Case Study: University of Mary Washington achieves a unified, reliable LMS across three campuses with Canvas LMS

Canvas succeeds as single LMS for three campuses with varying needs

The University of Mary Washington (UMW) in Virginia needed a more reliable, flexible learning platform after a degraded hosted Blackboard experience increased downtime and weakened support. With three distinct campuses—traditional undergraduate, a graduate campus serving non-traditional students, and a partnership/ distance-education host—UMW required an LMS that supported face-to-face content distribution, mobile and group collaboration, and robust online delivery. With the Blackboard contract expiring, a faculty-staff-student committee evaluated vendors and selected Canvas.

UMW fast-tracked a campus-wide migration, moving about 2,500 courses to Canvas in time for the fall semester. Adoption jumped to 82% of courses (from 55% under Blackboard), driven by features like integrated web conferencing, multimedia submission, Google Docs collaboration, rubrics tied to outcomes, and reliable cloud hosting. The platform also improved administrative training delivery and user support through an active community and feature-request process, resulting in higher engagement across all three campuses.

University of Mary Washington

Lisa Ames

Administrator