I'm taking a course that requires me to use Canvas and my lord, fellow professors, do you know what you're putting your students through?It's appalling for 2023 software. Just two examples:

1. If you upload a photo taken on your Android phone, it won't recognize it. The photo is JPEG and it accepts JPEGs. But…it will reject it if the *file is not .jpeg". That's right: no ".jpg". ↵

@shriramk I tried using Canvas to give feedback on my students' final project reports last term. This was a graduate seminar course of eleven students, so I was leaving multiple paragraphs of feedback on each one. Canvas ate all the line breaks! Luckily, I'd saved all my writing elsewhere before posting it on Canvas, and so I was able to just email people all their feedback with line breaks intact, but sheesh.

@shriramk More problems, just off the top of my head:

- There's a feature that hides student names for grading. Good. Except -- it doesn't hide avatars! 🤦‍♀️

- If multiple people are working on grading parts of the same assignment submission concurrently, Canvas will just lose writes, as @redmp found out the hard way when he was my TA.

I've learned to use Canvas very minimally -- it's a good place for students to see their grades (some of them like the "What-If" feature), but that's about all.

@lindsey @redmp Why do you use it at all? I have never used it, except when I taught in a professional program that used Canvas and I was told I had no choice (so I used an admin as an interface). And this experience definitely does not make me want to reconsider my position!

@shriramk @redmp Really just two reasons to use it at all:

- It's the single source of truth for who's enrolled / auditing / on the course staff
- It's a good place to show students grades (like I say, they like the What-If feature)

But that's about it. When I start teaching a large class, I send one Canvas announcement inviting everyone to the Zulip, and from then on we use Zulip for announcements, Q&A, in-lecture discussion, course staff coordination, and everything else.

@shriramk @redmp There's actually another reason: if students' other classes use Canvas, which a lot do at UCSC, they're not wild about having another platform that they have to remember to check, especially if they're newer to college and still figuring out things like how to keep their own calendar.

(I find this is less of a problem if I just tell them what the important dates and deadlines are from day one, and then try to stick to that schedule come hell or high water.)