Canvas Adoption Continues Upward

UChicago officially switched to using Canvas as our learning management system in the summer of 2017. We are now in our seventh quarter on Canvas, and our fifth major academic quarter (excluding summer). How has Canvas adoption for courses changed over time since our official transition?

Initially, we hoped to keep even with the adoption originally seen in our previous LMS, Blackboard (Chalk). We exceeded the goal during our first summer, and came up roughly even for autumn 2017. However, since winter 2018, our numbers have been ticking up steadily across our major academic quarters (excluding summer). Academic year 2018-19 has seen significant increases in the number of courses in Canvas for autumn and winter, with winter ‘19 having 122 more courses in Canvas than in winter ‘18. This represents an almost 9% jump in courses in Canvas over the past year.

While there continues to be a gap between created and published courses each quarter (an average of 97 courses created per major quarter remain unpublished), both numbers continue to increase steadily. Since autumn 2018, we have seen an increase of roughly 2.2% quarterly for published courses, with 120 more courses published in winter 2019 than autumn 2017. Created courses have increased 6.6% since autumn 2017.

In the background, we have been working on creating additional metrics to allow us to better analyze Canvas usage across courses. We are working on dashboards for feature usage (e.g. Quizzes, Modules, Discussions, etc.) and analysis of Canvas-eligible courses vs. published courses per quarter. This additional information will help us better analyze gaps in usage across divisions and schools, and it will allow us to provide better Canvas learning opportunities for faculty, instructors, and staff.