Pedagogical Best Practices in Canvas and Blackboard

Pedagogical best practices in Canvas and Blackboard

Though there are many similarities in the toolsets of Canvas and Blackboard, it is important to note that UNL Canvas users have identified numerous tools in Canvas that out perform Blackboard’s tools in fostering a productive, best-practice-driven teaching environment. In short, Canvas offers enhanced pedagogical functionality in the following ways:

• Peer Review
• Communication
• Group Work
• Discussions
• Outcomes-based education
• Scheduling
• Analytics
• Navigation
• Cloud Storage
• Live Chat
• Mobile
• Graded Video

The table below details these pedagogical enhancements, highlighting the difference between the two systems and, where necessary, providing further context:

Practice / Canvas / Blackboard / Comments and Notes
Peer Review
Peer Review deepens learning by combining the higher-level learning outcomes of creation and evaluation. It can only be done in large enrollment courses when supported by technological systems. / Robust built-in peer review system allowing students to employ rubrics and give comments on the work of peers. / No available tool / John Geppart recently tested the functionality of Canvas's peer review system and validity of the peer reviews. To view his findings, please watch his narrated presentation or download his Powerpoint slide show. Moreover, without a robust system to support peer review, BSAD 220, which is set to launch Fall 2016 and impact over 500 students, won’t work.
Student-teacher communication
Many researchers examining student perceptions of teaching presence find that higher levels of facilitated discourse improves student outcomes (HoslerArend, 2012), with one study noting that “the need for presentation of clear, concise objectives, instructions and general participation guidelines should be a cornerstone of online course development” (Kupczynski & Ice, 2010, p. 32). / Canvas allows students to select their preferred mode for receiving communication from instructors and notifications about assignments, announcements, discussion forum postings, and assignment feedback from instructors.
They can receive communication at multiple email addresses and even via text message. This has proven time and again to be a more effective way of reaching students. / No text message support.
Supports only one email address.
May subscribe to discussion forums and receive email notification of new posts.
These limitations prove problematic because many students do not check their email frequently, or make use of emails accounts that are not the same ones associated with their academic account. / Pilot participants—both students and teachers alike—indicated that one of the key features of Canvas was the ease with which users could use the LMS to communicate. Students appreciated the ability to tell Canvas how to send them notifications. Notification control means that, to the student, interaction in Canvas need not happen within the LMS – student can interact in their preferred medium, which significantly increases their frequency of course interaction.
Teachers stated that communication was far smoother in Canvas, and that they saw improved response rates when they posted discussions and announcements.
Student-student communication
Peer-peer interaction is critical to building a meaningful classroom community in distance and online courses. In courses of all delivery modes, the ability for students to easily communicate with each other is central to efficient problem solving and collective meaning making. / Notification settings, SMS support, Collaborations tool, and Discussions tool provide conferencing, messaging, multiple-author editing of documents, diverse notifications, and a robust discussion platform—all either within the LMS or in email or text message threads. This serves to facilitate communication among students as well as with their instructor. / No SMS support, single-address email support, and discussion boardlimitations require that all communication take place within the LMS, not via e-mail or text messaging. This reduces interaction by requiring a course login for ever course-related communication.
Group & Team Work
Central to a constructivist classroom, group and team projects allow for peer-peer interaction, collective meaning making, and the student-center location of knowledge acquisition. / Canvas Collaborations toolset offers us the ability to have students to complete group work in truly collaborative environments where students are able to synchronously edit documents, launch web conferences, and utilize real-time chat.
Canvas allows instructors to fully integrate both Google docs and MS Word online documents into their course shell. Allowing these tools to be used in the course shell rather than externally is important since we know that the more we can do within the course shell, the less trouble students and teachers will have. This has led to increased participation in group work. Further, the synchronous functionality of these tools allows for more authentic and often rich interactions between students.
BigBlueButton tool allows for student-created video conferencing, to foster group work and community building in online and distance courses. / Blackboard relies on asynchronous discussions and 3rd party tools. The native Blackboard live chat tool does not work, due to Java errors. The native Blackboard blog and wiki tool is insufficient for campus needs and has been supplemented by a 3rd party tool called CampusPack.
No student video conference tool is available. / Authentic assessment based courses where students must share many different types of documents as part of each project. The collaborative capabilities of Canvas facilitate group coordination and participation, such that one student doesn't end up doing all the work. More importantly, this type of collaboration better mimics the real working world, giving students invaluable experience to take to the workplace.
