Austen Hunzeker
News Editor
After approximately three years of debate, Idaho State University officially rolled out Canvas in replacement of Moodle to ring in the 2025-2026 academic year.
Enforced by the Idaho State Board of Education, a statewide standardized use of Canvas has been in the works for all Idaho colleges and universities — ISU being one of the last establishments to follow through with the trend. ISU faculty and students are now attempting to transition their technology habits in and out of the classroom after over a decade of using Moodle.
“Canvas was ready to go as of May of this year,” Instructional Technology Resource Center (ITRC) Director Robert “Bob” Houghton said. “In previous years there’s kind of been talk about moving to Canvas…It’s now actually happening.”
Houghton explained that while there are differences between Canvas and Moodle, there are still many similarities from a student perspective.
“Every single learning management system, or LMS as we call them, they all have their quirks,” Houghton said. “They all have a list of courses, a list of assignments, you know, week by week or topic by topic breakdown depending on how the faculty member has set their course. So from that standpoint, they’re all the same.”
Houghton continued, “A few things that are going to be different, that we’ve noticed, especially when it comes to the students, are going to be the way that messages are delivered.”
In Moodle, one-on-one messaging avenues and announcement threads were provided for students and professors to communicate with one another, while Canvas goes through an email system.
“If you click the professor, you want to talk to them, they’re going to get an email,” Houghton said. “If the professor makes an announcement in the class, it’ll go through…your emails.”
In addition to different modes of communication, students also have access to 24/7 technical support through Canvas as a company.
“From a student point of view…it’s going to look different, it feels a little different, but it does the same things,” Houghton said regarding the adjustment. “From the faculty perspective, that’s where everything’s kind of a lot more difficult.”
Comparing the two LMSs, the way faculty can upload and set up courses, grade, set up teaching assistants within a course and more are all significantly different. Approximately 5,800 courses are being transferred to Canvas, some rolling over seamlessly and others with hiccups. For Houghton’s courses it took him a total of 26 minutes to make the transfer from Moodle.
“The answer is, yeah, you could do [things] in Moodle [that] you can’t do in Canvas because of different permission structures,” Houghton said. “We want to make sure that the data that we have in Canvas is safe and secure. And so we’ve backed off on those permissions a little bit more than the Canvas Tech Support would like us to.”
Houghton’s reasoning for this is if more permissions are recognized, faculty and teaching assistants would be able to delete data they’re not supposed to. The main concern is protecting students, faculty and enrollment data, among others.
“This is not exactly a situation that we wanted to have happen…I’m not talking from the ITRC. I’m talking about from a larger perspective,” Houghton said about the decision to adopt Canvas. “Our existing system was doing a very adequate job. Were there problems with it? Yes. Are there problems with all LMSs? Yes. Canvas solves some of those problems but creates others.”
Adam Bradford, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at ISU, expressed similar thoughts.
“We weren’t considering a move or a change in our LMS until the State Board sort of invited us to look at this through the lens of building a more seamless and integrated system across the state, and that’s what sort of prompted us to look at it that way,” Bradford said. “We were pretty committed to Moodle, and then we moved this direction, trying to sort of imagine what that system could look like and what we could do with that at ISU.”
The Idaho State Board of Education purchased a statewide license for Canvas in 2016 for all higher education institutions to use – even for some high schools. Multiple Idaho colleges and universities have been switching to Canvas for years, with ISU being one of the last holdouts until now.
“The State Board finally put the right kind of pressure on the right kind of people and said, ‘It’s not that you should switch over, it’s that you will switch over.’” Houghton said. “So this change was, again, brought upon us by the State Board of Education.”
The understood reasoning behind the State Board’s decision is that by all colleges and universities adopting Canvas, a similar point of entry is provided, allowing students to transfer easily between institutions. But many feel the switch wasn’t necessary.
“There has been adequate frustration from the faculty, and yes, it is totally justified,” Houghton said. “There has been a lot of pushback. Now, I will say that our team has worked really hard this summer to try and ease as much of that pushback as possible.”
Training was provided throughout the summer to introduce faculty to Canvas, which came with an expected turnout considering it was unpaid and took place before contracts began, according to Houghton.
As of the first day of the fall semester, hundreds of calls and emails ramped up the ITRC service lines, and Houghton’s team was prepared for the large influx of faculty and students seeking help with the transition. The week prior, ITRC was also slammed trying to ensure that faculty were ready for the first week of the fall semester. But, overall, Houghton feels the switch has gone well.
“This isn’t an academic freedom issue,” Houghton said. “It’s just a system…This isn’t even like choosing between two different books. It’s more like choosing different editions of the same book.”
For now, Houghton and his team will continue aiding in the transition as well as gather statistics on how the new system is performing amongst ISU Bengals in the coming weeks. Faculty and students who experience technical issues involving Canvas are invited to take advantage of Canvas Tech Support or contact ITRC at (208) 282-5880.
