Mandating Canvas usage would benefit student success

GRANT CRAGG

Staff Writer

Since UMW adopted Canvas as the university learning management system in 2011, many professors have not been taking advantage of the benefits that make learning and teaching more effective. For students to keep organized and have an easier transition each semester, using Canvas should be mandatory for all professors at UMW, and that mandate should be enforced.

According to UMW’s website, every professor is required to use Canvas. The requirements read, “All courses must use Canvas in basic ways. This includes providing the syllabus, course schedule, faculty contact information, office hours and means of communication, information on how students will access their grades or feedback, and links to any other sites/platforms that are used for the course with explanation of use and expectations.”

These basic requirements are easy for the professors to meet at the beginning of the semester, but they often do not maintain the course page throughout the semester, since there is nobody monitoring each professor’s Canvas pages. 

In addition to the UMW Canvas guidelines, professors should also be mandated to have accurate grade weighting, proper assignment due dates and the syllabus under the syllabus tab. They should also routinely check their Canvas inbox. In order to ensure professors are meeting these Canvas expectations all semester long, Canvas course pages should be monitored by UMW to assure that they are being used properly throughout the semester.

As a student currently in courses that do not use Canvas, it is apparent that the university and the professors are not upholding the stated terms. From personal experience, I have found it very challenging to stay organized in these courses. I find that I miss or overlook assignments when they’re not clearly stated in Canvas or the professor uses another tool.  If all professors at UMW met this requirement and maintained their Canvas page, it would set students up for greater success. 

“I began using Canvas in earnest with the moving to online classes and began to design an asynchronous online course for Intro to Sports Management and have since used Canvas to house all my course information in classes that are synchronous online, as well as in-person,” said Drew Delaney, the head men’s lacrosse coach and senior lecturer in the athletics department. “I have also moved my team’s playbook and other team materials to Canvas to encourage my players to get on the site. 
According to an article by Phil Hill, the co-founder of MindWires, Canvas was the most popular learning management system for higher education in the United States and Canada, working with 32 percent of institutions. Canvas continues to grow faster than all other learning management systems “with 51 percent of new implementations” in 2020.

When professors utilize Canvas and keep it up to date, it allows students to achieve better grades and stay organized. It doesn’t make sense to require Canvas but not enforce that requirement.

“As a student, I have had a course where the professor only used Canvas in the beginning of the semester, but by the end it was so out of date it wasn’t even worth checking it,” said Cameron Walker, a senior business administration major. “It makes it very challenging to be successful in a course when you don’t have an accurate grade in Canvas. I would have to calculate my own grade, which took time away from doing the actual work I needed for the course.” 

Walker added, “It’s very inconvenient when you go to check Canvas to see what assignments you have and all but one of your courses has a Canvas page and the assignments and due dates are right there in the Canvas calendar. But for the last course, you have to check the professor’s course page on the internet.”

If all classes at UMW used Canvas, there would be decreased chances of missing assignments and confusion because Canvas automatically sends out reminders about upcoming assignments. Also, students would not be confused about their grades in a course since they would be able to view it through Canvas.

Whether you want to see your overall grade in a class, contact a classmate, find a file that your professor has posted or look at the syllabus to see your professor’s office hours, Canvas exists to make academics easier. 

Canvas makes it easy for students to stay organized because all of their work is in the same place. It also can help students that struggle with organization and time management. 

“Not having any canvas page at all made it extremely difficult to track past and future assignments,” said Easton Kittinger, a senior business administration major. “It also made it challenging to know my grade at any given time. Since everything in the class was done by paper, I had to stay extremely organized to calculate my grade whenever I needed. Having to do this made the course more stressful than it had to be.” 

Other students have similar complaints about courses not being on Canvas.

“In one of the courses I took we had a Canvas page, but it was only used for the final grade of the class,” said Sam Allen, a senior geographical information systems major. “Everything else was done through Slack. All of our assignments, grades and comments were given through Slack. This made it very tedious to find out how I was doing in the course, and it felt like I was jumping through unnecessary hoops.” 

If UMW wants to set its students up for success, it is imperative that UMW mandates the usage of Canvas for every course.

“As much as professors want to protect their autonomy, it is important that we also adapt to the needs and demands of our students,” said Delaney. “Canvas is a pretty powerful tool if someone cares to learn, and it provides a consistent and somewhat uniform way for students and professors to stay up-to-date in a given course.”