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Canvas Tips and Tricks

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

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:

Student Editable Pages

The pages area in Canvas is excellent for designing rich multimedia content for your course. However, it can also be a collaborative space. Next time you are editing a page, scroll down to the bottom and

Students can edit.

take a quick glance at the drop down menu that lets you choose who has editing rights. There you will find options to make the page to be editable by your students.

Think of the possibilities!

Here are a few things teachers in Canvas are already doing with this functionality:

Collaborative online debates in which students take a side of an argument and work together to lay out their case for others in their class to see. For added effect, you can follow it up with a class vote on the argument via the quiz tool.
Student contributed web resources. Set up a template page with categories and instructions and let your students do the rest, adding resources they find on the web for topics pertinent to your course.
Creative, collaborative, multimedia projects. Without ever meeting face to face, students can use pages, in connection with Canvas’s other collaborative tools, to write, characterize, and even perform a short play. The integrated multimedia recorder/uploader adds numerous possibilities to what students can do.
Let students write the textbook. Some teachers have gone so far as to give their students the topics of the course and then have set their students loose in researching and writing their own textbook.

Need a do-over? Canvas' Rollback button.

If you’re worried about tracking student’s efforts or managing the possibility that a student may delete important content, look no further than the page history at the top right. There you can see who has contributed and what past versions of the page looked like. You can even roll back versions if needed. It’s the undo button you’ve always wanted in an LMS.

Media Everywhere, including podcasts

If you’ve spent much time in Canvas, you’ve hopefully seen the option to record and/or upload media practically everywhere you look. This is already empowering fully online immersive sign language classes, music and theater classes, and other learning environments that require audio/visual expression.

Podcasting is a breeze in Canvas

Did you know you can also use Canvas discussions to podcast? We’re talking podcasting in the true sense of the word, with an RSS feed students can subscribe to so that content automatically downloads to their computer and mobile device as it becomes available. The next time you set up a discussion, click “More Options” and check out the option to “Enable Podcast Feed for this Topic.” The RSS feed will display to students as they view the discussion. You can copy this link and make it available elsewhere, either in Canvas or elsewhere on the web.

Podcast external link

This can be great for lectures. Or maybe you’re regularly visiting places and meeting people pertinent to your field and you want to share with your students. Perhaps you’re teaching radio or video journalism and want your students contributing to a current events podcast. All of these and much more can be accomplished via the discussions podcasts tool.

Quiz Moderation

Moderate Quiz

One of the facts of life in teaching is, well, life itself. Things rarely work out perfectly for everybody, and sometimes students need special accommodations. Canvas makes this especially easy with the quiz moderation feature. Look for the “Moderate this Quiz” button as you view quiz details. There you can unlock a quiz for a specific student while it remains locked to others. You can also give students extra quiz attempts and additional time.

Podcast external link

But did you also know that if a student runs out of time on an attempt (thanks to technical difficulties, an awkward moment, whatever) you can actually add more time to that student’s attempt on the spot? Click on the clock to add more. It’s like the teaching equivalent of adding time on your microwave to get your popcorn just right.

Interested in more?

Crosslisting
Importing Spreadsheets in Gradebook
Extra Credit

Canvas is brimming with possibilities you may not have considered. In addition to the topics above, if you are interested in more check out the Canvas Community’s user-contributed resources page. There you will find things like USU’s tips and tricks blog, Mike Kisow’s how to Vimeo channel, and the training resources pages of schools like Howard Community College, Massasoit, Weber State University, and more. Feel free to contribute!

Have fun, and keep learning!

Neal Legler
Instructional Designer, USU
Canvas Coach

Introducing Canvas K-12

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

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.

An artist's depiction of Canvas K-12 in action.

New K-12 specific features include pre-populated state standards and common core curriculum, parental co-enrollment, attendance, and curriculum mapping. However, web conferencing and social media settings will be disabled by default.

Speaking of sex, in 1953, the American School Health Association launched a nationwide program in “family life” education. This new program ushered in an exciting opportunity for teachers, administrators, students and parents to work together to educate young people.