Finally, using collaborative capabilities makes it easier for instructors to give timely, targeted feedback by streamlining access to artifacts and managing the conversation around a point of feedback.
Quote from a teacher: “I actually can use the tools in Canvas and make it worth my time. For example, I used Google doc integration for a simple sign up sheet. In Bb, it might take me 15 minutes to get settings. In Canvas, it's a nearly instant process“
Quote from a teacher: Canvas enabled me to better assign and track groups—something I can do in BB but again, was cumbersome and clunky.”
Discussions
The most basic of all LMS tools, the discussion board allows for forum-based discussions, fostering a Socratic environment and asynchronous discourse. / Canvas Discussions allows participants to be notified and to respond to posts in the way of their choosing. If via email, the recipient receives the content of the post and may respond simply by replying to the email. The system ensures the response is placed in the correct place in the discussion for archival/grading purposes. This has the effect of making it convenient to participate at any time and speeding up conversations, leading to richer discussion.
The tool also allows for post rating, meaning that students can “like” various posts. Those posts with more likes can move to the top of the forum or can be flagged as a means to facilitate discussion-board grading. / Blackboard Discussion: Participants may opt to be notified by email that a new post has been made. Also provides a link to the Blackboard forum so they can respond to the post.
Participants often delay responding because they must find time to access the system and respond using the discussion board tools. This slows conversation and discourages lively exchanges of ideas. / Quote from a teacher: “The discussion threads are more seamless, especially the video integration
which I use a lot to incorporate other media beyond just text. It is
faster, more intuitive, which helps you focus on the discussion rather than
be distracted by the technology.”
Outcomes & Standards management
Important for colleges and programs that require fidelity and consistency in assessment, such as for accreditation purposes. / Canvas offers an outcomes tool allowing programs as well as individual faculty define and monitor student mastery of designated learning outcomes.
Outcomes may be defined by administration and then available to all faculty involved in the program or teaching multiple sections, making it simple to construct and share rubrics for consistent assessment as well as getting quickly getting overall views of students' achievement of set outcomes. / No tool allows for Outcomes or standards integration. / Users can pre-define key learning objectives, standards, or benchmarks (either discipline-specific or otherwise) and track student progress in meeting them. These can be tied to graded material or be ungraded.
Scheduling & Time Management / Assignment due dates and other scheduled activities for students appear in an integrated calendar giving them a single view in which they can see the information for all their courses. Moreover, these events provide one-click access to the detailed pages for these assignments and events. Also, students may subscribe to their Canvas calendar and have its content automatically appear in a Google or iCal personal calendar. This is incredibly useful, especially with lower level undergraduates who tend to struggle with time management.
Teachers can change due dates of assignments by dragging the item within the calendar, rather than having to edit the assignment itself – a significant time saver. / Blackboard Calendar is static, often doesn't work, and isn't integrated. / Quote from a teacher: "You can subscribe to the course calendar and have it appear in your Google calendar! This is awesome!"
Course Analytics Dashboards
Data dashboards provide teachers easy-to-analyze views of student interactions within the course. This can facilitate just-in-time interventions for at-risk students or follow-up activities to deepen understanding, and it can also serve as a formative assessment mechanism by which teachers can evaluate the effectiveness of their lessons and assignments. / Canvas Course Analytics allows teachers to see which students are looking at pages, being active in the course, submitting assignments in a timely way, and where students' grades fall in the big picture. This quick, comprehensive view helps teachers see disengaged behaviors early enough to take steps to help students which impacts student success and retention. / Blackboard Course Reports doesn't work – reports are inaccurate and do not provide actionable or accurate data.
Easy course navigation & Direct linking to course content
In online courses, pointing students to the right content is critical. The ability to link directly to course pages ensures that students are looking at the correct content and are submitting in the correct place. This reduces errors and confusion. / Canvas URLs are static and always point to existing content. These means teachers can copy and paste the URL from and course page, and students will always be routed to the proper page. The ability to link directly to course pages, assignments, and discussions helps support understanding because students can read the email, announcement, or post, then quickly click on the link and check their understanding of what was said. If it isn't clear, they can then quickly respond with questions, much like raising the hand in class after hearing an explanation. / Blackboard URLs do not link directly to course material. To direct students to content, teachers must communicate locations of information and document using file structure syntax.
