Yes, I have had to make revisions to my course based on the Canvas structure. I noticed that once you dig into the content, you can easily get lost if the week/module/etc is not part of the title itself. The box within a box structure of Blackboard usually means that one box will have the module number and it will be listed in the breadcrumb. Not so much in Canvas. Their system of creating breadcrumbs could use some flexibility. I’m also not sure about how I grouped my weeks together into modules in the actual course. It seems to work okay, but I wonder if having each week be a separate module will work better. Still not sure on that one.

I am also constantly needing to play around with the image settings to make sure the images are easy to see. The CSS that has been applied to Canvas makes that a bit difficult. The smaller font and minimal space between paragraphs makes it difficult to view. I could always insert custom CSS inline declarations to fix that, but that is very time consuming. Not to mention that the next Canvas update could change something else that would make those changes nor work again. I just wish they had put more thought into readability.

So far, my design model is working great. Even though Canvas has differences from Blackboard and Moodle and other tools I am used to, it is still the same basic content repository model that I am used to working with. You can arrange this model to really meet the needs of most design structures, even though it sometimes takes some creativity to be less linear. But I am used to implementing that creativity after so many years of being stuck in Blackboard, so that is no problem.

Of course, as the design progresses and becomes less instructivist, the linear design I started out with might become more problematic. But that should be fairly easy to design around. I just hope that the tools will be flexible enough to allow for more connectivist structures inside of Canvas. Most connectivist instructors tend to abandon any LMS in order to accomplish their designs. Hopefully that won’t be the case here. Probably my biggest concern will be designing the content so that reviewers will be able to tell that a lost of course work is happening even though there won’t be a lot of “text” in the LMS.