There are so many great things about Canvas LMS. It's about fit of course, so I would never use it for corporate L&D... but as an academic LMS, it ranks at the top. I love the community forums (you can find help for literally anything), and the numerous tools that are 1) either provided by Canvas, or, 2) integrate nicely with Canvas. I also like the ease of use. It might seem overwhelming at first, but learning to build and administer courses on Canvas becomes easier by the day. So at first it may seem tough, but stick with it! It gets much easier - quickly!

In order to upgrade the look and feel of it, without hiring a team of graphic designers, you need to use design service that integrates with Canvas.

Overall, Canvas is the best I've used so far (1000x better than buggy/feature-impoverished D2L). It's generally nice to work with, plays well with most other online resources (especially Google Drive which I use a ton for teaching), it's fairly easy to explain to students, and it makes it easy to transfer materials between courses each semester.

One thing I love is that unlike Brightspace/D2L, Canvas has continued to develop and gain new features as long as I've used it. I also like how easy it is to transfer course materials from one course to another so that classes I teach each semester, or every other semester, can be easily copied over.

Some of the more advanced/useful features aren't always easy to use, and there isn't great documentation from Canvas. In fact, most of the documentation I've found has been from other university's websites.

As a student, I have been content with Canvas as a learning platform. Although I must say, I have not tried any other learning platforms for higher education, so I dont have anything to compare with.

Canvas is very easy organized! It is easy for me as a user to navigate between the different sites and features in Canvas. It dont take long to become familiar with it. I mostly use it on my computer, but I also like that it comes with an app.

I cannot think about anything that I dont like.

Best valuable features: Share to Common, Import/export content i.e., transport/transfer files from past year or another course. It saves time, not reinventing the wheel. Assignment Due date is very cruel to learner as 1 second late submission may cause a heavy penalty. Recently due to COVID-19 my learners in UK and International faced difficulties. I suggest to add a feature giving some window instead of a fix hh.mm.ss timestamp.

Learning & Teaching: Various useful features, e.g., upload/download files, page creation, announcement and discussion and valuable apps containing ubiquitous tools, like MS Team meetings, Panopto, Vimeo, YouTube, Dropbox etc. Assessment: Huge variety of Quizzes, secured quizzes, quizzes SWOT statistics, lockdown browser, Assignments, anti-Plagiarism tools, Moderation, Marker Allocation, Grades, Research: Conferences, collaborations, Canvas digital forum support.

Assessment of students: sorting may not be sync'd with local university database. i.e., downloaded grades and university's marksheet contains names of students starting differently. Imaging if you have 300+ names! this causes sorting issues while assessing online. Quizzes are great but cannot create duplicate questions, some time academic need this feature. Also because quiz question can be an Essay therefore, this type of assessment must include anti-plagiarism tool (i.e., Turnitin etc), not available in Quizzes but only in Assignments. Reference Manager and Library tools are not available but can be added, e.g., Talis, StudyNet etc. These features are necessary for cognitive learning and cresting your own Library does help. I need to use either Endnotes or Mendeley as an external app on my desktop or on cloud. Its good to use integrated Email tool but its not linked to outlook or other email app. I cannot send email to other people outside my module, i.e., cannot do cc to manager, examiner etc but I need to permanently add in the list of people. Also cannot add images etc in text but can attach files. Also cannot format the text but just plaintext is allowed. You cannot add http link to a text.