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From Blackboard to Canvas at Penn

Canvas is a new learning management system (LMS) developed by Salt Lake City-based Instructure. It's already being used by Wharton and the Graduate School of Education here at Penn. The Libraries led a pilot of Canvas during the last academic year, and the majority of instructors involved found that Canvas met or exceeded their needs and offered better teaching tools than Blackboard. Based on the pilot, and the positive experience of faculty in Wharton and GSE, the Council of Deans and the Provost agreed that a campus-wide adoption would be beneficial for Penn faculty and students.

Timeline

The transition to Canvas will be a year-long process. At the end of the process, Blackboard will no longer be available. Libraries and school-based support staff will be on hand to help you save and reuse your Blackboard course content.

Support

The Libraries, in conjunction with staff in individual schools, will offer workshops and a range of services including assistance with developing course sites in Canvas, migrating existing content from Blackboard, and learning all that Canvas has to offer. A schedule of workshops will be available on the Libraries' website.

More Information

If you have not yet started with Canvas but would like to use it in the fall, we look forward to helping you get started as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience as we get all the pieces in place. To learn more about Canvas, please see the following resources:

• CNVS 001. An Introduction to Canvas: A Canvas course about Canvas. No login required.
• Instructure's Canvas Instructor Guide: Detailed documentation from the vendor
• From Blackboard to Canvas: A summary of the differences in workflow from one system to the other.

For additional information, you can email us at canvas@pobox.upenn.edu.