Instructure Blog RSS Feed

Some Secrets Hurt (Redux)

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The ostrich algorithm is ignoring a problem in the
hopes that it will go away.

So, 90 days ago we issued a challenge to John Baker, CEO of Desire2Learn; Michael Chasen, CEO of Blackboard; and Ray Henderson, President of Blackboard Learn, to participate in an annual open security audit. Why? Because we believe that hiding security vulnerabilities in the LMS decreases the likelihood they will be repaired and increases the likelihood they will be exploited.

Unfortunately, none of them responded.

They are keeping their security practices closed and secret. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I'm not. This is how legacy enterprise software companies usually behave, to the detriment of their customers.

We think they may have picked 'D'.

We will kick off our second annual open security audit in Q4. We invite any and all education companies to participate. We think education should be open, safe, and secure -- and that corporations should be held accountable for their claims.

Keep learning,
-josh

My Favorite C's - Canvas, Community and Candy

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

These make me happy inside.

You've all heard the quote, 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life.' You've also heard, 'It takes a village to raise a child.' Well, here at Instructure we're not interested in raising a village of fishermen. However, we are working hard to provide the very best community resources to help our users get the most out of their Canvas experience.

Let's talk about a few of the community resources that may be useful to you:

Ask a Question forum

If you have a question, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can ask a Canvas Coach

Community Created Resources

Best Practice Webinar Archive

Product Release Notes

wrote a post

Feature Request Forum

Extension Gallery

Hey, I'm on a boat.

There are many other great resources in the Canvas Community, so come join us. Feel free to start slow. Subscribe to a forums. Make a few comments. Share a tip or two. After all, we're all fishing in the same village. Let's help each other out.

If nothing else, at least swing by and tell us what kind of candy you like.

Keep learning,
Matt
The Canvas Community Guy

Power to the Parents

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The Helix Nebula. Dead stars are pretty.

When I look up at the stars, I only recognize Orion’s belt and possibly a dipper or two. Even though I find the night sky breathtaking, I also find it overwhelming. I’m just not familiar enough with the patterns of constellations to draw much meaning from the jumbled mess of twinkling lights above my noggin.

Like myself looking up into the vast abyss of the Milky Way, parents of K-12 students are faced with an array of courses, dates, homework, assessments, and grades to keep track of. This is normally no easy task, and can often be a feat of epic proportion to drag such information out of your 8^th grader.

Canvas K-12 is a lot like a star-chart for parents. Actually, Canvas K-12 is more like that really cool star-chart app that your brother-in-law has on his iPhone. When parents are co-enrolled into the same Canvas courses as their offspring, beautiful things happen. Things like being able to surprise Johnny with your awareness of an impending history exam and then planning some time to study together.

Susie Derkins: honor student, nemesis.

Parent co-enrollment provides access to grading information, submission status, due dates, calendar events, and best of all, notifications. With customizable parental notifications in Canvas, it’s easy for a parent to be notified via email, text message, or social media. Effortlessly, Susie’s mom is informed that her report on frogs was just graded and that Susie’s group is scheduled to present in class on Tuesday.

Canvas K-12 courses provide a framework for the educational careers of our students. Now, parents can share in the context that Canvas provides by viewing courses as an observer.

Student learning is a moving target that is often hard to perceive by rummaging through your kid’s backpack. Canvas K-12 provides parents just the right perspective to distinguish a shooting star from another airplane in the night sky.

Keep learning,
Mike Kisow
Park City School District

Blackboard Calls it Quits

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The fence line just shifted again.

We've received a lot of calls and emails about Blackboard's announcement, so I figure it's easiest to just make a post about it. Here you go:

Yesterday Blackboard announced that it has officially gotten out of the LMS business. They are now an education software and service conglomerate. They now "own" the legacy LMS market by supporting 5 different LMS products (6 if you include the D2L cross-licensing agreement.)

In other words, they don't care what LMS you pick. They will gladly take your money for whatever flavor of LMS you choose, as long as they can bill you for generic IT software and services. In a lot of ways, they are becoming IBM (minus the research labs) which is known as the IT support provider of last resort - the shop to go to when your institution relies on outdated technology (yes, they still happily support COBOL and mainframes). Blackboard is now a full service company supporting the "late majority" and the "laggards".

