Eastern’s utilization of Canvas has been called into question on whether it is as beneficial to students and faculty as initially believed.

According to Eastern 24/7, Canvas has been running since the fall of 2012 after the testing phase was completed during the summer. Since 2012, features such as the Single Sign-On (SSO) and anti-plagiarism systems have been added to Canvas to make both student and facility access more user-friendly.

“Canvas brings many exciting new features and capabilities to EWU with the goal of enhancing the user experience while mitigating frustration,” according to the Eastern 24/7 website. “Everyone who is a member of the EWU community should be able to log onto Canvas and interact with the system.”

Brendan Colbert, a junior majoring in music, has been studying at Eastern for two years.

Colbert said Canvas has been a generally positive experience and said he thinks it is a useful tool for giving students the opportunities and advantages they might not have under other circumstances.

“[Instructors] can post videos, lectures or anything else that can help aid in studying,” said Colbert. “However, I think that it can be a downfall if it’s relied upon too much, because classroom learning is very important. When Canvas is used as a crutch, it can take away the incentive to come to class.”

Colbert said while not having Canvas caused some inconveniences, the professors who did not use Canvas were equally successful in teaching their material versus the teachers who did use Canvas.

“In one of my classes, my professor did not use Canvas, and it was hard to track your grade,” said Colbert. “You had to do it the old-fashioned way, but it did give a higher incentive to be in class and be very attentive because the classroom was the only place to get your information from.”

Joe Cronrath, a junior biology major, has been at Eastern for three years and mirrors Colbert’s frustration with the lack of access to grades in those situations.

Cronrath said Canvas is a great classroom system to use and when professors did not use Canvas, it caused problems because students have come to rely on it for checking grades. Without Canvas, students never know how they are doing in a course.

Professor James Kieswetter taught history for 46 years at Eastern before retiring last year.

Kieswetter said there is not a big difference between Canvas and traditional methods for posting information to the classroom in terms of content, except with Canvas, a wider audience can be reached.

“Canvas and similar programs can open all sorts of doors for other resources,” said Kieswetter. “Finding aides from the library and looking for bibliographic information are some of the useful features Canvas supports.”

Kieswetter said when other teachers use Canvas for exams, there is a lack of assurance regarding academic integrity because there is no way of knowing that students are taking the quiz on the other side of the screen. This is one of the reasons why Kieswetter never used Canvas.

“When I taught, I wanted personal contact with the individual students I was teaching,” said Kieswetter. “When I would grade their book review papers, I would sit down with them and go through their work, trying to correct it and help them with their writing.”