Canvas Is Not Built With Educators in Mind

Canvas is a learning management system that I use under the name Carmen. It mostly does its job correctly, but it often boggles my mind how little it seems to map to the education environment. So, I wanted to rant about it!

What Is Canvas?
The Problem(s) With Canvas
Lack of General Desired Features And Inclusion of Weird Features

What Is Canvas?

Canvas (and its alternatives like Blackboard) is a learning management system that basically every university uses to facilitate coursework. It has features like accepting assignment submissions online, enabling virtual quizzes and exams, and hosting a general repository of course files like slides.

From the educator perspective, I use Canvas for a variety of its features. For example, I administer exams through Canvas, which relieves me of some of the pain of grading. I also have a team of graders that are granted access to Canvas, so they can go in and grade written assignments and programming projects.

From the student perspective, I used to use Canvas to track all my assignment due dates. After all, Canvas lists all your courses side-by-side, so you can see what needs to get done.

Of course, I am sure there are many other uses for Canvas as it is fairly deep in features. Unfortunately, many of these features don’t exactly work the way you would like, so I figured I’d rant about that a bit.

The Problem(s) With Canvas

Where I work, we have a custom fork of Canvas called Carmen, so I’m not sure exactly how well my complaints will match up with Canvas more broadly. That said, most of the issues I’ve run into are also known issues on Canvas forums, so I suspect it’s just a silly name change.

With that said, I’m going to spend the rest of this section listing off the many ways that Canvas has given me problems over the last handful of years.

Group Work Is Notoriously Inflexible

In one of my classes, we form teams using the “groups” feature of Canvas. Each team is responsible for submitting 9 projects over the course of a semester, and the groups feature allows a single student to submit on behalf of their group.

Of course, if you’ve ever worked in a team before, you know that things rarely go smoothly. In addition, it’s not uncommon to lose teammates for whatever reason (e.g., dropping the course). As a result, it’s helpful if the groups feature can accommodate these very normal situations, yet it doesn’t.

If a team needs to change its membership, the only way to do this is to create a new group set with all the same teams except the teams that need to change. Then, every future assignment needs to be updated to the new group set.

Already, what should be a seamless change is actually quite painful, yet it only gets worse. The only way to actually update future assignments is if no team has submitted yet. If a single team has submitted, then the group set for that assignment is static.

If that’s hard to believe, check out this forum thread from 2019 about the issue as well as this set of workarounds by the University of Minnesota.

In my own experience, the group set trick works but only very early in a semester. As tensions grow between teammates near the end of a semester, I find that it would just be nice to give individual members of a team different grades, but even that’s too much to ask.

Question Banks Are a Gift And a Curse

One of the seemingly nice features of Canvas is the ability to make quizzes. This saves educators some time as most question types can be autograded. Likewise, there’s no more need to head to the printer before class, nor is there a need to collect quizzes, grade them, and return them.

As an added bonus, Canvas has support for question banks. I’m not sure what their idea was, but I like the idea of question banks. Basically, what you can do is put together a handful of questions for a single learning objective in a group. Then, when you put together a quiz, you can create a section that selects a few questions from the bank. That way, you know you’re hitting the right objectives AND everyone’s quiz is a little different.

Unfortunately, Canvas always seems to find a way to ruin a good thing. Again, imagine that you are human and are capable of making mistakes. For example, maybe you create a question and input the wrong answer. Now, when students take your quiz, they will select the correct answer but get it wrong.

Typically, I would expect this to be a simple change. Go into the question bank, fix the question, and maybe hit a button like “regrade” to signal that you want to update grades based on the updated question bank. Well, Canvas doesn’t let you do that. Any changes to the question bank will not be reflected in any submitted exams.

This results in a comically stupid scenario if you’re lucky where you catch an issue after a couple of early submissions and update the question bank for future submissions. More often than not, you will find the issue after everyone has taken the quiz, in which case you have to regrade all the quizzes manually.

The irony of this being that quizzes without question banks can be regraded—just not quizzes that use question banks. As far as I can tell, this has been an issue since at least 2020 with no sights on a fix.

Each Section of a Course Must Be Configured Separately

To be entirely transparent, it’s possible that the need to configure sections separately is entirely a department specific issue (i.e., my department just doesn’t have Canvas configured correctly). That said, as someone who teaches three sections of the same course each semester, it’s a huge pain in the ass to setup the same course three times.

