Canvas LMS

This is a portrait from Pompeii of a woman holding a wax tablet and chewing on her stylus. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. One theory in particular is referred to as tabula rasa which means shaven table, or blank slate. The ... [More] shaven table refers to the method of deleting content from early data storage devices made of wax poured into a wooden frame. These wax tablets would be erased by shaving or scraping the wax off them. The tabula rasa theory is basically the idea that our minds are blank slates and need to be filled with content through education. John Locke subscribed to this idea and expounded on how to fill the slate in his seminal work Some Thoughts Concerning Education. John's writing style reminds me that I don't like the BBC mini- series Pride and Prejudice. John Locke is as verbose as you'd expect from a 17th century philosopher, but the short version of his methodology on the best way to educate a student is to wash their feet in cold water every day, don't give them candy and don't make them take Latin. I'm being serious here - that's what the man said. Okay, so we don't think Tabula Rasa would have been the best name for our product, so we went with Canvas, which is a lot like a wax tablet, in that it's a platform for content, except it's made of cotton. And that's an important point to make - Instructure isn't in the content business. Our platform is open and content agnostic. If you can view it in a web browser, you can add it to a lecture on Canvas without modification. "Canvas: it's a lot like scraped wax, but better." Keep learning, -josh [Less]

The Instructure open-source strategy is simple: open source is necessary but not sufficient to fulfill the needs of this market. The market also needs mission-critical, enterprise level support – and not just any kind of ... [More] support, but support from the core developers of the product itself. When I think about dual-licensed software, it makes me happy inside. When people think of open source LMS, they usually think about Moodle and Sakai. These are great systems – and we salute them for the work they've done in this market, but we believe that without a commercial entity driving development, sales, support and innovation, the market ultimately suffers. It's the balance between the value of openness and the requirement of mission-critical solution based development and support. Merely adopting an open source project and then offering it as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution may provide support, but when the chips are down, critical bug fixes, integration and innovation only come out of the folks that own the technology. So, at Instructure, we've adopted a simple model. We own the technology – but we have open-sourced it. This is managed by maintaining and developing one source code tree, but offering two licenses. The open source license is out there for the world to audit, use and augment, but the commercial license is what we sell and support. With the commercial license, we are able to migrate your courses, we integrate with your SIS and we advance your institution into the 21st century of learning management technology. The commercial license is the basis for the Canvas Cloud solution as well, which is the easiest, most scalable way to utilize our technology. This dual-licensing model allows us to make a serious commitment to openness, but at the same time have a stable and profitable business to support real change in the industry. Ask yourself – would you rather have a closed system owned by a commercial entity, or an open system not owned by anyone? It's not an obvious choice – both approaches have their positives and negatives. So, doesn't it make sense to take the best of both worlds? Keep learning, -josh [Less]

Newton knew Latin way better than me. So it turns out that I mostly just know English. I know a little bit of Cambodian, Spanish, Latin and I can say a few words in Nepalese and Russian, but mostly, just English. And when I mean ... [More] English, I'm really just talking about the basic conversational type of English - not the precise grammatical type. The problem is that my brain isn't wired quite right to learn these sorts of things - like complex mathematics and foreign languages. I took a couple of years of Latin in high school, and despite the best efforts of my dear teacher Mrs. Bisio, I actually did rather poorly. It's difficult to recall, but I think one of the issues was that I was always a little disturbed in Latin class. See, while all my friends were learning how to order food, talk about the weather and ask where the bathroom is in French and Spanish, I was learning about farms, soldiers, and slaves - and they were always killing each other for some reason. The content in the textbook seemed to always be related to violence, death, taxation, Roman roads and aqueducts. It was kind of a bummer. The Romans built this sweet aqueduct in France in the first century. It's 31 miles long. I wish I had an aqueduct like this. Speaking of Latin and architecture, the word Instructure is actually derived from Latin. It's a combination of the Latin word instructus which means "to teach" and structure which means "to build". Devlin Daley and Brian Whitmer came up with this name when the company was founded. It's a great name - I think it captures what we are trying to do here - build something which enables teaching. I'm really excited about what we're doing here at Instructure - but it's not because I think technology is the "answer" to problems in education. I believe technology is necessary, but I don't believe it's sufficient to elevate education. Technology is only a tool, and a tool is only as good as the skill of the person that utilizes it. Our hope is that we are able to get a better tool into the hands of skilled teachers, students, and administrators and let them do what they are best at. And yes, we did have toga parties, and no, I don't think taking Latin helped my SAT scores. Keep learning, -josh [Less]

There is a certain library in Minnesota where there are 24 cardboard boxes containing the records of the very first electronic Learning Management System. This LMS was developed in 1960 at the University of Illinois at ... [More] Urbana-Champaign by a researcher named Donald Bitzer. It was called PLATO, which was an acronym for Program Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. The ILLIAC I system. PLATO required a fair amount of hardware. The PLATO system went through many revisions over a period of decades. The first system was programmed on the ILLIAC I system. The ILLIAC I measured ten feet high, two feet wide, and eight and a half feet tall and weighed about five tons. It utilized 2,800 vacuum tubes. In the 1970's a touch screen interface was utilized on a much smaller form factor, featuring a monochromatic orange display. Content was created with the TUTOR programming language, which was used to create thousands of hours of lesson material. The PLATO IV system was a lot like the iPad. The early PLATO systems were used to teach K-12 as well as college courses near Urbana-Champaign, and eventually systems were sold to educational systems all over the world. Bitzer published a paper in December 1968 describing the economics of the PLATO system in which he estimated the cost of the system to be about $0.27 per hour per student to use the PLATO III system.  Assuming a student used the system 5 hour per week, 16 weeks per semester, that comes out to about $43.20 per student per year. In today's dollars, that's about $266.00 per student, per year. (With this pricing, we'd be profitable in no time!) The first PLATO system went live in 1960, and the last PLATO system was shut down in 2006, but every LMS in use today is based on the fundamental concepts that Donald Bitzer developed - including our own LMS, Canvas. Keep learning, -josh [Less]