So, without further ado, let us present “Preparing for Change: Understanding Canvas K-12” (no parental permission slip required.)

Some Secrets Hurt

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Keeping Vulnerabilities Secret Doesn't Make Them Go Away

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.

Hey guys, please don't be this way.

So back in November we decided to be the first LMS company to do an open security audit and we invited a 3rd party observer (Phil Hill) to document the process. And yes, the major security problems reported about Blackboard prompted the idea behind this open security audit. Fundamentally, hiding security vulnerabilities in the LMS decreases the likelihood they will be repaired and increases the likelihood that they will be exploited. The idea of openness in security is almost universally embraced by the academic and commercial security vendors as a method for increasing security.^{1, 2, 3, 4}

Blackboard, D2L, and Instructure - with annual open security
audits, we can all be winners!

As such, we see no reason why all LMS providers in the market shouldn't provide open security audits on an annual basis. We're not asking for the stars and the moon, we’re simply asking the LMS industry to prove their claims of compliance in the open.

The Cost of Open Security Audits

So what's the downside? Time, money and inconvenience.

Open security audits cost LMS providers money. An audit costs somewhere around $40,000. Out of the hundreds of millions of dollars that the major LMS providers bring in every year, we think this cost is not a burden when compared with the benefit of keeping educational institutions safe.

Open security audits cost LMS providers engineering time. If they need to publish a vulnerability report, they will likely want to fix the vulnerabilities before they publish the report. This will require some effort on their part to make their software as secure as they claim it is in their marketing literature. The challenge here is that if there are multiple software versions supported, then tracking security issues across version can be a complex process. In this case, native cloud systems have a distinct advantage when it comes to security management.

Open security audits are inconvenient for LMS providers because they could be embarrassing and leave no room for dodging accountability. It's easier to pretend that everything is fine, and that the "internal" security audits or closed 3rd party audits are sufficient. The problem is that you never know if these audits are complete or if the security vulnerabilities found are fixed in a reasonable amount of time.

As an educational institution, the questions that need to be asked are:

Would you rather have that next neat feature in the next version of your LMS or would you rather know for sure that the gaping security hole has been repaired?
And how will you know that these security holes aren't being kept secret from you by your vendor?

The Challenge

John Baker, CEO of Desire2Learn, why don't you do an annual public security audit?

Michael Chasen, CEO of Blackboard and Ray Henderson, President of Blackboard Learn, why don't you do an annual public security audit?

In the spirit of efficiency, let me help out here with the response. It seems to me, that the four possible responses to this challenge are as follows:

A) I'm going to ignore this call for an annual open security audit.
B) I'm going to make a noncommittal statement about how important security is, reference security bulletins we've published in the past, and say that's good enough or have a spokesperson do it for me.
C) I'm actually going to walk the walk and do an annual public audit because keeping educational institutions and students safe is more important than the potentially embarrassing security flaws that could be revealed through the audit.
D) I'm not going to do it, because my engineering team is incapable of making our software secure, so I'm going with option A and/or B.

Let's make a commitment to education that we will be open, honest, and accountable for the security of their faculty and students. Together we can make the edutech industry the most secure and open tech sector.

Okay guys, it's your move.

How seriously do you take the security of your customers?

-josh

¹ Bruce Schneier, "Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity"
 http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0205.html

² Randy Bush, Steven M. Bellovin, "Security Through Obscurity Dangerous"
 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ymbk-obscurity-00

³ Seth Ross, "Security Through Usability" Securius Vol 4, 1
href=http://www.securius.com/newsletters/Security_Through_Usability.html

⁴ Whitfield Diffie, "Perspective: Decrypting the secret to strong security"
 http://news.com.com/2010-1071-980462.html

Online Course Design - Keep It Super Simple

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." -- Albert Einstein

He should have just stuck to Scooby Snacks.

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! Traditional LMS are similar: they’ve transformed a good idea into an often silly and painfully slow combination of steps, levers, and pulleys that end up hindering both teachers and learners.

