Dog Fooding the LMS

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The University is moving from Anthology’s Blackboard learning management system to Instructure’s Canvas. It looks like it’s just in the nick of time. Our full cut over isn’t until fall 2026 but, both because I’m the person responsible for our instructional tech team and because I’m teaching in the spring, I figured I’d start to dog-food the new LMS. It has been interesting to compare the two but also a reminder to me that, if you aren’t using a service, you may not appreciate its strengths and weaknesses.

You will read a lot about the ideal change management system but the reality is often more like what we experienced. There was a business decision made to shift LMS platforms and while feedback was sought, there were other driving factors. Consultants can often wax poetic about the ideal steps to take to make a transition but sometimes you are given a direction to go and you need to make the best of walking that path that you can.

I had a colleague whose organization decided to fill a documentation gap with a Mediawiki-based wiki platform. While I’m a fan of wikis, I realize that they can be on the high end for friction in getting adoption. When you have a culture that largely works with Microsoft Word documents and PDFs, a wiki is likely to become one of two things: a document file system where documents are uploaded and not explained, or deserted. It is an incongruent outcome. If you have a culture that produces documents, and they produce documents in a specific set of formats and those aren’t HTML, a wiki isn’t a good place to shift your documentation. One team eventually just moved their documents to SharePoint, which is more intuitive and easy for them to use and they are more productive without the learning curve of a wiki editor.

The shift to Canvas makes a lot of sense to me. Also, when you’re talking about two large adoption platforms, switching is usually less risky than if you were adopting a relatively untried platform. For example, a law firm that wanted to drop Thomson Reuters Westlaw for RELX Lexis isn’t going to see a lot of difference. The friction is very low and, because it is likely to be regularly used (unlike a wiki editor), that friction will abrade away. A switch back later would be just as easy.

A couple of students commented on how much they disliked Blackboard and I let them know Canvas was coming. You would have thought they were being given iPhones. For me, that was a great sign. It meant that we were already going to see buy-in from the people who needed to navigate it the most. At that point, I had not yet gotten into the LMS myself but I’ve spent a couple of weeks playing around now and I can see why they feel this way.

A Spray of Kibble

Woof. Let me preface this by saying that I think dogs get a raw deal when it comes to the phrase “it’s a dog’s breakfast.” Sure, dog’s may not be as dainty as other creatures when they eat but I’m not sure judging a person’s plate’s cleanliness is very fair. I know some humans whose plates aren’t very attractive (not advocating for the Clean Plate Club-cleanliness) either.

But it’s fair to say that, upon using the Blackboard Ultra product, it was a bit of a dog’s breakfast. The University was running the Blackboard Classic version when I arrived and the campus plan was to move to the Ultra version. I was asked to teach a new-to-me class on bar essay writing (on December 21st, starting on January 13) and decided to jump into Ultra without starting on Classic.

In hindsight, I’m not sure if this was wise. Not because I would need a crystal ball to know we were leaving Blackboard entirely. But I didn’t really consider what the impact is on students who are taking instruction from faculty on different versions. For example, I don’t know if they can opt into the Ultra view and see both Classic and Ultra courses with the same interface. Or does the interface switch back and forth depending on the instructor? One benefit of moving to a new platform is that, like the migration to Ultra would have provided, every course should really use the same interface, provide the same user experience.

One thing I started to adapt over time was the use of documents. I do not know but I would assume that a lot of instructors use their universities LMS as document file sharing sites, like my colleague and the wiki. The document is created offline (like a PowerPoint slide deck or Word document or PDF) and uploaded online and made available via a link in a class or course module.

This crashes almost immediately into the LMS assumption of a web-based syllabus. Since both Blackboard and Canvas offer a special Syllabus option, I’m assuming this is their expectation. Otherwise we could just upload a File object and name it Syllabus. Gosh, the Blackboard syllabus drove me bananas. First, if you click to Edit the Syllabus object (Syllabus Builder), you open up the HTML syllabus but still have to click a second Edit option to actually edit the HTML.

Now that I have seen Canvas’ syllabus builder, I can see that they’re very similar. I was missing the Add Lesson option on Blackboard. Without that, the only way I found to represent the course schedule was a table within the syllabus document. Since the Blackboard HTML editor (based on the tried and true TinyMCE and the identical editor on Canvas) acted like many LMS and content management system (CMS) editors, it would strip and reformat HTML pasted in. I ended up having to wrangle HTML far more than I wanted. This was particularly true because we are encouraged to draft a syllabus based on a Microsoft Word template. This template, saved as a web page, creates its own awful HTML that then collides with the TinyMCE code cleaning.

This was also a design problem (to me) in the Blackboard Syllabus object. Once you opened it, it was built into three HTML blocks. I really cannot fathom the purpose of this approach. It meant that you had to organize your syllabus in three parts, with the HTML heading enforced by code. That’s a very strict way to apply formatting, even if the goal is accessibility. Fortunately, Canvas’ Syllabus object is just a single editor block.

For the upcoming semester, I am starting entirely from within the LMS. If I need to create a PDF or some other document, I’ll build the document in the LMS first. I’m hoping this will simplify managing the LMS integrations.

At first, I was a bit baffled by the empty Course Summary at the bottom. I expect this is how Add Lesson works on the Blackboard Syllabus Builder. In Canvas, it’s where assignments and calendar events appear and is automatically generated. Once I understood this, I I started to see the value of Canvas’ structure.

When I created items in Blackboard—a new file, an assignment—I wasn’t really creating them within a collection of similar items. I was creating them from within the lesson or module that I was building. This made it harder to find where the original object was later on. Worse, with assignments, when I built them out, they appeared chronologically. So a late semester open memo assignment might appear after the third week’s CALI lesson assignment on the student’s Grade Center because that was the order I created them, not the order they were assigned.

