February 08, 2012
Whether you are new to Canvas or not, there may be tricks that you were unaware of or possibilities in teaching your course that you have not considered. Here are a few that may be interesting...
February 01, 2012
Today, Instructure announced Canvas K-12. So what’s Canvas K-12? It’s “regular” Canvas with some K-12 specific features and default settings added.
January 24, 2012
Currently, every major LMS in the market keeps their vulnerabilities and security flaws a secret. The problem is, keeping these flaws secret doesn't make them go away. These kinds of secrets put students, faculty and institutions at risk...
January 17, 2012
If you’ve ever watched a Scooby Doo cartoon, you’ll know that the gang often attempts to catch the bad guy with an overly complicated Rube Goldberg machine that usually ends up trapping poor Scooby instead. Ruh roh!
January 05, 2012
January 1st, 2012 marked the anniversary of the arbitrary point in our orbital path around the Sun that we have designated as the beginning of a new cycle. So, happy new year! 2011 was an incredible year for Instructure...
December 12, 2011
So what's up with the comparison matrix? When it comes to Learning Management Systems, no one asks "Why?" but we do hear a lot of people asking "What?" as in "What's the difference?" The LMS has been around for over ten years now, aren't they all the same?
December 08, 2011
In 1989, Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan pioneered the use of smartphone technology in education. They utilized a smartphone to access educational content in new ways and achieved an unprecedented level of mastery of the subject they studied...
November 02, 2011
Lately, it seems like Open has been such a confusing term for some organizations that have arrived late to the 'open' party. Here's our take...
October 31, 2011
Educause was great. It was our first time attending the conference, and so we were allocated a relatively small booth, but it was packed with visitors the entire time. We had great meetings with a variety of different folks to talk about partnerships, integrations and industry gossip...
October 06, 2011
When I think of Washington D.C. the first thing I think of is Canada. I guess I really haven't quite forgiven those guys for burning down the White House in 1814. I mean, a lot of folks think it was the British...
September 13, 2011
And the 2011 Mebipenny Challenge Award of 2^20 cents ($10,485.76) goes to Andrew Cobb! Congratulations Andrew!
If you're just joining us, we're hot on the heels of our first ever Instructure Mebipenny Coding Competition, which was, by and large, a huge success! Here's a quick recap of how the competition worked...
September 08, 2011
New Mexico State University was founded in 1890. Its first graduating class, the class of 1893, had just one member – Samuel Steel. Unfortunately, Steel was shot and killed shortly before...
August 30, 2011
This time of year always makes me think of my first day of school. I was 5 years old, and I had literally no idea what I was in for. Almost 2 decades, several college majors (Music, Psychology, English, Economics, and back to English) and one college degree later...
August 10, 2011
We had our first user conference, with somewhere around 243 users in attendance from all over the country. It was awesome! Highlights included...
July 18, 2011
So, we crashed Blackboard World. Sort of. We really just had a small event in a small lounge across the hallway called the VBar. We invited lots of folks from the conference...
June 16, 2011
Last week was our first Instructure Best Practices webinar; this one was on learning outcomes in Canvas. I walked through how to set up and use learning outcomes as an administrator or instructor...
June 10, 2011
Okay, first off - I just want to address the rumors and get this cleared up:
there will be no dinosaurs at InstructureCon 2011. We're sorry if this is a disappointment - we just couldn't get the science to work out. Despite this failure, I assure you, the conference will be super...
May 16, 2011
I grew up watching the Simpsons. My family recorded it every week on VHS since day one. Before shows were available on DVD and Netflix, my friends would come over to watch random episodes of America's favorite cartoon family. One great episode is...
May 04, 2011
One of the first courses taught using Canvas was called "Writing 301". It was created created September 8, 2009 and was taught at Irvine Valley College by Amelia Parkin. Amy and our six other pilot instructors were very helpful – and very patient as we ironed out some early kinks in our product, then-code-named...
April 25, 2011
Last week Amazon Web Services suffered a high-profile outage. Early Thursday morning at around 1am, the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service failed in one of their Virginia datacenters, bringing down several large websites and hundreds of smaller ones. The failure in this data center caused the load to cascade to other AWS datacenters, causing additional problems...
April 18, 2011
So we've closed some funding. It's just one milestone in the journey, but it's an important one. It's the critical fuel we need to grow the business to a point where it's strong and self-sustaining. Our investors are serious professionals that...
March 10, 2011
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. One theory in particular is referred to as
tabula rasa which means
shaven table, or
blank slate. The shaven table refers to the method of deleting content from early data storage devices made of wax poured into a wooden frame. These wax tablets would be erased by shaving or scraping the wax off them. The tabula rasa theory is basically the idea...
February 28, 2011
The Instructure open-source strategy is simple: open source is necessary but not sufficient to fulfill the needs of this market. The market also needs mission-critical, enterprise level support – and not just any kind of support, but support from the core developers of the product itself. When people think of open source LMS, they usually...
February 11, 2011
So it turns out that I mostly just know English. I know a little bit of Cambodian, Spanish, Latin and I can say a few words in Nepalese and Russian, but mostly, just English. And when I mean English, I'm really just talking about the basic conversational type of English - not the precise grammatical type. The problem is that my brain...
January 31, 2011
There is a certain library in Minnesota where there are 24 cardboard boxes
containing the records of the very first electronic Learning Management
System. This LMS was developed in 1960 at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign by a researcher named Donald Bitzer. It was called
PLATO, which was an acronym for Program Logic for Automatic Teaching
Operations...
