Canvas LMS

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 ... [More] 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! [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 YouTube page or check out our support wiki. 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 [Less]

InstructureCon attendees as far as the eye can see. ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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) [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

This is what the Canvas dashboard originally looked like. One of the first courses taught using Canvas was called ... [More] "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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

Dante illustrates what not to do with venture funding.(Yes, those are naked guys with big bags of money.) So we've closed some funding. It's just one milestone in the journey, but it's an important one. It's the critical fuel we need to ... [More] grow the business to a point where it's strong and self-sustaining. Our investors are serious professionals that have spent literally hundreds of hours doing research, talking to customers, competitors, analysts and crunching the numbers to figure out if Instructure has what it takes to really change the market. Openview Ventures invests in growth companies, not startups, so why did they invest in us? We're a startup, right? Well, yes and no. Instructure is three years old now, which is relatively young, but the rate at which we are growing our customer base is evidence that we have obtained a very real foothold in the market, and the next step is to build out the support and sales team while continuing to perfect the product. So what does this mean to the market? Well, to our customers it means that they can be a lot less concerned about our financial stability. To our competitors it means that we aren't going away and that they will need to start to lead, follow or get out of the way. ;-) Keep learning, -josh [Less]