After 20 years of Blackboard, select Ohio University classrooms welcome a new learning management system, or LMS, Canvas.
Phase 1 of integrating Canvas began during the 2024 Spring Semester, including 90 courses and 55 faculty members implementing the new application fully.
“Students will be able to go to GoOHIO, the app, and click on the Canvas link, so if that opens up for them, they are part of the Phase 1 group,” Senior Director for Teaching and Learning Technologies Eszti Major-Rohrer said. “We have been also communicating with them, so everyone who is in Phase 1 should have gotten messages from both the faculty and us.”
Students have to take a Canvas course to learn the ins and outs and will have support from Canvas itself. Phase 1 expands to regional campuses and online courses, Rohrer said.
“We asked each of the colleges to nominate at least one, maybe two faculty members who will be willing to teach in Canvas in the spring,” she said. “This way, we can have student and faculty feedback about both the preparation and the actual teaching experience and learning experience.”
Ultimately, the motivation for a new learning management system came from a surplus of issues had by students and staff over 20-plus years.
“Over this time, we have had so much feedback from faculty and students about concerns and issues (with Blackboard),” Rohrer said. “‘Why are they not looking at something (different)?’”
She said Canvas was the clear answer after evaluating different systems.
“When you test a system like that, it's of course not your course, it's not your brand yet, but as they were logging in, they just found it easier to use,” Rohrer said.
Canvas has more to offer compared to Blackboard, like a course calendar to show assignment due dates and teacher evaluations for the end of the semester.
“It's a much more flexible system in terms of that it really allows all of those different (teaching) approaches to be sort of built into the LMS in a more effective way,” Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Sarah Poggione said.
Rohrer and Poggione both agreed that Canvas is more “intuitive” than Blackboard.
“Some people have talked about it being a little bit more intuitive, more like you would think about a website might be used and how you would find things as opposed to this, go into this folder and then go into this folder and then go down into some folders,” Poggione said.
Rohrer said students enrolled in online courses may face more challenges navigating Canvas since those courses heavily rely on learning management systems.
Although the change may be extensive and will take a few weeks to get used to, the academic benefit will outweigh any growing pains during the transition period, Krystal Geyer, associate director for the Center of Entrepreneurship, said.
“I love it so much, I'm a little bit of an (enthusiast) when it comes to Canvas,” Geyer said. “I have been working from both an instructor and a student standpoint in Canvas for about 10 years, and I deeply prefer it to Blackboard.”
Geyer is teaching a Phase 1 course, Introduction to Entrepreneurship, and said she is curious to see how grades will change with Canvas at the end of the semester.
“It is very, very intuitive,“ Geyer said. "It's brighter. It's more colorful; instructors have a lot more personalization capability, I think, in Canvas than Blackboard. Canvas has a really great feature that you can input potential grades, so if you see you have assignments coming up, and you want to factor out like what do I need to get an A, you can do that.”
Rohrer said in a previous Post article, that all courses will implement Canvas by the fall 2026.
