What Is SAMR and How to Use It in Canvas

New tools arrive in education every year, and it is easy to feel that using one counts as progress. SAMR is a simple way of asking a better question: what has the tool actually changed about the learning? This post explains what SAMR is and shows how to use it in Canvas, with examples from the kind of course you may be building now.

What SAMR is

SAMR was developed by Ruben Puentedura as a way of thinking about how technology is used in teaching. The letters stand for four levels: Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. The levels describe what the technology does to a task, not how impressive the technology is.

• Substitution: the technology replaces an older tool, with no change to the task.
• Augmentation: the technology replaces an older tool and adds something useful.
• Modification: the task itself is redesigned in a way the technology makes possible.
• Redefinition: the technology allows a task that was not possible before.

The first two levels are often grouped as enhancement, because they improve a task that already exists. The last two are grouped as transformation, because they change what students do. The model is usually drawn as a ladder, but it is better to treat it as a thinking tool than as a league table.

That caution matters. A higher level is not always better. A well-made PDF handout may be exactly what a student needs, and a redefined task that does not serve the learning objective is just a complicated way of wasting time. SAMR tells you what the technology is doing, and your learning objectives tell you whether that is what you need.

SAMR has its critics, and they raise fair points. The ladder image suggests that the upper levels are better, it says nothing directly about whether students learned anything, and the boundaries between levels are blurry. Two colleagues can place the same activity on different rungs and both have a case. Treat it as a prompt for discussion rather than a measurement.

Pair it with a model that describes the thinking you want from students, such as The New Bloom’s Taxonomy: A Practical Guide for New Academics, and with a structure for your course such as the Introduction to the PANDA Framework. The post on creating engaging and effective learning experiences shows how several of these models fit together.

Substitution and augmentation

Most Canvas courses begin at the first level, and there is nothing wrong with that. Substitution is where you swap a tool without changing the task. A printed handout becomes a PDF in Files. A paper register becomes a spreadsheet. The task stays the same, and the only gain is convenience.

Augmentation adds something useful. The handout becomes a Canvas page with a short video, a glossary of key terms and a practice quiz that gives instant feedback. The task is still the same, which is to learn the material, but students have more support and can check their own understanding. For marking, the paper mark sheet becomes a SpeedGrader view where comments sit next to the work, which {a(“sg”)} describes in detail.

Augmentation often improves access too. A page can be read on a phone, searched, translated by a student’s own tools and used with a screen reader, which a scanned handout often cannot. That benefit is easy to overlook, and it is a good reason to build pages with proper headings and descriptive links.

These two levels are valuable because they save time and reduce friction. They are also the levels where most of us can make quick gains. The risk is stopping there and calling the job done.

Modification and redefinition

Modification is the first step into transformation. The task is redesigned, and the redesign depends on the technology. A lecture handout becomes a set of case studies that students discuss and critique online. A final report becomes a first draft that students review for each other before submitting.

In Canvas, a clear example is peer review. Students submit work, then receive a set of classmates’ submissions to review, ideally with a rubric. The task has changed from handing in work to giving and receiving feedback. That is difficult to do well with paper and email, and it builds evaluative skills that a single teacher’s mark does not.

Redefinition is the rarest level. It means a task that would not have been possible without the technology. Students might create a short explainer for an audience beyond the class, publish it and respond to comments. Or they might work in groups across time zones on a shared project that is assessed on both the product and the collaboration. The learning looks different because the audience and purpose are different.

Group work is another route. Canvas lets you set up student groups with their own discussion space, and a task that asks a group to produce a shared output and then critique another group’s work is a different task from one that asks each student to submit an essay alone. Whether it counts as modification or redefinition depends on how far the technology reshapes the work.

Be realistic about this level. You will not redefine every task, and you should not try to. Pick the tasks where the learning outcome is hard to reach any other way. If a task matches the higher thinking levels in {a(“bloom”,”Bloom’s Taxonomy”)}, such as evaluating and creating, it is a good candidate.

SAMR in practice: files, email and paper

It is much easier to see the levels in a real teaching pattern, so here is a scenario that I recognise from practice. It is a fictitious lecturer, but the habits will be familiar.

Look at what happened in SAMR terms. Moving files into modules and replacing email with announcements is mostly substitution. Pages with headings and links, and comments in SpeedGrader, are augmentation, because they add function. A rubric and recorded feedback add more, and a peer review task would move the course towards modification.

The lecturer in this scenario made real gains without needing a radical redesign. That is worth remembering. Starting with substitution and augmentation is perfectly respectable, as long as you can say what you intend to do next. For more on building the rubric, see 5 Tips for Building Effective Rubrics in Canvas.

If you are unsure how to choose between files, pages and module items, Driving Canvas: Modules vs Pages explains how Canvas treats each of them.

Using SAMR to plan your Canvas course

You can use SAMR as a short audit of your course. Make a list of the main tools and tasks, place each one on the ladder and ask what would improve it. The aim is not to climb every rung. The aim is to be deliberate about where the technology is doing useful work.

1. List: write down the tools you use for content, communication, activities and assessment.
2. Place: mark each one as substitution, augmentation, modification or redefinition.
3. Ask: for each, decide what would improve the learning, not what would be more advanced.
4. Change: choose one task and make one change this term.

Share the result with a colleague who teaches a similar module. Two people placing the same tasks on the ladder will disagree about some of them, and the disagreement is where the useful conversation about purpose begins.

You will probably find that most of your course sits at the first two levels, and that is normal. You may also find one or two tasks where a small modification would give students a lot more. A discussion that becomes a peer review, or a quiz that becomes a student-written question bank, can change how students engage without a big rebuild.

Keep in mind that the model describes technology use rather than teaching quality. A course can be excellent at substitution and poor at modification, or the other way round. Use SAMR to start a conversation with yourself and your colleagues about purpose, and let your learning outcomes make the final call.

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