A simple approach is always going to win. This is true for the LMS as well as for course designs. Canvas gives you the power to quickly embed multimedia and hypertext anywhere in your course. But with great power comes great responsibility. We want learners to focus on the learning activity, and not be weighed down by extraneous cognitive load¹ that may arise from complicated or confusing design choices. Here are some tips that will help teachers and course designers keep instruction super simple:

1. Less is more. In general:

Shaggy in a hall of mirrors with a robot.

“Omit ~~needless~~ words”²...
...And multimedia³. Only include video, slides, or external hyperlinks when they clearly support learning. List everything else as references.
Avoid redundancy which splits attention or causes information overload.⁴
Tear down the wallpaper. Avoid media as decoration; instead, grab students’ attention with relevant stories and anecdotes.

2. Use hyperlinks (wisely). Canvas makes it easy to contextualize new material with one-click hyperlinks in our rich text editor. Referring back to previous learning and pointing forward to upcoming activities can reinforce course goals. But remember that too many hyperlinks may adversely affect cognitive load⁵, so be selective.

3. Clear, concise directions. Students need explicit directions (except when they don’t). But if we want students to read those directions, paying attention to the critical bits, we need to write as concisely as possible. Rubrics and Outcomes will help ensure that your assessment criteria are neatly expressed with clear ties to course goals.

4. Stay on target. Being able to clearly articulate how every learning activity maps to a specific outcome is one way of keeping the weeds out of the garden. If you can’t identify how a reading, activity, or assessment supports a course outcome, chances are you don’t need it.

Worst homepage ever.

5. Free up the homepage. Because many students will see it every time they access the course, keep your home page free of static, one-time-use information better suited for Announcements. And while every course needs a home page, don’t forget that students may prefer to use links in the Canvas Activity Stream, their To Do list, or Notifications to instantly access course resources. With this in mind it’s possible to design a Canvas course that doesn’t rely on a home page at all, but rather engages learners continually and opportunely.

So, while Canvas’s simple interface and rich feature set makes it easier to do more with your courses, remember Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s words, “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Keep learning,

Jared Stein

¹ EduTech Wiki, "Cognitive Load"
 http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Cognitive_load

² Steve Krug, "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" http://books.google.com/books?id=g1QBFJxB_eEC

³ Ruth Colvin Clark, Frank Nguyen, John Sweller, "Efficiency in learning: evidence-based guidelines to manage cognitive load" http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iKVhZ4wj82cC

⁴ Richard E. Mayer, Roxana Moreno, "Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Overload in Multimedia Learning"
 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_6

⁵ A. Shapiro, D. Niederhauser, "Learning from hypertext: Research issues and findings"
 http://www.mendeley.com/research/learning-hypertext-research-issues-findings/

The New Year

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This makes sense. Think about it.

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 - it was the year we established ourselves as a serious, viable alternative to the traditional LMS. Over 100 educational institutions have made the decision to leave behind their tired, legacy systems and make the choice to move to Canvas.

We also experienced incredible growth within the company. We started the year with not much more than a handful of engineers and now we have grown into a full service company of over 85 employees, with another dozen positions open.

2012 will be even more amazing. We are working on several new initiatives to make your life easier - some of them have been announced, others will be announced soon.

Thanks to all our customers and partners for an extraordinary 2011. Together, we really are making a difference in education.

Oh, and one more thing - if you haven't checked out the Canvas Community, take a look.

Keep learning,

-josh

Compare Canvas

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

So what's up with the comparison matrix?

The zenith of automotive innovation.

Thanks to commercial pioneers like Blackboard, the Learning Management System is ubiquitous in post-secondary education and no one questions the need for some type of learning management system. 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?

Well, yes, at some fundamental level, all the learning management systems are the same. Just like all cars are the same, and all search engines are the same. Of course, we know the difference between a Ford Pinto and a Ferrari and there's a reason that most people use Google instead of Lycos or Excite for search.

So to make things clear, and simple, we thought we'd publish a comparison matrix that highlights the important differences between Canvas and the other guys. It's not a feature list - it's a list of strategic considerations that educational institutions need to consider as they think about the next steps in education technology.

We hope you find this matrix useful.

Keep learning,

josh

Canvas for iOS

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Education technology innovators.

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.

