I casually opened Canvas on my phone and was greeted by an unfamiliar conglomerate of bubbles and charts. Rummaging through the app’s settings to see if there was an option to revert to the old menu, I was relieved to find that it was, in fact, toggleable. But as the menu lay dormant, I reconsidered whether the redesign could be more beneficial than unusual.
On April 18th, Canvas’ parent company, Instructure, released its new dashboard menu to early adopters; earlier this year, Haverford brought it into its system. The new menu overhauls the old three-view system for customizable widgets designed for each student’s needs.
Canvas’s desktop web interface previously offered three dashboard views: card view, which displays tiles for each of the student’s courses; list view, which shows upcoming assignments in a scrolling list; and recent activity view, which displays a bare-bones list of recent activity. Now, a new option appears: “Switch to new dashboard view.”
Despite this, some may feel that the new dashboard view highlights the menu item’s own identity crisis: it attempts to be everything at once and falls short in most areas.
The new web view features two columns of widgets of varying sizes, including course grades, announcements, a to-do list, and progress information showing which assignments are due, submitted, or graded.
Many students may find this customizable menu fresh and tailored to how they prefer to view information. Despite this, some may feel that the new dashboard view highlights the menu item’s own identity crisis: it attempts to be everything at once and falls short in most areas.
In my use of Canvas, I find the calendar view to be the simplest visually and easiest to follow. Likewise, the courses menu gives me easy access to my courses. Everything else, primarily announcements and grades, comes through email or push notifications. Thus, I don’t typically use the dashboard much, though other students may use it differently.
The mobile app has received a similar widget-based dashboard, except that all widgets fall into one column, which further lengthens the list of items, especially for those with many Canvas courses and groups.
For now, Instructure still includes an option to toggle back to the old dashboard menu, a useful choice for those of us accustomed to the Canvas we already know.