Justification for Canvas Purchase

[leromt]

My organization is asking me to provide justification for migrating our campus from Blackboard to Canvas and I'd like your assistance.

Aside from "look and feel" differences and "it's so user friendly and much easier to use" aspects, can any of you help with "What does Canvas do for us that Blackboard (or Moodle) cannot?"  

For example, can you support the items below with examples or things of your own?
  -- Because Canvas is open source, writing LTIs to add customizations is much easier.  
  -- Canvas has a more robust API for integrating into our SIS.
  -- Canvas allows for a much more robust collaboration environment between student and teacher (true? If so, how)
What functionality does Canvas provide that is unique and not provided by Blackboard or any other LMS?

Can anybody help me with this?  I have literally 48 hours to submit it (deadline is noon, Fri, 6 May 22)

Tom

[leromt]

ANY feedback on how to justify Canvas over Blackboard or Moodle is also appreciated.

[rmurchshafer]

Hi Tom,

Sometimes it's difficult to have concrete examples or cases to illustrate why one system is better than another.  With your first two examples, I can't say that that Canvas is better at this time for LTIs and robust APIs, but I can say Canvas was a leader in both. If Blackboard and/or Moodle are also good in those categories it's due to the openness of Canvas over the last 10+ years driving that. 

I've worked with two schools doing LMS migrations.  One went from Blackboard to ANGEL, and then when Blackboard purchased ANGEL a few years later migrated to Canvas (2011).  At my current school I helped migrate them from Blackboard to Canvas in in 2017.  With both cases a lot of why I wanted to move to Canvas was the culture of the company.  That's difficult to quantify and admittedly is not the same as it was 8 years ago, I still think it's a driving factor.  The Canvas Community for instance it's a big factor, even though I realize your question did sit for a couple of days with no response 😃

Have you ever seen the famous "squid diagram" for LMS market share?  https://philonedtech.com/state-of-higher-ed-lms-market-for-us-and-canada-year-end-2021-edition/  Phil has been doing this for a number of years and it's always interesting to look at.  Canvas is clearly the leader when it comes to growth and now marketshare.  I know it's not always best to make a decision because that is what everybody else is doing, but if so many other schools are choosing Canvas that must say something about the the product (and community).

Back to the products themselves; it's been a number of years since I've used Blackboard and even longer for Moodle.  When I last did a LMS comparison one of the exercises I did was to recreate an online course in each to compare workflow of creating content and accessing content as a student.  For online courses in particular I felt that Canvas worked so much better in terms of content organization and flow.  Bb felt more like a web site that served as a filing cabinet to put stuff.  Moodle had a lot of options, but in many ways was disoriented like a bunch of different people with different ideas designed parts of it.

I don't know if any of this helps given your specific questions but it's the best I can do given it's been a while since I've used Bb or Moodle.  

Rick

[nwilson7]

To echo much of what @rmurchshafer mentioned I have been through several LMS switches as well as comparing them to see which one fit our needs.  I have used Bb as a student but never as a Faculty/Staff but it is one that keeps coming up in the running for switches but always falls short.  The last time I was involved in a choice, it came down to Canvas and Blackboard (this was 2013).  At that time Bb had tons of great things on their roadmap but the product as it stood was far less superior than Canvas. All the features we were looking for were already developed in Canvas instead of just being on the roadmap.  At my current institution, I came in to help with the transition from Moodle to Canvas.  Our super heavy power users loved Moodle because there was a huge developer base and lots of reporting tools.  Every other user has preferred Canvas as it has a much more user friendly design and has been pretty easy to learn.  One extremely important piece that has not been mentioned is the students.  I have yet to talk to a student that has not preferred Canvas and felt it was by far the better product.  We are a Higher Ed institution and Canvas has the majority of the k-12 market so it has also been great that students come to us with potentially 13 years of already using Canvas.  They also really like the app.

There are going to be things that other systems do better, and I am sure you will have at least one faculty that prefers the way whatever system did it.  That said, I think Canvas has been the best of the 5 or 6 LMS systems I have used and supported.

-Nick

[leromt]

Thanks to @nwilson7  and @rmurchshafer  for your replies. This is all good information, however, I need to provide specifically measurable things like “ ONLY Canvas has this feature” or “this Canvas feature will save me x number of manhours because …”. 

I look forward to more interaction with this community.  Thanks for the kind welcome.

Tom

[kona]

Greetings! I've never served as a Bb Admin, but I've used Bb as a teacher and am currently using it as a student. I've also worked with a number of adjuncts who, in any given semester, might be using Bb, Canvas, D2L, or even Moodle at the various colleges they are working for. From the adjunct perspective, what we always here is how much more user-friendly Canvas is compared to Bb. This is in terms of setting the course up, managing the course, and rolling a course over from semester to semester. On a personal side, I also experienced this as a teacher. It always felt like Bb overcomplicated things. I would know what I needed to do but found it difficult to find the correct setting(s) to make Bb work correctly.

As a student, who has been using Bb for almost 2 years, I can't stand it. The gradebook is ridiculously non-user friendly for students. This includes journals, wikis (the worst), not being able to access the assignment from the gradebook, and more I'm probably forgetting. Also, Faculty can comment on assignments, but students can't provide follow-up comments. Course navigation in Bb is horrible. I know some people love the folder system, but as a student, it's horrible when there are layers upon layers of folders. I normally end up randomly clicking around until I find what I'm looking for. A great example of not being able to find course content is recorded lectures (using Collaborate). Why in the world would I, as a student, think I'd need to click on the three vertical lines on the upper left to find recordings? That makes ZERO sense. I'm not sure if it's just my college, but no one here uses the internal Bb messaging Inbox. Instead, everything is done outside of the LMS. In Canvas, all the faculty I know and work with love and almost exclusively use the Canvas Inbox (internal messaging). 

I also did a quick search and found the following quick video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap97oONRAqM 

Also, here's two functional comparisons of the two -- https://princeton.instructure.com/courses/478/pages/blackboard-and-canvas-functional-comparison & https://canvas.tccd.edu/courses/206/pages/blackboard-to-canvas-comparison-and-preparation 

And, another resources -- https://www.csub.edu/its/lmseval 

Hope this helps! Kona