What is Canvas?

With online learning becoming an integral part of any student’s academic experience, learning management systems have given teachers the tools to optimize their students' learning outcomes without having to stretch themselves too thin between enrollment, attendance, assignments, grades, syllabi, tests, quizzes, and basic guidance.

Canvas by Instructure is the premiere LMS for teachers and students alike today. In relation to artificial intelligence, Canvas embraces new technology to make the teacher’s job easier while integrating Turnitin AI detection into their submission portal to ensure academic integrity is upheld at all costs.

Canvas LMS and systems like it are the present and future of learning. Whatever the latest innovations in learning technology will be, they will surely be absorbed into Canvas.

Table of Contents

• What is Canvas and How Does it Work?

• Why Do Schools Use Canvas?

• Is There A Free Version of Canvas LMS To Try Out?

• How Does Canvas Integrate With Third-Party Educational Tools?

• Canvas and Turnitin

• AI Plagiarism and Undetectable AI

• Conclusion

• FAQ

What is Canvas and How Does It Work?

As I stated earlier, Canvas is a learning management system that schools use to consolidate all their course materials and student data in one place. Using Canvas, teachers can quiz their students, distribute syllabi, set curricula, assign homework, grade homework and much more. It’s a one stop shop that takes care of all a teacher’s needs.

I set up a free Canvas account to show you how Canvas works. First, find the course section on the sidebar and create a Canvas course. For our sample, I’ve created an English course. Before you can publish a course, you will need to create a module to set the course’s homepage.

Once you’ve published an online course, you will want to add Canvas students into that course. Go to the People section under Courses and add the students that have enrolled in your class.

For the sake of our sample, we’ve added the jock to our class and created some course content in the form of a Football essay assignment that we’ve assigned The Jock to write. You can look below at the all the customization options for your assignments.

Now lets assign that essay to The Jock:

Once The Jock finishes his essay, we can manage his scores and letter grades along with the rest of the class’s in the Canvas gradebook. Teachers can use speedgrader to ease their grading process if they choose.

As these samples have exemplified, Canvas keeps every feature a teacher might need right at their fingertips. It’s a very user friendly interface for both teachers and students that want a more rewarding and modernized digital learning experience.

Why Do Schools Use Canvas?

The more online students are, the more online we should expect teducation to become. Canvas is the natural progression of academic infrastructure into the digital ecosystem. Because we depend on certain technological features in our ordinary lives, like notifications, we should expect academia to rely on those same features.

Sometimes higher education may feel like a different world or a fishbowl, but ir can never be completely separated from the real world. If schools chose not to employ software like Canvas, or if Canvas was never invented, there would be a measurable difference in student success simply because learners wouldn’t be able to access the tools of the modern world.

How Does Canvas Integrate With Third-Party Educational Tools

As Canvas is the gold standard of learning management systems, it integrates the gold standards of each third party educational tool that is necessary for student success.

The most notable of these integrations is Turnitin. The world's premiere AI Detection software built into Canvas’ submission portal to ensure any assignment that runs through Canvas is always plagiarism free and not AI generated.

As essential as Turnitin is deemed in academia, many universities have declared AI detection tools don't work because they generate such a high rate of false positives. In the case of Turnitin, there is a 4% false positive rate at the sentence level.

AI Plagiarism and Undetectable AI

Teacher’s integrated learning software into academia because students integrated software into their learning. That includes the use of AI to generate assignments for them to directly submit as if they wrote it. Although this does not consitute traditional plagiarism because no person is having their words outright stolen without credit, academia has made an effort to protect academic integrity by labeling the use of AI writing tools as AI plagiarism.

StealthGPT's guide to AI ethics in academia will give you thorough breakdown of AI plagiarism.

The rise of ChatGPT led to the rise of AI detection tools. The rise of AI detection tools led to the rise of undetectable AI. Students are now using services like StealthGPT to ensure their AI generated text bypasses services like Turnitin. Because undetectable AI poses a threat to student’s truly learning, academia will inevitable be forced to find a way to make room for generative AI or reshape how students learn around it at a different cost.

If you want to learn more about how to bypass AI detectors, our guide has all the answers.

Conclusion

Canvas is the premiere learning management system used by academic professionals to optimize the learning outcomes of their students. If anyone is interested in understanding modern education or digital learning, taking the time to investigate the ins and outs of Canvas is essential.

Canvas is your one stop digital education infrastructure. Letting you create classes, enroll students, assign homework and tests, grade and more in one place.

If you want to take Canvas for a test drive, you can create a free Canvas account like I did. They even have a Canvas mobile app to manage your courses on the go. Tutorials are available to teach you every feature of the software but only guides like these will give you the lowdown without trying to sell you anything.

FAQ

Is There A Free Version of Canvas LMS to Try Out?

Yes! I tried it out myself and got acquainted with the service. All you need is an email address and you can start creating courses and assignments for an online course today.

What Is An AI Detector?

AI Detectors check any piece of text for the watermarks of AI writing. These watermarks are measured in perplexity and burstiness and usually refer to the simplicity and precision of the word choice and sentence structure which indicate the text was written by language models trained to write for utility, not human writing style.

This Forbes article breaks down the watermarks of AI writing best.

Can I Gain Access To Turnitin?

No. Unlike Canvas, there is no free version of Turnitin you can gain access to directly from them. Turnitin is an exclusive service that requires some kind of student enrollment to access or verifiable credentials as an educator. People often find ways around these obstacles, but if you need access to an AI Detector, there are many free options out there with equally powerful engines.