The University's transition from MyCourses to Canvas as its primary online course management platform is in full swing. This semester, 457 courses will use the site, up from 70 last semester, said Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron.
Around 7,000 students - graduate, undergraduate and medical - are using the platform this semester, according to Hong Chau, instructional technologist for the academic technology division of Computer and Information Systems.
"I anticipate all students to have at least one course in Canvas by the end of the year," Hong wrote in an email to The Herald.
After MyCourses' parent company Blackboard announced in 2010 that it would be ceasing support of the platform this October, the University engaged in a search for a new system, ultimately choosing Canvas for its more intuitive interface.
"There was a very strong response to Canvas on the part of the students who tried it out, and that ultimately swayed the decision in that direction," Bergeron said.
"I think it's easier to navigate," said Sophie Yan '16, who has two classes on the new platform and one class on MyCourses.
"MyCourses is less user-friendly," Yan added. "Sometimes when I try to navigate back to the (MyCourses) home page, I get lost and go to the main Brown page."
Currently, 302 courses are still being hosted on MyCourses, Hong wrote. MyCourses will be available for professors to use until summer 2013, when the administration will completely phase it out. Bill Allen, adjunct lecturer in public policy, chose to be one of the earlier adopters of Canvas, The Herald reported in January. Now in his second semester of using Canvas for two of the three courses he instructs, Allen said he is still happy with his decision to switch, and his third course will be transitioning to Canvas in the spring.
"The more I use Canvas, the more I realize how clunky MyCourses was," he said.
In January, Allen told The Herald there was a MyCourses feature he was unable to make work on Canvas. But since then, Allen said he has solved that single issue.
"It was very easy to figure it out," he said.
Allen said he likes Canvas' superior support of media integration, its "more streamlined file management system" and the discussion forum feature Canvas builds into each course page.
"I encourage students during the discussion portion of Canvas to add materials themselves," he said. "Students then see new things that relate to things we discussed ... and I in turn use that material to enrich the site itself."
"I think that the faculty are making very good use of its features," Bergeron said of Canvas. "One of the things that any new product can do for us is to make us think about how we're approaching our teaching."
"Canvas provides me an opportunity to create somewhat of a living syllabus," Allen said. "It provides an opportunity to reconceptualize the syllabus in a much more dynamic way, and do it in an electronic platform, rather than a standard document."
Allen said his students had "generally positive feedback" about the new features he has been able to integrate into his course.
As the University transitions from MyCourses to Canvas, students may now have two separate course management systems to check. Some students said that though they prefer Canvas, balancing the two websites can be a pain.
"I'll be glad when it's all integrated," Yan said.
Some students have to balance both sites for a single class - about 15 courses set up websites on both platforms this semester, Hong said.
Gopika Krishna '13 said that for the first two weeks of the term, her class, BIOL 1140: "Tissue Engineering," had some materials on the old system and some on the new.
"The syllabus is on MyCourses, but the problems are on Canvas," Krishna said. "It's not super difficult, but it can be annoying."
That issue has since been resolved. "The professor now changed it so that MyCourses only has a copy of the syllabus on it, while Canvas has syllabus, assignments, readings, etc.," Krishna wrote in an email to The Herald. "So I think we're mainly using Canvas now."
"Any kind of big transition is hard," Bergeron said. "We're hopeful the benefits of the new product are going to, for faculty, alleviate some of the difficulty of the change. And for students, (we are) hopeful that this product makes their learning seamless."
"There are growing pains, but in a few years I think people will be like, 'Well, this is the way we always did it,'" she added.
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