But what about open source? Yes Ray Henderson talks a lot about open source, but clearly it's eyewash. Blackboard hasn't changed, but hope springs eternal.

And what about ANGEL? Yes, they gave ANGEL a temporary reprieve from life support. Give it a year or two, and it will be back on the chopping block. In the meantime, I'm sure they will do the absolute minimum required to keep ANGEL alive until they feel they can afford to cut it loose. They have 5 different systems they need to support and develop - when resources get tight, which LMS do you think will get the short end of the stick?

So, what's going to happen now? Expect more confusion. I don't think it requires much imagination to suppose that the Moodle and Sakai community will become even more jumbled and Blackboard will shove innovation even further back on the burner.

And what about Instructure? Most of our customers are former Blackboard schools. We rarely see Moodle or Sakai make it to the short list of any education institution. We launched only 13 months ago and have just closed our 128th school. Why did Alamo Colleges, Auburn University, Brown University, Maricopa Community Colleges and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania pick us? Because Canvas is the open, full featured LMS platform, built on modern technology, native to the cloud. Instructure is about innovation.

And no, Blackboard can't buy us - it's not all about the money. (Yes, that's my 2011 W-2.)

Keep learning,
-josh

What Can Professional Services Do For You?

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I want one of these.

Have you ever wished Canvas would make you a grilled cheese sandwich? I know I have. Maybe something more like a Jetson's food machine - select what you want and it's instantly ready. Someday technology will catch up with our imaginations.

While Canvas can't (yet) make you a grilled cheese sandwich, we want to help you get the most out of your experience with Canvas. We've launched the Instructure Professional Services team to do just that - make it possible for you and your organization to use Canvas to its fullest potential.

The team consists of Project Managers, Engineers, Trainers, and Instructional Designers who want to help you accomplish your goals with Canvas. As part of our Client Services organization, the team's objective is not to sell you expensive services or generate a bunch of revenue for the company. The team exists to ensure Canvas meets all your LMS needs.

Examples of services already rendered include:

custom training sessions tailored to an institution's individualized needs
custom branding
course design and creation
management of course migration efforts
custom data extracts and reports
integrations with Student Information Systems, identity providers, and portal products
customer-driven accelerated feature development

Grilled cheese perfection.

In short, if your organization needs something more from Canvas, Instructure's Professional Services team would like to work with you to make it a reality. And if you've developed a grilled cheese-making machine with APIs, we'd love to hear about it.

Excited to see what we can do for you.

Mitch
VP Client Services

Canvas is a Learning Platform

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Some people don't even know what
this is. It's like a memory card. Sort of.

Remember when you had to develop pictures to see them?

You'd have to wait and wonder if they would turn out. How about mailing letters? Lick the envelope (ick), put it in the mailbox, and hope it was delivered.

In today’s world, innovation moves toward instant communication and openness, like email and digital photography. I don’t even know where I could buy a box of Kodak film anymore.

In education, innovation is happening with professors tweeting, YouTubing, classroom flipping, and more. This type of innovation is quick, easy, and open. Forklift upgrades are something that are quickly becoming antiquated, like camera film and snail mail. The new way for quick, easy, and open innovation is building on an open platform.

Last month, Marti Harris of Gartner Research and Phil Hill of the Delta Initiative have published their thoughts on platform based education technology.

This is a metaphor.

^{1, 2} Marti specifically encourages CIOs to develop a learning stack strategy in an agile environment where “elements can be added or removed as needed without changing the entire platform.” The LMS may be the platform if it is “amenable to opening up its system.”

Canvas is an open learning platform -- it was designed to be this from day one. Here’s what we think it means to be a learning platform. 1. Be open. Canvas has open APIs, an open community, and even open source code. 2. Native to the cloud. Being a native cloud app means that innovation isn't waiting for the semi-annual "release train" to get up and running. 3. Work with your users. We have over 120 smart institutions using Canvas. Our users regularly submit integrations and provide insights and ideas for us to work with. These customers are the trail blazers in education technology.

Today, as part of Instructure’s ongoing effort to make Canvas the best learning platform, we’re launching our Extension and Integration Library. It's a small start, but we think you're going to like it.

