I'd love to see Populi add some features that would enhance person-to-person interactions in the LMS, enabling more collaboration and connection between teachers and students who are geographically separated for all or part of a course. After using Canvas as a PhD student in a course on "Digital Learning", I learned about some features that would make Populi a stronger competitor as an LMS for online learning and would meet some needs for improving online learning in general. I also make these suggestions having heard a few people calling for using Canvas as an LMS while keeping Populi as an SIS (which I am not excited about).
-Video conferencing within the LMS. I wonder if the "Chat" tab could integrate Big Blue Button, a web conferencing tool: https://bigbluebutton.org/developers/ . I've also used WebEx, so maybe an area to link to that could work as well.
-Custom student groups (students in a course can be grouped in smaller numbers for focused discussions and projects).
-Peer Review for assignment types. Connect students to grade each other's assignments using the annotation tools.
-Rubric-based grading for assignments (the option for a grading rubric integrated into each assignment, which would allow for highlighting and score calculation).
-Media comment on assignments (the option to record a video/audio clip as a comment on an assignment, instead of text-only)
-Collaboration documents, which can be updated by each user (link to Google docs?)
This may have been a lot to include in one request, but all of these features (which are presently in Canvas) would work together to greatly enhance Populi's appeal to schools that want to offer the best quality in online education, as well as online LMS support for face-to-face classes.