How can any smartphone from today compete with that? Sure, we have Angry Birds and Infinity Blade 2, but we have yet to achieve a breakthrough on par with Socrates and Beethoven in a time traveling pay phone.

Okay, so here at Instructure we haven't quite nailed time travel, but we do have a solution for students to utilize mobile platforms. It will help them communicate with one another and keep tabs on their academic progress. Today we are happy to announce the release of Canvas for iOS.

Canvas for iOS

Built natively for both the iPhone and iPad, students are able to interact with Canvas via an immersive touch interface. Wherever you go, Canvas can go with you.

Main features:

View your Canvas activity stream
Stay on top of your to do items
View your course schedules
Read and participate in course discussions
Read, create, and reply to Conversations
View grades for your courses and individual assignments
View submissions and participate in comment discussions with your instructor via text, audio, or video

For the technical people:

Uses the Canvas open API
Takes advantage of OAuth to provide support for single sign on systems
Does not use a custom windowing system

Canvas for iOS will allow students more flexibility and control, so they can score some non-heinous grades. If you're on the Canvas Cloud, you can grab it from the app store today, at no additional charge to yourself or your school.

Also, check out this cool video:

Be excellent to each other,

Mark Suman
Manager of Mobile Development

Canvas Tastes Like Open

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

OpenEd 2011 Conference, #opened11

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:

Last week we joined the crowd of gentlefolk and ruffians at OpenEd 2011 in Park City and quickly ran out of t-shirts. Seems that Canvas has some appeal with folks pushing the boundaries of education. This may be because when it comes to openness, Instructure doesn’t just talk the talk, we are the duck:

Canvas is open source. AGPL, baby. This equals freedom for DIY’ers and code junkies, and seeds a new community that benefits everyone involved.
Canvas has an open API. No exclusive, members-only club here; we actually want people to innovate and expand Canvas’s capabilities.
Canvas uses open standards. Sure, our code is standards-compliant, but we also use open learning standards like Common Cartridge for bringing learning content in and out, and LTI to let your custom tools talk to Canvas.
Canvas courses can be open published and assigned a Creative Commons license. Why rebuild your course as OER when all it takes is one click? (Been doing this since 2009.)

This next one’s my favorite: 

Instructure tastes like open too.

Canvas supports open learning experiences. Students in Canvas use whatever web services they want for communication and creation. Let students publish course work in their own digital spaces, then use Canvas’s SpeedGrader (along with the URL submission or Google Docs or Etherpad integration) to painlessly manage assessments. (Again, old news for Canvas.)

Instructure is open. It’s part of who we are. It’s what we believe in.

Keep learning,

Jared Stein

Educause and CanvasCon DC

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

October has been a great month.

Educause

I really like Philadelphia. Tastykakes? Not so much.

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. Oh, and we unveiled a couple of new Instructure t-shirt designs and gave lots of shirts away.

CanvasCon DC

CanvasCon DC went well. It was our first regional conference, and what was most interesting about the attendees was that about half of them had never used Canvas before. Phil Hill was the keynote and he discussed the general landscape of the LMS market - but the highlight of CanvasCon was that we invited our BFFs from Blackboard and they showed up! They were great sports and danced with us, took copious notes for the next version of their product and messaging and generally had a great time. ;-)

Happy Halloween.

Also, Canvas adoption continues to grow in significant ways. In fact, I recently heard that the largest community college district in the country selected Canvas. Oh, and get ready for analytics - done the Instructure way. It's coming in Q1 of 2012. That's just a few months away.

Keep learning,

-josh

The two latest t-shirt designs (click for a bigger version):

CanvasCon Washington D.C.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Those bastards.

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, but really, the Canadians were behind the whole thing. Seriously - you should probably look into it.

The other thing I think about is earthquakes. Even though, according to the USGS, there hasn't ever been an earthquake actually centered in the District of Columbia, this last one kind of freaked everyone out - and now the Washington monument is closed.

The Washington Monument has a complex and
somewhat checkered past.

