Canvas is accessible on the Internet by a web browser (like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc.) Users log in with their Loyalist College credentials and arrive at their Canvas Dashboard, a page that is common to all users. The content that is available from that page and others on Canvas is dependent on a user’s role on the system; the two most familiar roles are Student and Teacher.
From the Dashboard, users can view links to the courses in which they are enrolled; following a course link brings a user to a “course”. Canvas courses are managed by Instructors, generally, the faculty member who is teaching the course.
The core Canvas toolset includes a rich set of tools, and faculty are free to enable or disable various tools to suit their curriculum and their course outcomes. Courses can look and behave quite differently from each other, and are reflections of the unique curriculum and the Instructor(s) who design them.
At Loyalist, we’ve extended the core toolset with many different integrated products, including, Microsoft Teams (virtual classroom service), Studio (video capture platform used for recording teaching) and a few others that CATL is investigating which include a plagiarism tool.