College can be difficult when choosing a major and taking many classes at one time. Canvas is an online website that is used by professors to have students turn in and grade their work for the semester.
Yet, Canvas can be difficult to maneuver which makes it more stressful on students during the semester.
Professors should not make it a requirement for their students to use Canvas for their courses. Canvas can be hard to navigate when it is relatively new to a student. Although there are videos and information one can read, it still can cause frustration.
The website carries many problems from crashing, not uploading certain types of files and recurring maintenance issues.
During the semester, it can make it hard for students to upload their work because sometimes files get messed up when the teacher goes to see the assignment uploaded.
This can also hinder student success, because the site sometimes crashes.
Canvas is not the best tool to enhance a student’s ability to learn. The interface is only meant to turn in homework while they are learning in the classroom.
Students have a better advantage of learning in a classroom than they do online. Physical classrooms are able to offer more methods of interaction than online classrooms can provide.
With more ways to interact with new subject matter, students may have a deeper understanding of the curriculum with longer-lasting retention of the material.
Plus, there is a social component to classroom learning that is compromised with online coursework.” said Jeffrey Mace on his blog “The advantages of classroom learning over online.
The website does not help them in any part of their education because they have the resources they need on campus or when they are in class with their professors.
Open Educational Resources (OER) is “A hub that is a customizable, branded resource center on OER Commons where a network of users can create and share collections, administer groups, and share news and events associated with a project or organization.”
This website is more resourceful because it allows the professors to make the “hub” their own and organize their page the way they want to. The website also gives professors the ability to track which students are more active on the website.
Canvas does not allow professors to do this and sometimes things that they uploaded end up in different files than what they imported them to.
Canvas can be frustrating to both the professors and the students. The files from the previous semesters that professors have had can sometimes be mixed in with the new semester that is starting making it hard for students to find their notes or homework.
