Canvas LMS

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 ... [More] 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.) [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

"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 ... [More] 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/ [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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): [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 andsomewhat 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. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]