E.g. From left nav, click Documents > Module 1, Week 2, etc.
Students often put off checking their understanding of what was said until it is too late for the teacher to clarify. / User interface and navigability were highly rated by teachers and students alike.
Quote from a teacher: “More efficient. Navigating is way easier. There are multiple ways of accessing a particular page without backing out and going back to a main menu. Canvas is way easier to navigate in general than Bb.”
Quote from teacher: “One thing I really appreciated in Canvas not available in Blackboard is the easy ability to see the course from the “student view,” since things sometimes display differently to different audiences. That way I could ensure I set things up correctly and could give clear directions to students.”
Cloud storage and synchronous multiple-author document integration / Collaborations tool allows for the integration of Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive content. Teachers can post materials directly from their cloud storage, and students can submit assignments directly from cloud storage. Teachers can assign collaborative authoring assignments wherein students collectively edit documents stored in Google Drive. / None.
Live chat and video conferencing / Conferences tool - Integrated, modern tool allows for quick video conferencing or rapid messaging to facilitate communication among students or between instructors and students. / Adobe connect integration is for teachers only and does not help with student-student interaction such as when students are doing teamwork-based projects.
Mobile platform / Canvas student app
Canvas teacher app
Speedgrader App
Canvas has a very robust mobile app that allows students to view all course content quickly and efficiently. Research has shown time and again that students are increasingly using mobile technology to interact with courses. For instructors, the main Canvas app allows the creation of course content and offers a wonderful attendance taking tool which combines names, student photos, and a seating layout if desired, to help teacher learn students' names, which improves teacher-student interaction.
Canvas also provides mobile support for instructors with the SpeedGrader, Polls, and Teacher Tools apps for Android and iOS.
SpeedGrader allows instructors to view, grade, and give feedback on student work, Polls makes it possible for instructors to pose questions during class to which students respond using the Polls app on their own mobile devices. Formative assessment of this nature improves learning. The Teacher Tools app helps teachers learn student names with its quizzing tool and take quick notes about students.
We cannot advocate for an LMS that has fallen so far behind in the mobile arena the way that Blackboard has. / Blackboard Mobile
Bb Student
Blackboard’s mobile app has been notoriously useless for years now. It doesn't allow students to do much more than view some small bits of course content and post short messages to discussions. It often doesn't work at all.
The Bb student app has functioning discussion posts, but no assignment submission or quizzing.
Quizzed videos
Flipping a class involves providing students with pre-recorded lecture material in advance of the class sessions, then using class time for discussion and discovery activities. Embedding quizzes into pre-class videos ensures that students watch the material and allows teachers to assess their understanding of it prior to class. This in turn can inform the in-class activities, allowing remediation to happen as needed and enrichment activities to supplement what students already know. / 3rd party tool integration of TechSmith Relay
An assignment can be made to use TechSmith Relay. Videos that use the testing/quiz feature allows for the grade to be passed back into Canvas for grading / 3rd party tool integration of TechSmith Relay
The video tool connects well to Blackboard, but the quizzing feature does not work in Bb
Grading / The gradebook in Canvas allows students to enter hypothetical grades on future assignments to see how this will affect their final grade in a course. This allows students to get a real-time picture of exactly how they need to perform in a class to achieve the course grade they desire. Often students don't understand how individual grades affect the bigger picture of their course grade. This feature in Canvas helps them engage with the overall course grading process. In doing so, we have noted time and again that students begin engaging more with the course work as they better understand the importance of said work to their final grade in the class. / Blackboard’s Grade book allows more control for the teacher on how grades are displayed (as calculated columns). No hypothetical grade feature exists for students.

It is clear that Canvas was built with the published literature on instructional design in mind. Its toolset is directly in line with instructional design best practices, and the ease-of-use lowers the barriers to good teaching.

Course Time Management

Research shows that there are a variety of factors that affect the amount of time required to teach online such as, field of study, type of course, and course level (MupingaMaughan, 2008). Several additional factors can affect an instructor’s workload. Some of these elements include the number of students in a class, software and technology, instructional design, student-student interactions, faculty-student interactions, student experience with online courses, and faculty experience with online courses (Rockwell, Schauer, Fritz, & Marx, 1999). In two specific areas, Canvas improves upon the capabilities of Blackboard: Information Management and Communication Management.