As I’m sure most readers of The Sophian know, Smith uses Moodle for all of its coursework. As I’m sure they also know, it sucks. Here are the many reasons why Moodle is out, and Canvas – the platform used by other colleges in the Five College Consortium – is in.
Point 1: It’s archaic.
Moodle is slow. Sometimes I’ll sit for several minutes while it contemplates loading my assignment or quiz. Smith students constantly get email reports that the website has crashed, that it’s not working today – unfortunately we will just have to wait to do our homework. However, I’ve never had that happen with Canvas.
Apparently it’s continually updated and up to date, but nothing ever seems to change. It’s technically not legacy software, outdated computer systems that are no longer actively supported or developed, but you could have fooled me.
Moodle’s worst offense: it’s ugly, too.
Point 2: It’s disorganized.
Moodle, from what I’ve seen, only has two tabs: “Course” and a decorative “Grades” tab, since many professors don’t input grades into Moodle at all.
Canvas usually has at least these seven essential tabs, “Home, Syllabus, Modules, Assignments, Quizzes, Grades, Announcements” conveniently all together on the left. Here is an image of my Canvas for a class I attended at UMass this semester.
Notice the notification in the grades section? I can watch my grade update constantly, and even see what would happen if I got certain theoretical scores on upcoming assignments. I’m always aware of how well I’m doing in the class — it tells me if I should be seeking help or if I’m doing okay.
With Moodle, unless your professor is particularly tech-savvy, you will only get the privilege of learning your class grade at the end of the semester: the optimal time of you no longer being able to do anything to improve it.
If Canvas is like a book with a clear table of contents, Moodle is one mile-long digital scroll – and your assignment due tomorrow is… somewhere on it? Maybe?
Point 3: It’s not user-friendly
This goes back to the difficulty of finding assignments or resources.
Rather than remembering anything when you log in, Moodle makes you reselect everything every time. It’s always threatening two factor-authentication, and if you have Moodle tabs open, they expire pretty quickly. Now you have to log in again and find whatever it was that you felt was important enough to leave open.
Here are the 5 simple steps to login to Moodle, which you will do at least 4 or 5 times a day:
First, go to Moodle.smith.edu and hit “Login to Moodle.” Select Smith College and enter your Smith College login info. Then two factor-authentication is needed. It’s not sure yet though, so sit while it considers the idea. And once you’re in, you get to find your assignment. Good luck!
Does Moodle have any advantages?
Surprisingly, yes. But you’ll never see them.
The main one is that it’s a more low-level site (closer to the machine code), which means it gives professors more ability to customize while being less user friendly (on the professors’ end here). The issue is this just makes uploading content to Moodle more complicated and professors don’t have the spare time to perfect Moodle’s block-based coding structure, which uses multiple levels to create online courses. So in theory, with a lot of tedious work, a Moodle class can be organized really well, but Canvas already does this with no additional effort from the professors.
Canvas, however, has many more advantages.
Canvas has a to-do section on the home page with all your upcoming assignments and due dates. It shows you your grades, and the format is nice to look at. Furthermore, it’s not constantly going down, barring a recent near-catastrophic Amazon Web Services server error that briefly paused the operations of universities across the U.S. Regardless, it is significantly quicker to log in to Canvas than it is to Moodle, and is made up of tabs instead of one long scrolling page.
Canvas also allows students to open attached PDFs instead of downloading to their computer or opening in another tab. When you turn in an assignment on Canvas with a PDF, it will show you a preview of exactly what you turned in and you can scroll through it to check you uploaded everything right. Canvas also has a handy calendar that automatically inputs your assignment due dates. Moodle has a calendar, too, but it appears the professors must manually do something to make assignments show up. And last but not least: when you turn in an assignment, you get confetti!
So why hasn’t Smith switched to Canvas?
It seems, objectively, to be the better Learning Management System. UMass once used Moodle too, but a couple of years back they made the change.
However, Smith has stake in Moodle. Smith is part of CLAMP: “The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project,” a group of colleges and universities who collaborate to develop and support Moodle, with an eye toward the issues unique to a liberal arts environment.” That group includes Smith college. To become a CLAMP member school, you have to “contribute annual dues,” which means that Smith funds Moodle. Which means that you and I fund Moodle.
If we’re funding a learning management system that doesn’t work for students, that’s a waste of our money. We need to switch to the cleaner, more user friendly: Canvas – a site actually conducive to learning.
