671. External tools to make up for shortcomings in Canvas LMS

Not a fan of Canvas LMS at all. There are too many things missing, too many things that don't work well, and ultimately I feel it does not work well for me as a teacher.

In contrast, I felt that on the whole Moodle offered the tools that I needed: a well-functioning quiz tool, a good forum, and  good tools for making exams.

The forum in canvas is confusing to the students, and is hard to organize. 

The quiz function is very limited in scope, and does not offered a good overview of responses. From what I understand you can de-anonymize reponses as well. It's not a good tool for course evaluations for these reasons. It also doesn't work well for getting responses from discussions as part of a flipped classroom.

Also, you can't attach more than one document to a question when answering. Even worse, attached documents that are uploaded by students end up in THEIR accounts, so that they can e.g. delete them after they've taken an exam. Anything to do with exams/quizzes should be immutable.

I don't have a solution to that last issue, but here's what I've done with the rest:

Course evaluation: 

mentimeter.com. We have a license. The course evaluations look great and are easy to interpret.

Otherwise I'd use google forms.

Feedback during flipped classroom discussions: 

Google Forms. It works well, and gives an easy overview of responses in real time. If we didn't have mentimeter.com I'd use this for the course eval as well.

Forum:

ProBoards. I also looked att making a Google Group, but that worked about the same as the Canvas forum. ProBoards looks and works like a real forum, and you can let students self-register. You can also create custom names/URLs for your forum(s) -- mychemforums.proboards.com.

[Examination: For now we use moodle for this, although we've been told to phase this out. Instead we're going to be using Inspera, which at a glance if anything seems less suitable for chemistry exams than moodle. Time, and testing, will tell.]