This is our first year using Canvas at University of Oklahoma: we had a soft rollout this year (opt-in for Fall, opt-out for Spring, with all courses on Canvas starting next year), and I did a mid-semester survey of my students in the Fall and again in the Spring to see what they had to say... and I learned so much, especially from the open-ended questions. I am curious to know what kinds of methods people have used on different campuses to assess their students' use of Canvas and how they gather feedback from students about how to make better use of the system.
You can see the data from my Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 surveys, and I just now wrote up a post with some of my reactions to what the students had to say here: Student Voices about Canvas: Spring edition. The feature that students mentioned most often as their "most liked" feature of Canvas was the Gradebook, and the Gradebook was also the highest rated feature by the numbers too. For me, this is very discouraging (see this blog post: More Visible Learning, NOT More Visible Grades )... but at the same time, I know that students are very grade-focused and often anxious about grades, so if Canvas is helping to reduce that anxiety (if not to shift the focus), I guess that is a good thing. To get a sense of how grade-related items predominated in the students' free responses about their favorite Canvas feature, I made a word cloud (below).
I'm guessing that what I am seeing here from the students in my classes is typical of my campus overall (although that's just a guess), and I would be very curious to know what data and comments other schools have collected from their students about using Canvas!
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