™ (Canvas Conferences)Canvas Conferences is Canvas's native video conference tool and is directly accessible within Canvas. This makes it simple to create, view, and join for both professors and students. Of the three conferencing tools, Canvas Conferences provides one of the most holistic classroom experiences and competes with BlueJeans for the widest range of functions. However, this functionality comes at the cost of simplicity. All of the extra functions and buttons make the initial learning process more complicated, and, while they can be recorded, Canvas Conference recordings cannot be downloaded and are only available for 14 days.
Compared to the other Video Conferencing tools, Canvas Conferences is best used in instances where the remote faculty who desire to recreate as close as possible an in-person class setting online, who are used to making use of a whiteboard during lectures, who like to break their students up into groups, or who make use of in-class quizzes. Canvas Conferences provide the functionality to do all of these things within the program itself.
Canvas Conferences's more complicated style and less intuitive nature make it less desirable in instances where its additional features are unneeded. Such instances as one-on-one meetings, small group meetings, or lecture courses that have small amounts of student involvement and/or do not require a whiteboard. Additionally, recordings are only available for 14 days after the meeting, and there is a limit of 10 concurrent Conference sessions going simultaneously. If you try to start a Conference and happen to be the 11th concurrent user, let us know as we are actively watching how much these tools are used to know if we need to increase our number of licenses.
This 6-minute video provides an overview of the functions of Canvas Conferences and where to find them once the conference has been started.
