Are there any Universities out there that allow commercial advertising in their Canvas courses?

[gcavin]

We had a vendor for an ad company approach us about adding commercial advertisements at the bottom of Canvas.  His enticement was that the University would get a share of the income from the ads.  We are not comfortable with this idea, but I wondered if any other Universities are allowing this practice, and if so what are the pros and cons? Thanks.

[dhulsey]

Hi,  @gcavin ‌. That is an interesting proposition. The biggest con is that the ads would then be competing with the course content for student attention. We have enough competition already. The other issue  would be if the students took the ads as an endorsement from the university or professor, it could raise potential legal and ethical questions. A classroom is a different environment than a campus newspaper that sells ads, I think. 

[gcavin]

Hi Dallas,

I agree with your logic. We don’t think there are many if any schools engaging in this concept. We are not in favor of it, but wanted to hear what others might have to say.

Thanks for your feedback, it will be very helpful.

Glynn Cavin

[kona]

I think Dallas brings up some important things to consider and I have to agree with him completely. 

Last year we had different campus groups/clubs that wanted to send all College messages out through the Canvas Inbox. At first we thought this sounded like a good idea - reach the students where they are - but after getting some feedback from students we stopped doing this. The feedback was that they felt like they were getting spammed. They felt that Canvas was for their coursework and academic stuff and they didn't want other things coming through that way. For me this is similar to what you are proposing except worse because you really are advertising something to the students. I'd say a big no to this.

[kblack]

I wholeheartedly agree with the above sentiments.  I believe that an LMS should be the academic equivalent of a "safe space" from ads of any type. I realize many of us are hurting financially in the realm of higher ed, but I this carries things a bit too far.

[kona]

Yep, even coming from a financially strapped College in Illinois (pretty much worst state ever for public Higher Education funding) I still wouldn't take it this far. 

[laurakgibbs]

As an instructor, I would be outraged to have my course space hijacked for that purpose.

If you want faculty to care about their courses and feel a sense of ownership, they need as much control as you can give them over those course spaces.

It's frustrating enough how little control we have over our course spaces with Canvas.

To put advertisements on our pages would add insult to injury.

If a college were to implement something like that, I think it would be essential to keep the advertising on non-course specific pages like the log-in splash page. And even that would be morally dubious, in my opinion. But colleges do engage in shenanigans like that, I know. Just keep it out of our course spaces, please!

[gcavin]

Hello everyone,

Thanks for your input - and believe me, we at TROY Online have the same sentiments - we think this idea is wrong on many levels.  I appreciate the arguments presented so far, and will echo those points.  For example, I liked the comment about the learning space being a safe space and not being intruded upon by crass commercialization.  But I had to ask the question, so that I could sit across the table from the vendor and discount his claim in an honest manner, that other Canvas Universities are practicing this idea.  I welcome any additional factual information especially if this has been considered by some other institution.

Thanks again.

[dwillmore]

I have lost a battle to keep our announcements pure of anything not Canvas related, and I am afraid the spam is reducing the usefulness of the tool as people avoid it.   While I don't have hard data, I believe that it is starting to affect the use of the Dashboard in general as well.

Adding commercial advertisements to Canvas would probably send me to the looney bin.   Would we do this to a classroom?   Wait, don't answer that.  Learning is focus and focus is learning.

[myerdon01]

We have been using global announcements for things "other than Canvas" for awhile now and our students and faculty don't seem to mind too much. I've heard some grumbling, but until our school comes up with actual student portal and faculty portals, Canvas is the only common place they have right now. We have a community site for faculty and staff, but it is clunky and underutilized, and we have a student page for announcements, links, etc. but most students do not use it and go straight to Canvas. Student emails do not work to get the word out either since most students, again, do not check their school email, but go straight to their inbox in Canvas. 

I do put a disclaimer on the bottom of every announcement that says "Scroll down past these announcements to see your course dashboard. If you wish to remove an announcement from your dashboard, please click the "X" in the upper right corner, but please note, once closed out, the announcement cannot be retrieved." This seems to work well if someone wants to see only their courses, but you've made me more mindful of that space becoming too cluttered!