Rodney Santos is another student who is using Canvas for the first time this semester but has used ANGEL for two courses, along with the U.S. Army LMS, which is a web-based LMS that manages training information and career planning for soldiers.
"Comparatively, Canvas is leaps and bounds ahead [of ANGEL]," Santos said.
Santos said that he really appreciates how graphically pleasing Canvas is compared to other LMS platforms he has used. Like Smith, he said the Big Blue Button has proven to be very helpful with facilitating group meetings versus Google Hangouts and Skype.
Santos said the quiz vehicle in Canvas has been pretty good as well, with built-in functionality to easily mark and index each question so he is able to scroll back through and find the particular questions he was unsure about. The way the grades are presented to the student is very clean and he said he likes that he can see comments from the instructor with his grades.
Lack of proper email integration was a big issue Santos said he had, where the email between his Penn State account and Canvas did not sync after he read an email in his Penn State account then went back into Canvas to find that it was still marked as unread. He also found the sidebar in Canvas to have extraneous links, such as between the modules section and the lessons section, which duplicated information and presented it in a different format.
“I feel like there could be uses on the mobile device, but because they are not currently functional, I don't really have a use for them,” Santos said.
Santos said he would use the mobile Canvas app if the Big Blue Button feature were active. However, he can still access it from his mobile browser.
"A feature that could be developed going forward is it would be nice if this was linked to my course plan, so that in my profile, I could look at my actual course plan as dictated by my academic adviser,” Santos said. “I could see which course I've completed, I can see which courses I need to register for, and based on that, they should all link to those courses."
Lauren Mayer