Canvas for Schools — Rating, Pros, and Cons

Reviewed June 2020.

Remote is eating the world. More and more schools are using Learning Management Systems to work outside the classroom or to augment the physical classroom entirely.

Canvas, from Instructure, was made for just this. It’s one of the most widely used EdTech tools, but is it actually any good? Read on to see if it’s overrated and if you should consider an alternative for your school or classroom.

Canvas LMS Rating

We would rate Canvas as overrated.

Rating: 2.75/5

Though it’s used a lot and has many in-depth and considerate pros, there are also some serious disadvantages.

Canvas LMS Pros and Advantages

Share-ability: Replace Google Docs or Microsoft Word in the cloud with Canvas. The Canvas LMS lets students share work right there on the platform. This is very good for remote projects.

Organization: Canvas lets you organize your students’ grades, so they are easy to sort through. While minor, organization is of significant importance when there are many kids to manage.

Permissions: You can give different permissions to different users so that you can have the teacher with the top-level permission and students under her. Different roles can even assign projects, other roles, and assignments. There can also be assistants. The way in which different users can access your virtual classroom can be mixed and varied.

Stay notified: Canvas sends alerts about upcoming projects, assignments, feedback, and questions. Canvas helps both teachers and students stay organized.

Personalization: Canvas allows for white-labeled institutions. You can use your school’s logo and have a school-specific domain. This is standard for all LMS’s as it’s one of the features all schools want most, but it’s good to see in Canvas.

Breadth: There’s a full breadth of assignments and projects professors can create on Canvas.

Cloud hosting: Everything is hosted on Canvas’s servers, making it easy to manage for schools. This, again, is standard with any LMS, but it’s important to recognize.

Lots to do: There are so many options in Canvas that you can almost get lost in the possibilities. This is a blessing and a curse, but for teachers who don’t mind a steep learning curve, the amount of options and customization can be great.

Canvas LMS Cons and Disadvantages

Clunky: We wish Canvas had spent more time refining the user experience and user interface rather than throwing in so many features and customizations. Frankly put, there’s too much, and it feels overwhelming. This is not a simple plug-and-play school solution, and combined with the bugs, at times, Canvas can feel unusable.

Bad duplication: It’s incredibly valuable to be able to duplicate assignments so that they can be recreated in different ways or recreated in courses and classes. Canvas’s functionality here is limited and sometimes doesn’t work at all.

Not made for higher-ed: Though the marketing on its website suggests otherwise, Canvas is not made for higher education. It’s too difficult to configure options related to enrollment, finance and loans, curriculums, grades, and faculty. There’s too much functionality and user experience considerations missing from Canvas when it comes to major universities and colleges.

Useless tabs: There are a lot of tabs in Canvas that feel outright useless, confusing, and add to the clunkiness. The People tab is one such tab.

Buggy: Canvas is not reliable. Too often, there are issues uploading, navigating, and editing. Sometimes we’d spend dozens of minutes customizing something, only to lose that customization on our next visit. This occurred infrequently for documents, but even twice is too many times.

Not mobile-friendly: Canvas is best used on desktop, not tablet, and definitely not mobile. There’s too much going on to be used on a smaller screen. Google Classroom would be better for mobile.

Issues with sharing files: Canvas requires too many clicks to share data and files, and takes too long. We’ve had students complain and teachers complain, and we’ve seen this ourselves. This is a make or break issue, as document sharing can be so critical to an LMS.

Conclusion

We reviewed Canvas personally, as well as with teachers we work with, and the findings were clear. Canvas, while an in-depth solution to many teachers’ needs, has too many problems that need addressing.

It’s 2020, and we find many of these problems, especially the ones centered around usability, to be unforgivable. It’s hard enough to conduct a classroom remote; we wish Canvas would make it easier.

For this reason, our rating is 2.75 out of 5.

Agree or disagree? Please share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below! We look forward to a lively discussion.