A few months ago, the Board of Education announced that MCPS would be moving to a policy that would require teachers to use exclusively myMCPS Classroom, a Canvas/Instructure platform for online learning. This means that teachers would not be allowed or able to use Google Classroom for online learning, even though many teachers have been using Google Classroom successfully before and during the coronavirus pandemic.

Below are some of the arguments against this Canvas-only policy, and a summary of demands by the signers of this petition.

(1) Google Classroom is a highly effective online learning platform that teachers and students like, and have been using effectively for years. It would be a waste to bar them from using it. 

Many MCPS teachers use Google Classroom regularly, and with good reason: Google Classroom includes many features with an easily navigable user interface (UI). Google also continually adds new features to Classroom based on the direct feedback of users around the world, all without sacrificing their easy-to-use UI.

Importantly, despite this new Canvas-only policy for teachers, Google Classroom is still available to MCPS teachers and still actively being used for professional development (PD). For instance, this fall’s class for Studying Skillful Teaching — one of MCPS’s most popular and well-received PD courses — is using Google Classroom. Therefore, it cannot be that MCPS is somehow saving money by ‘getting rid’ of Google Classroom, because it is still there. 

Is MCPS really going to force classroom teachers onto a different platform, while allowing PD instructors to keep their freedom to choose? And if Google Classroom is still technically available to use, and presumably will be used for teacher PD through the fall, is MCPS serious about enforcing this policy?

A Canvas-only policy would make more sense if a majority of students preferred it to Google Classroom. However, many MCPS students — especially highschoolers, who at this point have been using Google Classroom since elementary school — are more familiar with and prefer Google Classroom over Canvas. What will it do to student engagement to have students use more of a platform they like less? 

If MCPS wants to claim that students actually do prefer Canvas or do not have strong preferences, does the district have data to back up this claim? 

The Board and MCPS have also claimed that teachers using both Canvas and Google Classroom causes ‘confusion.’ Is this ‘confusion’ coming from the students, or from parents, who are not the primary users of these platforms? Was any data related to these issues shared with teachers at any point? Were teachers offered the chance to express their own preferences before this policy was announced?

(2) The Board has argued that making all teachers use Canvas would help streamline student learning. But the truth is more complicated: an all-Canvas system would do little to reduce the number of online platforms students have to navigate. 

There are a vast array of educational tools and systems that MCPS students may be expected to use every day: Naviance. Khan Academy. Vocabulary.com. Remind. ClassDojo. Albert.io. YouTube. Read180. Nearpod. And many more. It seems hypocritical for MCPS leadership to cry for the “streamlining” of student platforms, all while encouraging and/or requiring students and teachers to use other websites, tools, apps, etc. like those listed above.

What do all secondary students have and use, though? MCPS Gmail accounts. Google Docs. Even our district’s laptops are Google Chromebooks, which students will be using now more than ever. And what is best integrated with Google Docs? Google Classroom. Why force teachers to abandon the platform specifically designed to integrate smoothly into the Google Apps for Education system that ALL students use?

That being said, we are not advocating to axe Canvas entirely, though we wonder about the possible sunk cost fallacy that MCPS is employing in its continued use of the platform. If some teachers want to use it, more power to them. However, we are advocating for choice, since all essential tools of online learning are offered by both Google Classroom and Canvas. 

(3) We know that there are multiple trainings available for Canvas available to teachers. However, these trainings have only further emphasized that (A) Google Classroom and Canvas both offer the same essential features and (B) any extra features on Canvas are, at worst, clunky, and at best, unnecessary for quality, rigorous education.

One Canvas video in the training called Deep Dive into Online Assignments claimed that using an ‘external tool’ option for submitting Canvas assignments was “one of the easiest ways to integrate Google into Canvas” — all while showing an “integrated” Google Docs assignment that is cut off in a sub-window, so students would have to scroll horizontally and vertically in order to see the whole document at once. 

It turns out that Google Classroom is, in fact, an even easier way to integrate Google Docs into online assignments, and was expressly built for that purpose. 

We as teachers are used to navigating unfamiliar technical tools and continuous learning to better ourselves in our profession. And we will do our best to make learning as easy as possible for students no matter what. However, if this Canvas-only policy is allowed to continue, many teachers who have used Google Classroom effectively for years would be forced to waste hours learning Canvas — hours we could have otherwise spent preparing for this unprecedented shift to online learning, making our curriculum as effective as possible using the platform that works best for our professional needs. Does the Board of Education really think it is a good idea to force this transition NOW?

IN SUMMARY, WE THE UNDERSIGNED

• urge MCPS and the Board of Education to reconsider their choice to force classroom teachers to use myMCPS Classroom/Canvas, instead of allowing them to choose between Canvas and Google Classroom. This would allow teachers to focus on providing high-quality online learning for students from whatever platform they already know.
• demand more transparent, honest, and publicly available information — both quantitative and qualitative — about the Board’s rationale to force teachers to move exclusively to Canvas, because it was done suddenly and without recent, widespread calls for input from the MCPS teaching staff.

As educators, we all know that buy-in matters for implementing with fidelity — and so far, MCPS has not done enough to promote buy-in to a Canvas-only system for a large number of its teachers.