Earthquakes, politicians and Canadians aside, we're going to host a regional conference in Washington D.C. on October 27th. InstructureCon 2011 was such a great success, we're going to try out a smaller, regional format for customers and folks interested in Canvas. The format will be similar to InstructureCon in that we'll have two tracks to choose from - the techno-geek track and the "normal people" track. It'll be awesome.

Oh, and we totally invited Blackboard to a dance-off at the conference.

Keep learning,

-josh

P.S. If you haven't signed up for CanvasCon Washington D.C. yet, early bird ends on Monday so get your tickets now.

The MebiPenny Coding Competition

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Andrew Cobb, gentleman, scholar, MebiPenny winner,
holding an undersized novelty check for $10,485.76.

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:

The competition was split into two phases. The first phase was an online challenge round hosted by custom coding competition software we wrote. The final round, held in-person at Instructure HQ, required competitors to write an artificial intelligence bot to play a game inspired by "Dots and Boxes" against other contestants’ programs.

How popular was this contest? I'll quickly share some stats with you:

We had over 600 people sign up to find out more about the competition and more than 300 people actually logged into the online contest portal. During the online competition, 180 people submitted at least one code solution and there were 2,570 code solutions total.

And how did scoring go? Well, the maximum possible score anyone could have gotten on the online portion was 40 and the average score was 6.62. We wanted to get an even spread and make a hard test, but we may have gone overboard!

Here is the distribution of points by all the contestants:

Good work everyone who joined in!

We were also able to collect a lot of interesting statistics in the online round, but the one that surprised us the most was the dominance of C# with Utah coders! We had no idea.

Check out the language distribution of the first round:

A whole bag of Swedish Fish. Not a bad consolation prize.

The final round started at 2:00pm at Instructure HQ. We had 13 contestants because of a 5-way tie for 9th place. After four grueling hours, Andrew Cobb's artificial intelligence came out on top, winning him a shiny new MebiPenny in the form of a tiny foam check. His program was so good, it even beat some Instructure employees' own solutions.

Second place went to Anthony Neal, who got a bag of Swedish Fish.

Here at Instructure we love open source, so we've decided to release all of our contest code to the public:

StraitJacket: This is a restricted code execution system based on Linux AppArmor. This project is where you want to contribute if we didn't support your language correctly or at all.
CodeWarden: This is the actual web application that hosted the tournament.
First Round Problems: This has all the first round competition problems, the test cases, our solutions, post-mortem-style descriptions of common issues people had, and what the right solution strategy was. Make sure to read the readme file if you need help finding the goods.
Hexagons: This is the specification, server, visualization, and sample bot used for the final round. This isn't quite ready to go yet, but it'll be at that URL soon. While you're waiting, you can watch a video of a match between two prized Instructure employees.

If you competed, thanks again, and hope to see you again soon!

Zach Wily
VP, Engineering
Instructure

New Mexico State Chooses Canvas

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This pepper was specially bred to hold more cheese.
Now that's innovation.

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 graduation (so it went in the wild, wild West). Since that time, the school has had quite a bit more success in graduating its students, and is now the home of illustrious programs like the Chile Pepper Institute (home of the world’s hottest pepper!), the NMSU Physical Sciences Laboratory (a partnership with NASA), and the Institute for Energy and Environment.

Obviously, NMSU is an innovative school. Well, they just got more innovative. Today they announced that they have selected Instructure Canvas to replace their existing Blackboard LMS. Why did they choose Canvas? Well, they cited ease of use and Web 2.0 features like social media integration, SpeedGrader™, and streamlined multimedia as major deciding factors. We could say more, but Project Manager Steve Leask said it best: "While the other applications were the next version, Canvas was the next generation."

Welcome to the Canvas family, NMSU!

Back To School, Canvas Style

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

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, I was much, much wiser. I can tell you in retrospect that I never would have made it if it hadn’t been for some great teachers, some smart friends, and a willingness to ask for help.

My first day of school sendoff looked much
like this.

Likewise, some of you are having your first experience with Instructure Canvas. Maybe you have a good idea of where you're going with Canvas. Maybe you don’t. Either way, it never hurts to have a little assistance. Fortunately, Canvas has some excellent resources and a great community of users who love to help. You can ask questions on Twitter or engage other users on several Facebook pages, or, if you’re an administrator and want to talk to other administrators who are using Canvas, check out the Utah State University Canvas listserv or the Canvas Google Group. As for official Instructure resources, you can watch some videos about Canvas on our video page or check out our support site.