Keep learning,
Devlin

¹ Marti Harris of Gartner Research, February 12, 2012
 Building Learning Stacks for an Evolving Learning Environment

² Phil Hill of Delta Initiative, February 3, 2012
 Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform

Radar for the Cloud

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Air traffic control systems show you what's
coming up.

Air traffic controllers are often recognized with having some of the most stressful jobs around. They work under intense pressure, sitting for long stretches at their equipment and making split-second, potentially life-or-death decisions. Fortunately they have precision tools in place that help them do what they do so we can all travel safely.

Chief among these tools is the flight control radar. This allows controllers to see through the clouds and get an accurate picture of what’s happening in the skies above them. If tools like this weren’t available, you’d never catch me on a plane.

Clouds are beautiful.

Canvas is native to the cloud. That means straight out of the box Canvas comes with automated peak load management and no versions, upgrades, services packs or patches to worry about. Additionally, every two weeks features and bug fixes descend out of the cloud like planes coming in for landings. Yes, we just mixed our metaphor.

Much like flight controllers, we understand our users need to be able to see these features coming in advance. We provide two useful tools to serve as radars for our users.

The first one is the product release screencast. This is a short video presentation that is put out with each release where the new features are shown with some descriptions. These are usually a couple of minutes and can be shared with faculty who want to keep up with the new features in Canvas.

The second option caters more to our power users. This is the beta site. One week before the release, the new features are pushed to a beta site that is accessible to all our cloud users. This site features a copy of production data where users can experiment with the new features without messing up their actual production data.

Instructure is about steady continuous improvement, made possible by the native cloud architecture of Canvas. Using these tools to serve as your radar, new features will continue to find safe ground at your institutions.

Keep learning,
Matt

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

His mother hand knitted his cardigans.
For reals.

Superman. Hellboy. The Tick. These were super heroes for sure, but let's be honest -- they had nothing on Mr. Rogers.

Fred Rogers had so many super powers: he taught, he listened, he shared. He was an awesome person. He was an open, friendly neighbor that really cared about the success and well being of others.

At Instructure, we want to be like Mr. Rogers. We have a ways to go, but we think the more we spend time with users, the better shot we have at emulating our hero.

This is a photo of a conference.

So this year we’re going to attend close to 50 conferences, up from 4 last year. With a few of these shows behind us already, we’ve had some great times and connected with a lot of awesome people. All this quality time we will spend together will help us continue to develop a great business to support our customers and make Canvas the right platform for education.

Of course, we've got our own conference: InstructureCon. Last year we had our first go at it, and it was a great success. In addition to InstructureCon, we’ll also be doing a few Instructure-sponsored regional conferences. We call these regional conferences CanvasCon, and we may be coming to a neighborhood near you!

So if you live between Seattle and Orlando or in between Milwaukee and Dallas, we’d like to be your neighbor. Come visit us at one of these shows in the next couple months and pick up a t-shirt or other SWAG.

Keep learning,
-Brian

***************

EDUCAUSE West/Southwest Regional Conference 2012
February 22-24, 2012
Portland, OR

League for Innovations
March 4-7, 2012
Philadelphia, PA

COSN
March 5-7, 2012
Washington D.C.

Creating Futures Through Technology Conference
March 7-9, 2012
Biloxi, MI

Course Technology Conference
March 7-9, 2012
San Antonio, TX

NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computing Program)
March 12-14, 2012
Providence, RI

NCCE 2012 (Northwest Council for Computer Education)
March 13-16, 2012
Seattle, WA

ACCS (Association of Collegiate Computing Services of Virginia)
March 14-16, 2012
Charlottesville, VA

CUE (Computers Using Educators)
March 15-17, 2012
Palm Springs, CA

CISOA/Secure IT
March 18-20, 2012
Ontario, CA

SunGard Summit
March 26-29, 2012
Las Vegas, NV

EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference
March 26-28, 2012
Chicago, IL

FSCJ Teaching and Learning Conference
April 10-13, 2012
Ponte Vedra Beach, FL

2012 eLearning Consortium of Colorado
April 11-13, 2012
Breckenridge, CO

TxDLA
April 15-18, 2012
Dallas, TX

American Association of Community Colleges (AACC)
April 21-24, 2012
Orlando, FL

2012 Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference and Workshop
April 23-24, 2012
Milwaukee, WI

Here are the latest t-shirt designs:

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!