Bitching about Canvas and my mentorship gig, so break
Canvas's free-for-teacher option, which is still shuttered, has opened today for 24 hours so people can retrieve their course content. The mentorship really only uses Canvas as a repository for students to upload work and for mentors to receive it and provide feedback. It makes it easier for me to track everything from one place so that I can make sure everything is running smoothly and that mentees are uploading work and mentors are providing feedback. It also has a peer review function that was extremely useful. And it can be accessed all over the world for our international students.
In the research I did, the only other LMS option, other than Google Classroom, seems to be Moodle, but we will still have to pay for a hosted version, and I'm unfamiliar with its interface. I have an appointment next week to talk to a Canvas representative about whether they offer paid versions for an organization as small as ours. And then Canvas is also saying they will bring back some kind of non-paid version. Not crazy about continuing to use Canvas at all after this debacle, though, which is understandable!
The decision I made for this summer was to use to Google Classroom, but it's an imperfect stopgap mostly because it's not accessible in mainland China, and we have some mentees who will be affected by this.
So today I'm getting my materials off Canvas and beginning to set up shells on Google Classroom. All of this has been a giant headache, as you would imagine. And I'm super nervous that I'm not thinking through all the organizational aspects of moving to Google Classroom. Maybe I should have immediately moved to Moodle, which is where I think we'll eventually end up, but it just made me so nervous to commit to a paid LMS at such short notice and to have to learn a new interface and deal with a company and program that I had no idea even existed until a week ago. The mentorship begins in two weeks!
It's scary that I'm making all these decisions essentially by myself! Why am I in charge of all this! Who let me do this???
I'm trying very hard to break all the work up into manageable steps and not get overwhelmed by everything, but just know that internally I am screaming.