Also, we’d love to hear stories about how Canvas is making your back-to-school experience easier in the comments. We hope you have a great year!

Keep learning,

Nate
Director of Marketing

InstructureCon 2011 Reviewed

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

InstructureCon attendees as far as the eye can see.

We had our first user conference, with somewhere around 250 users in attendance from all over the country. It was awesome!

Highlights included the Typing of the Dead contest, just-in-time lightning round talks, the panda bear, both rain and sunshine in the mountains, and even a moose sighting.

Overheard at InstructureCon 2011 via #InstCon11:

9 out of 10 pandas love Canvas

@windygap96: #instcon11 getting underway now...hidden pandas and soap box opportunities...a new kind of conference?
@tekten: LMS discussions continued even in the hot tubs at Snowbird's Cliff Lodge at #instcon11
@kateATuvu: "The smaller the font, the more powerful the feature. You can ask Brian Whitmer why it's that way." -Cory Stokes #InstCon11
@creategery: OH: Man, this is the best conference I've ever been to #InstCon11
@hong_chau: Thanks @instructure for the amazing conference!! Leaving in great spirits! Snowbird was awesome! #InstCon11
@clsaarinen: Thinking of using Canvas? "Don’t worry. I’ve been there before. It’s good. - Ben Adams" #InstCon11

One-armed pushups are really hard.

We recorded all the sessions and we will be uploading them to our YouTube channel sometime next week.

Thanks again to all who attended, and we’ll see you next year.

Keep learning,

-josh

Blackboard World 2011

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Feeling guilty? It's okay. We understand. Call us. We can help.

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 to come visit us between sessions and we ended up having over 200 people crowd into the VBar to visit Instructure.

We gave out t-shirts and served food and drinks to all the great folks from educational institutions that were there for the conference.

One thing we were surprised about was how interested Blackboard employees were in our event. We didn’t let them in at first but towards the end we sort of opened it up to them.

Everyone looked great at our event.

We met a bunch of people from the design and experience team at Blackboard. Lots of them have spent many hours on the Canvas demo site the last few months, so it was fun to finally meet them in person.

About halfway through the event Michael Chasen came by to see if he could get in. One of our engineers, Ryan, ended up talking with him for a while. Michael said he liked our flame thrower video, but didn't understand what the 9.meh shirt meant.

This guys badge had tons of ribbons on it.

Darth Vader and Chewbacca were also there. They did a really awful skit – but we all had fun with it. We gave away an iPad 2 and a couple of high-end lightsabers. Ironically, one of the lightsaber winners works for Blackboard. I can only hope that The Source will be with her now.

So we appreciate Blackboard for being a good sport about us riding on their coattails. It was a great opportunity to meet up with so many folks from the industry. Thanks everyone for coming.

Maybe Blackboard will come crash our conference coming up in August!

Keep learning,

-josh

For those that missed out, here are all the designs (click to see bigger version)

Learning Outcomes Webinar

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

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. I also pontificated on where we're heading with outcomes in the near future, and how our development approach helps us add functionality, like outcomes, in a way that's seamless, effective and that can grow with the product. I may or may not have mentioned cheese curds in the webinar. I most certainly didn't bring up tube socks.

Keep learning,

Brian Whitmer

InstructureCon 2011

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This photo is self explanatory.

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 fun, even without dinosaurs.

The conference will be August 1st and 2nd up in the mountains at Snowbird. Our primary objectives are to facilitate learning, networking and to have fun. You can take a look at the agenda here.

We're also going to host a Just-In-Time Soapbox Session where attendees at the conference can sign up for a 5 minute 'lightning round' to plug in their slides and step up to the mic and talk about whatever they think we all need to hear - but when the 5 minutes are up, that's it.

You can find out more about InstructureCon on our website, or you could just register now.