While it’s possible to configure a single course and copy it to a new course, it’s important to note that the new course probably has different deadlines. I believe Canvas has a feature for this, but I can’t imagine it works very well. After all, different semesters have different schedules (e.g., fall break vs. spring break).

I am fortunate because my course coordinator makes “course cartridges” each semester to load into our Canvas courses. However, because I have a lot of personal differences with the way I run my course, I still have to configure the three sections separately.

Originally, I solved this by writing a Python script to automate a lot of the painful parts. However, even this was painful because the script had to physically click buttons. Then, a student told me about the Canvas API, which I decided to give a chance. Now, I generate my course automatically using the API, but the script is almost 800 lines long.

Even with the automation, I still find it annoying because tools like TopHat handle multiple sections seamlessly. I can just configure the master section and TopHat distributes the content to three separate sections.

That said, to be fair to Canvas, they have an ability to “cross-list” a section. I am unable to do what this page says, but I’m sure it would make my life easier.

Rubrics Are Awesome But Also Broken

In my field, it’s uncommon for educators to use rubrics. This is a bit sad to me because rubrics improve clarity of communication between students, graders, and instructors. Instead, most folks in my field opt for ambiguous requirements with no clear idea of how students are being assessed.

As a result, one of the personal changes I mentioned previously was to include rubrics on every assignment. This ends up being really nice for many reasons, but my personal favorite is how much easier it makes grading low-stakes assignments. Now, I can bust out my iPad, skim an assignment, and tap the appropriate rubric value. Done! They have a grade.

The problem becomes that rubrics are not enforced by Canvas. Therefore, when my graders use Canvas, some of them use the rubrics and some don’t. This becomes a nightmare for me and the students because it’s never clear what was wrong about their work. Even worse, when I offer resubmissions, it’s hard to tell what the student did to improve.

In addition, until I automated the creation of my Canvas page, I would manually import rubrics to each assignment. Compound this with three sections and we’re talking over 100 rubrics that need to be attached to assignments. And the weirdest thing is that Canvas keeps duplicating the rubrics. As a result, if I ever reuse a rubric, it gets renamed (e.g., rubric (2), rubric (3), etc.). Of course, this is a minor gripe, but it creates a mess in Canvas.

Lack of General Desired Features And Inclusion of Weird Features

While many of the features I use daily are broken in some way, there is also just a general lack of good features. For example, it would be nice to see the differences between two submissions. Right now, I have to sort of click between them, and I can never have both the old submission and the current submission up at the same time without downloading them both. So, either Canvas needs to allow me to see both at the same time or provide some sort of “diff” between the two.

Also, assignment comments are a bit of a mess. Students seem to assume that if they comment on an assignment we will get notified. While this is true for the Canvas app, it’s not like I get an email every time a student comments on an assignment. As a result, it causes a break in communication where students think they’ve expressed something that the teaching team may never see.

Overall, Canvas does a good enough job to get me through a semester, but there are still lingering issues that make me wonder if the Canvas team ever consults educators. There is just so much about the tool that assumes perfect use and doesn’t account for the flexibility of the real world. With how many universities use Canvas, I am amazed that they don’t have infinite funds to refine the tool. Yet, there are issues still lingering from as early as 2020.

With that said, I have spent entirely too long on this rant, and I need to get started on my annual review. I also need to get to work on my birthday post. We’ll see how far we get with both!

In the meantime, why not check out some of these related posts:

And if you want, you can support the site even further through my list of ways to grow the site. Otherwise, that’s it for today! See you next time.

I had to add an addendum to this piece because I’m getting ready for the semester and noticed a comically stupid feature.

Normally, I like to report out several descriptive statistics for exams to my students, so they can see where they fit in the class. Typically, the way I do that is by going to the exam page on Canvas, which lists most of the statistics I care about:

Unfortunately, this doesn’t include median, which I think is a useful statistic. As a result, I would usually download the spreadsheet of grades and calculate it myself.

That was until today when I was going through an individual student’s grades as I was writing them a recommendation letter when I saw this:

This drives me nuts. Why aren’t these statistics shared in the quiz overview? Why do I have to click into an individual student’s grades to see this? Canvas will never make sense to me.