would indicate it was a problem.
We migrated to it in 2015. So, it has been seven years.
It is very stable. I see very few glitches with it, and updates don't have to be propagated halfway through. We don't have to propagate emergency fixes and patches during the semester. It is a stable system to use.
It is scalable. There must be 20,000 people using it on that campus. We run a medical college, a public health department, and the hard sciences department. We also have a lot of things that are spread out across the state of Florida through Canvas. So, it is pretty scalable.
In terms of our plans to increase its usage, I don't know what the university is going to do, but right now, the university is saturated with Canvas. Even if you're doing classes in a regular standard classroom, all of your exams, all of your quizzes, all of your practicals, and all of your teaching are recorded and loaded into the Canvas system for future review by accreditors. So, it is pretty well saturated on that particular campus.
I've had to get technical support from the Canvas people themselves on occasion. When that happened, the campus IT people, who were the Canvas people, actually stayed with me while I was working with the software design people. They were very helpful, and they very much understood right away what was needed to fix the issue, but it was very rare that I needed help
We switched from Blackboard to Canvas. I was around when we transitioned from Blackboard to Canvas, and everybody was like, "Oh no, we finally learned Blackboard." When we transitioned to Canvas, we never ever heard a complaint. Everybody suddenly said that this is nice. Unlike the constant grumbling about Blackboard, which everybody still grumbles about, when it came to Canvas, everyone found it easy.
It was probably easy.
Initially, it was an in-house deployment. I have no idea if it was with assistance from the corporation. I also have no idea if it is hosted on local servers or on the cloud because I'm not a part of that process.
I have no idea about the people required for its maintenance, but I have had to have very few interactions with IT over trying to manage, manipulate, or make it do something different. There were very few instances where I had to pick the phone up and say to IT that I got a problem. In every one of those instances, it was because connections from certain countries back into the system were blocked. They had to make special exceptions or rules for my specific computer while I was traveling. Other than that, there were virtually no problems with it.
We have absolutely seen an ROI. It has made our accreditation reviews and our outside monitoring much more seamless than the last version of Blackboard that I have had experience using.
When the decision was made to shift from Blackboard over to Canvas, they also concurrently looked at Moodle as a system that could be utilized. Moodle is open source, but it has some inherent issues with it. That's why they went with Canvas LMS instead of Moodle at that particular school.
It functionally works, and it is intuitive and easy to learn, which makes it significantly more advantageous than the Blackboard LMS or Moodle LMS.
Canvas is definitely up there at level nine out of ten.
