Question

Is it possible for Canvas to act as the school's management system. Teachers and Administration being able to post notices to the whole school or to a specific year level?

Also, to be able to do roll marking on Canvas instead on other programs within the school network, making it a single point of truth program?

If this is possible, could it also be possible for students to have their own student page when they log into Canvas with their school schedule for that day, assessment calendar, assessment due dates and other important news items that are passed on by the teachers and administration with notices?

If this were to be possible, it would need to be a page in front of the course cards that we see when we log into Canvas, I don't see how this is possible at the moment, and is this something that can be considered in the future?

Chris · Accepted Answer

Hi @SteveMUIR,

It would be easy to answer your question by saying the old adage "anything is possible," I think you're asking for a more realistic assessment of things so let me give you my views as a higher-ed Canvas admin.

Is it possible for Canvas to act as the school's management system. Teachers and Administration being able to post notices to the whole school or to a specific year level?

If you set up subaccounts per year, with the courses for that year inside the subaccounts, and also made the teachers admins for the appropriate subaccount so they could make global announcements, a simple version of this could be possible.  Whether or not you'd really want to go that route and how easy or difficult may be have. a lot of factors, but it's at least within the realm of possibilities right now.

Also, to be able to do roll marking on Canvas instead on other programs within the school network, making it a single point of truth program?

I would sat that this gets much more onto a gray or "no" area, but again it does depend a bit on how you want to do things.  Overall, I don't think you're going to want your Learning Management System (LMS) to be a single source of truth for something like grades.  I say this not with any disparagement towards Canvas, but it's really just not the designed function of an LMS.  The source of truth for grades, contact info, student advancement, etc is almost always a student information system (SIS) or some sort.  The SIS is the system that's made to be that source of truth and to be able to communicate information around to many other school systems, including the LMS.  The LMS is meant to be more on the receiving side of info, but can do some passback of grades.  An LMS and SIS are two of the bigest systems a school usually runs, and while there may be some small efficiency in combining those two things together, I think it would likely be for the worse of both product sides in the long run.

If this is possible, could it also be possible for students to have their own student page when they log into Canvas with their school schedule for that day, assessment calendar, assessment due dates and other important news items that are passed on by the teachers and administration with notices?

If this were to be possible, it would need to be a page in front of the course cards that we see when we log into Canvas, I don't see how this is possible at the moment, and is this something that can be considered in the future?

Since I kind of said the last question wasn't quite possible at this point, this does make this one more difficult as well.  a 3rd party may be able to make some sort of add-on to display a popup with info from your SIS when someone logs in, but that's not part of core Canvas right now.  I do know Instructure is working on a new dashboard view which will give students more info and flexibility to display that info up front, which may do some (but not all) of what you're asking here.  It's currently in Early Access testing, so watch the community space for more info about it in the next few months.

I hope some of this info helps, and I do want to reiterate that this is just my opinion and assessment of where things stand right now.  Others may disagree with some of the things I said in their own replies to your post.

-Chris