A student in Payson Library reviews his classes on Canvas on Sept. 4. One Seaver student said they lamented the University’s switch to Canvas did not come sooner in their academic career, according to the 2023-2025 LMS Study. Photos by Melissa Houston
Pepperdine has adopted Canvas as its new learning management system, replacing Sakai Courses, starting in fall 2025, according to the IT Department’s Pepperdine Canvas LMS webpage.
The University decided to switch to Canvas with the best intentions and student experience in mind, said Jordan Lott, senior manager of the Technology and Learning Team (TechLearn) and IT training. His team was focused on ensuring the software works and faculty know how to use it, so instructors could better guide students in its use.
“We need to have a tool that is both modern, continues to be innovated and developed to really advance our operations, teaching and learning,” Chief Information Officer Jonathan See said.
The Decision-Making Process and the Switch
The TechLearn team of Pepperdine’s Department of Information Technology (IT) was the one to kick off research into a new Learning Management System (LMS), Lott said.
The Learning Management System Study is a report produced routinely by TechLearn in the years leading up to the contract renewal of the University’s LMS, according to the TechLearn webpage.
In October 2024, 80% of student respondents said they were in favor of Pepperdine adopting Canvas and discontinuing Sakai, according to pilot surveys in the 2023-2025 LMS Study.
“When we reached out to other institutions, a great number are switching to and adopting Canvas,” See said.
Sakai — the LMS on which Courses was built — is an open-source platform that relies on other institutions developing and sharing it with the community, Lott said. That community is becoming smaller.
Canvas takes up around 41% of the LMS market share, while Sakai takes up less than 2%, according to TechLearn’s LMS Study.
“Our main focus is what is going to be a good option for us 10 years from now,” Lott said. “And that’s how we landed on Canvas.”
The decision to move to Canvas was not out of dislike for Sakai; some functionality that people liked was lost in the decision to switch, Lott said. Sakai sacrificed simplicity and efficiency for more functionality.
The two features of Canvas that really stuck out during the LMS Study were the mobile app and familiarity, See said. Another factor was the need to unify faculty on which LMS was being used, as many had already stopped using Courses in favor of other tools like Google Classroom.
The transition began as soon as University leadership made the decision, Lott said. It started with town hall sessions sponsored by University leadership and concluded with collaboration between TechLearn and the makers of Canvas on faculty training.
Duke University made a tool to automate the transition of data from Sakai to Canvas, See said.
That tool was used during the transition, and with every migration from Sakai to Canvas, a one-on-one counseling session was available to faculty, Lott said.
“If I were to guess, it’s 95% or higher of faculty that have already made that switch,” See said.
The Transitional Period So Far
The IT Department’s website was revamped to give students and faculty access to step-by-step guides on Canvas, Lott said.
“Canvas would be good overall, for professors, in general,” Religion ProfessorNicholas Zola said. “For me personally, it has caused some inconvenience.”
Zola said Duke’s conversion tool was not very useful in his case because of the way he had used Courses. The drop-down menus he had created for his class did not have an exact equivalent, leading to all his material being placed into a single page on Canvas.
“It works,” Zola said. “It doesn’t work beautifully.”
The migration tool successfully transferred quiz questions to Canvas, but numerous extra steps were still required to make them usable, Zola said. It saved him some time, as some steps he would have otherwise had to do on his own were already completed.
“I think Courses was often clunky,” Zola said. “I think Canvas is probably easier to use for most professors, and I used Courses at a level of detail that normal people probably didn’t do.”
Zola said TechLearn set up a meeting with him shortly after he migrated the course to walk him through the conversion process, and he was able to show them the parts that worked and those that did not. He was able to locate the quiz questions even though the quizzes had not fully transferred over with their help.
“I have one class still on Courses, two on Canvas, another professor still struggling to get onto Canvas and another one who is fed up,” senior Ella Fay said. “The divide has been a little hard to keep track of.”
For the Music Department specifically, there have been difficulties in transferring over certain software, like those used to record performances, said sophomore Kirsten Villa, a music major with an emphasis in vocal performance. The feeling of security provided by the mobile app and its convenience is an improvement over Courses.
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Contact Oliver Evans via email: oliver.evans@pepperdine.edu
