| I have the privilege of participating in a religious education program using Canvas, and simultaneously the misfortune of using Google Classroom for secular school. For two years my church class was taught by a single elderly volunteer, who I remember providing some simple tech support for during our weekly in person classes — she was not a technical person. But our regular online classes went smoothly, without a technical hitch that I can remember. This year we have a brand new teacher (who also has no prior experience using Canvas AFAIK) and 100% online classes (cause covid), and I had the pleasure of preventing our weekly synchronous classes from occurring via Zoom by recommending BigBlueButton. It has also worked flawlessly. And it pains me every time I have to switch between tabs for the Zoom malware and separate tools like Nearpod in secular school, when BigBlueButton has so much more education-focused functionality baked in. So, while I believe there probably are free software solutions with insufficient support somewhere, my personal experience (as well as others’ anecdotes like those on BigBlueButtons homepage¹ or the MIT Professor/FSF member who teaches his class with purely free software², and the relatively empirical evidence that Canvas claim³) can’t attest to rumors of them being anything more than FUD. 1. https://bigbluebutton.org/ “Our instructors love BigBlueButton. With our previous web-conferencing solution our users encountered many technical and usability problems that caused a lot of support effort on our part. With BigBlueButton, the support issues are almost non-existent. We are constantly impressed with the level of quality in this open source project and it works without any prior knowledge. ”
Marc Matthes
Director of Computer Networking Programs and Program Developer, Distance Learning Department, Iowa Central Community College 2. (admittedly he isn’t anywhere near lacking in technical skill, and neither are his students, but on the other hand he was an early adopter during a high-stress time last Spring) https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-o...
“I am pleased to report that my classes were successfully presented, my students were well served, and we were all reasonably happy with the results.” Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He helped found the Free Software Foundation in 1985. 3. https://www.instructure.com/canvas/ “Canvas is the World's Fastest-Growing Learning Management Platform” “Over 30% of Higher Ed Institutions Choose Canvas” |