Canvas LMS

The ostrich algorithm is ignoring a problem in thehopes 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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 This is an open forum where Canvas users can ask questions of each other and share ideas. The forum is moderated by a group of Canvas power users who are called Canvas Coaches. 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 Have you made something awesome for your faculty or students? This forum allows you to share it for the good of all mankind. Our users have shared everything from implementation stories to tips and tricks to help you squeeze every last drop of goodness out of Canvas. Best Practice Webinar Archive This is easily one of the best resources for in-depth Canvas learning. Canvas Coaches and Instructure staff teach one hour specialized sessions on Canvas. Topics range from 'Tips for Smart Online Course Design' to 'Integrating Third Party Tools into Canvas.' You should definitely take some time to check these out. Product Release Notes A few weeks ago we wrote a post about the screencasts that come out before each Canvas product update. It explains how the release schedule works, where to find descriptions of releases, and how to access the beta environment to test features before they're released. Subscribe to this forum and you'll never miss a beat with the comings and goings of Canvas updates. Feature Request Forum Early in Instructure history, our co-founders Devlin and Brian, went on a product validation tour where they talked with a number of educators about their needs. This same practice is still used today right here in this forum. If you're interested in shaping the way things work in Canvas, join the discussion where your opinion matters. Tell our product team what you'd like to get out of Canvas. Extension Gallery Interested in integrating Khan Academy content into your course? How about lecture capture from Panopto or Tegrity? This is the place where we talk about all things integration. Learn how to bring powerful third party resources to bear in your courses. 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 This is an open forum where Canvas users can ask questions of each other and share ideas. The forum is moderated by a group of Canvas power users who are called Canvas Coaches. 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 Have you made something awesome for your faculty or students? This forum allows you to share it for the good of all mankind. Our users have shared everything from implementation stories to tips and tricks to help you squeeze every last drop of goodness out of Canvas. Best Practice Webinar Archive This is easily one of the best resources for in-depth Canvas learning. Canvas Coaches and Instructure staff teach one hour specialized sessions on Canvas. Topics range from 'Tips for Smart Online Course Design' to 'Integrating Third Party Tools into Canvas.' You should definitely take some time to check these out. Product Release Notes A few weeks ago we wrote a post about the screencasts that come out before each Canvas product update. It explains how the release schedule works, where to find descriptions of releases, and how to access the beta environment to test features before they're released. Subscribe to this forum and you'll never miss a beat with the comings and goings of Canvas updates. Feature Request Forum Early in Instructure history, our co-founders Devlin and Brian, went on a product validation tour where they talked with a number of educators about their needs. This same practice is still used today right here in this forum. If you're interested in shaping the way things work in Canvas, join the discussion where your opinion matters. Tell our product team what you'd like to get out of Canvas. Extension Gallery Interested in integrating Khan Academy content into your course? How about lecture capture from Panopto or Tegrity? This is the place where we talk about all things integration. Learn how to bring powerful third party resources to bear in your courses. 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 8th 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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: [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]