Canvas: Evidence of an Evolving Technology

College students who took online courses during the advent of online learning expressed a great deal of discontent with learning management systems (LMS). Several postsecondary students felt that LMS provided a learning environment that was highly impersonal. This environment left students feeling disconnected, and even isolated, from their peers and the course instructor. Such isolation and the lack of virtual presence among online students contributed to a high rate of student attrition in early online courses.

Student disorientation represented a second problem emanating from early LMS. The poor navigational design of many of these learning environments caused students to feel disoriented, as a significant number of students had great difficulty navigating online courses. The difficulties that students experienced during attempts to navigate online courses led to an increase in cognitive load among students, limiting the suitability of online environments for learning.

A third limitation of early LMS was the unimodal design of course content. Most of the course content that students encountered in online courses included text-based content, which burdened learners’ working memory with extraneous cognitive load. Limited video and audio resources were incorporated into these courses despite the fact that research has shown that learning is optimized when instructional content is presented in multiple modalities.

The Canvas LMS solves a number of the problems inherent in early learning management systems. This system allows students to communicate with video and audio messages and maintain a virtual presence with personal images. Communicating in such modalities makes the online learning environment more personable than the earliest online learning environments. Video, audio, and images can also be used in Canvas to enhance the delivery of instructional content, as learners are no longer forced to learn in an environment that features unimodal instruction. A reduced burden is placed on learners’ working memory. One significant contrast in the Canvas LMS and early LMS is the fact that limited navigation is required by students. Most course content can be accessed by students with limited clicking, which minimizes the potential for students to become disoriented with the course environment. Thus, the Canvas LMS provides clear evidence that LMS technology is evolving.