In Canvas, I can go to the Calendar and populate it with events in whatever order I decide. They will appear chronologically on the Course Summary no matter what order I create them. Similarly, since assignments are date-based too, they also appear chronologically on the summary and in the Grades module. My Syllabus object, then, is really just the “rules and regs” part of a syllabus—who, what, where, why—in an HTML builder.

Both Blackboard and Canvas support internet-subscribed calendars. I share this link with students proactively and explain how to add it to their Google or Outlook calendars. I prefer this to having someone import an .ICS file because, if I make changes, they need to import a new .ICS file. In Blackboard, this was an extra resource to manage. In Canvas, since the Calendar Event objects are re-used, any event change I have to make will populate out to both the Syllabus and calendar subscribers.

It may just be me but I like having the Rubric builder so visible within the Assignment builder in Canvas. I did not use rubrics within Blackboard assignments (except as uploaded PDFs) because I took one or two stabs at them and didn’t really get them. I’ve used them for every assignment I’ve created so far, which may reflect that (a) I’m building this course intentionally for the first time and (b) I have a more concrete understanding of how specific I need to be.

This approach in Canvas, of creating collections of similar items (calendar events, assignments) and then auto-generating a list, will support my effort to create a single syllabus. Unlike the Word document to PDF to HTML approach, I’ll only have an HTML one, built out of manual HTML and an auto-generated course summary. I can print a PDF out for administrative documentation purposes. But having the LMS-first approach means I can manage changes more cleanly. Any change at the moment required fiddling with an HTML table and, because I’d provided it, editing the accompanying PDF and editing the Blackboard Calendar item.

Heel!

Technology is designed. This means that technology adoption requires adopting someone else’s thinking as expressed in that design. Technology projects that I have seen go off the rails fail because of an unwillingness to make that adaptation. When I hear that someone is buying a technology product but is going to customize it, I imagine this scene from When Harry Met Sally:

When it comes to technology, I am usually more like Harry. Give me the #3 and I’ll work with it. I had to remind myself of this with Canvas. I am not a fan of how you create new Calendar Event objects but I am learning to live with the interface.

The thing I wanted to do was to create a new Calendar Event object and immediately populate it. But the interface pops up a simple modal dialog to capture the key elements (date, time, title) and to get to the more fulsome view, you have to click More Options. I wanted to see More Options by default. Otherwise, I created the event and had to go and find it and edit it to add the additional information. One of our designers took a look and confirmed that was the intended design.

At this point, I could shake my tiny fists in the air in outrage. Or I could think about why a designer would do this. This is not a personal calendar, after all. It’s a course calendar. There is a good chance that, perhaps 90% of the time, a person is going to build out all of their events at once. This simple approach means that I can quickly populate a calendar with class events, with a date and time and title that explains what we’ll cover, and then have my course summary filled out. With that done, I can go back and expand the language or resources or other information for each one. In fact, now that I have this approach in mind, I may only expand the first few weeks of detail and keep that approach as we move through the semester. I am confident topics I’m teaching about in law practice technology will develop over time and this will be a more responsive way to bring in current information.

Another head scratcher for me was the Home Page. When you click on the Home Page in a Canvas course, you can choose from 5 options for it. I understand this approach. Four of the options are pre-built elements (Calendar, Activity Stream, and so on). The fifth is the Page object. This caught my attention and I was delighted to learn that these are free-form HTML pages. Not only will the Pages work for any content I want to share with the class and avoid PDFs or other offline document formats, I can build a home page that has some interactivity. My first iteration has the course calendar shown in Agenda format, so someone hitting the course home page will see the upcoming events and assignments. This involves a simple iframe tag and a bit of styling with cascading style sheets. I am thinking about adding a law practice technology news RSS feed or something else useful to students. The goal would be to create a home page that is unique, not just a duplicate of an existing LMS resource.

Visit the Dog Park

One thing I’m interested in is whether I could create a template Canvas course for law practice technology and share it. Technically, it seems easy enough. We share legal research hypos and lots of people share their syllabi (like this CALI hosted syllabi commons). It seems like sharing courses are an easy addition to that. This may be only a Canvas-to-Canvas option, although I would assume that other LMS have import/export features and migration tools.

It also doesn’t eliminate the work of building a course. But if I have created a course with assignments and rubrics and linked material, that may be a better starting point for someone than scratch. People could adopt, improve, re-share, similar to an open source project. It makes me wonder if there’s a Github-like place to share LMS exports. There are sites like OpenCourseWare but those seem to be a web page and supporting documents, and not truly meant to be ingested by another LMS.

I’m coming to the end of a semester of teaching writing and research and it has been a lot of building the airplane in flight. Even having a sample syllabus (or many) did not eliminate the manual creating of the LMS components to present the course. I’d love to be able to shortcut that work in the future, editing someone else’s course rather than building from scratch. The more I move away from a document-centric course presentation or development, and into using the LMS components, this import/export opportunity seems like a better one.

Another benefit to sharing an actual course and loading it into my LMS sandbox course is to see how someone else structured everything. Not just the skeleton of the syllabus, but all of the other pieces (assignments, etc.) to see more of the connective tissue. I find syllabi useful for getting a sense of pacing and what’s achievable in a time-span but it would be helpful to also see what exactly each stage involves. Or maybe there’s a module I could move out of a shared course export and into my course to replace just one piece of what I’ve been doing myself.

It’s early days. I’m enjoying the challenge of a new technology though and after decades working with CMS, I appreciate the similarities with the LMS. It is going to be fun to try to understand some of the why behind the design choices in Canvas.