Keep learning,

-josh

SpeedGrader and Speed Holes

Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

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 "Homie the Clown." Krusty gets in trouble with the mob, so he convinces Homer to impersonate him in public. Homer is at a dealership looking at a car when the mob comes by and sprays the hood with bullets. The salesman quickly remarks, "Those are speed holes. They make the car go faster." Later, Homer takes a pickaxe to his own car, adding speed holes.

Cheetahs have speed holes.

SpeedGrader

SpeedGrader™ is one of the most popular features in Instructure Canvas. It takes the egregious task of grading papers and turns it into a quick, enlightening process where the educator can focus on the student's work with little overhead. All grades are synchronized with the server, so teachers don't need to "record grades" later. Essentially, we shot holes in the grading process that teachers loathe.

SpeedGrader for iPad

SpeedGrader for iPad supports complex rubrics.

In February, we made the SpeedGrader portable (and magical) by releasing it for the iPad. The app instantly received a warm welcome from professors, because it allowed them to capitalize on spare moments of downtime.

Suddenly, waiting for Junior's soccer practice to end no longer meant zoning out in the car while All Things Considered blared in the background. Teachers could crank through a handful of student papers in minutes, assigning grades and providing feedback in the form of text and audio comments.

Then we added more speed holes, and everything changed...again.

New Version

We are happy to announce the release of SpeedGrader for iPad 1.1.

Here's a small peak at what's new:

Video comments on the iPad 2.
Quiz grading.
Grading counts for faster grading discovery.
Ungraded student submissions appear first.

Teachers, if you have the means, I highly recommend picking up an iPad and SpeedGrader. They are so choice. You'll be able to kiss your manila folders goodbye and experience life in the fast lane. Oh, and while you're there, say hello to Paul Walker for us.

In case you were wondering, our collection capped out at 22 full VHS tapes.

Cheerfully,

Mark Suman
iOS Lead Developer

Canvas And Inbound Emails

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This is what the Canvas dashboard originally looked like.

One of the first courses taught using Canvas was called "Writing 301". It was 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 “Normandy."

Since then, Canvas has grown a lot in features, flexibility, and reliability. The interface saw a complete rework, and the full product was released as open source. The feedback has been unbelievably positive, and people really appreciate the simplicity and openness of Canvas. Even during that initial semester students could control what notifications they received and where they got them – in their inbox, on their phone, etc. It’s always been easy to get information out of Canvas.

This is a photo of cat in a mailbox.

Users have loved this, but in addition to getting information out, we’ve wanted to make it easier to get messages back in to the system. We’ve wanted to do more to encourage communication, so we recently enabled inbound email replies. This means that users can reply to Canvas alerts right from their GMail, Hotmail, or whatever email tool they use. When they get an alert about a private message, or a new post in a forum, they can reply right from their inbox and their message will automatically be added back into the Canvas conversation. It may sound like a trivial thing, but it means users can participate in their courses wherever they are, on whatever device they’ve got, without having to log in and navigate around the site.

As far as I know, this is the first time a learning management system has supported this kind of functionality. Students all but expect it after using Facebook and other social products, and we don’t want to prevent communication from happening. This is one more way Canvas leverages the rest of the web to help improve education.

Keep learning,

Brian Whitmer
Co-founder

Amazon Web Services and Instructure

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

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. These issues took several days to fully recover, raising many to question the viability of hosting applications in "The Cloud" instead of managing your own servers.

Honestly, we don't think a caption is required for this.

At Instructure I manage a team of experienced software and operations engineers that have been building large scale cloud systems for the better part of a decade (yes, "the cloud" is not actually that new) and we are experts so our customers don't have to be. Instructure didn't experience any problems related to the AWS outage, even though we do have servers hosted on AWS in the Virginia datacenters and we do utilize the EBS service. Our system is spread across several datacenters to maximize availability, even in a disaster scenario like last week.

Does this mean that Instructure will never have downtime? No, of course not. No one can guarantee 100% uptime - but we can assure you Instructure is based on a robust global architecture that we obsess over 24 hours a day, 365.242199 days per year, so you can spend your energy obsessing over your passion for education.

Thanks,

Zach Wily
Director of Engineering and Operations