Every single student at my university would cheer for joy upon hearing this news. Blackboard is as stunted a piece of development as they come and additionally is an incredibly expensive piece of software, especially considering the quality.
The user experience is so bad that many course lecturers make their own site or just avoid using websites at all. The only question I have though is how do you pitch it to universities when the people who suffer under the product usually aren't the ones making the purchasing decision?
As part of the deal, include "training" for those making the decisions, and make sure they know its at a nice resort in <insert seasonal vacation destination>.
I'll hold my cheers until the local college adopts it. I really like the screenshot. Canvas looks very well designed, but I somehow doubt that my college will start using it any time soon.
As someone who was suckered in Blackboard backend administration and still haven't managed to get free I decided to give this a spin.
This is my impression after 30 minutes of fumbling with it:
The look for end-users is clean and feels great. Way better than Blackboard for end-users. Canvas seems to promote a more self-service adhoc approach which would be attractive for small installs.
Unfortunately the admin interface seems non-existant.
How do I sanely create and populate thousands of courses?
User admin tools are primitive. Where is the ability for the administrator to change a users password? How can I see what classes they are enrolled in, what their roles are, etc? Can the administrator globally disable a user for non-payment without deleting?
How do faculty roll the content from one course into
multiple sections and then roll that content over to a new course next semester? No anti-cheat integration?
Anyway those are the concerns I was able to find in the first 30 minutes.
It looks undeployable here which is a shame. Here is to hoping it gets better soon.
Edit: I just spotted the course copy functionality. Scratch that one off the list. Still not impressed with the central admin tools exposed in the UI. Our faculty would prefer not
having to populate the user lists in their courses, etc.
Edit 2: Thought I'd be done playing with it but not yet. I can't get over how awesome the end-user UI is. As I just sent off to a co-worker: "The end-user UI is stupendously good compared to Blackboard. Stunningly good in comparison. It's like taking the best of Facebook and turning it into an LMS. Hide this from users."
Devlin from Instructure here. It's great when someone actually takes the time to dig into the application and give some real feedback. Thank you.
From the sound of things I think you are using one of our free-for-teachers accounts, which gives you complete control over a course and not to the administrative tools that an admin would have. This is why it feels self-service and adhoc for small installs, because it is :)
We can integrate with a variety of SIS systems in batch/real-time for auto-populating thousands of courses. You can integrate with auth systems like LDAP and SAML too. We have features for migrating content from other vendors and also from semester to semester.
I'm happy to chat on the phone, answer questions here or you can set something up by emailing me devlin@instructure.com .
This reminds me of the post about the site for apartment managers a couple of days ago, where it was designed to meet the needs of the end users - who aren't the actual purchasers.
OK, despite having read the article, the thread, and working for a major US university, I still have no clue what this Blackboard thing does, or what LMS stands for (though I have learned that everybody hates Blackboard). Can someone explain what class of product we're discussing?
Blackboard is an LMS that many major universities use to provide online support for classes. At my university (University of Richmond), I can sign on to blackboard.richmond.edu and for each of my classes that semester, can download assignments/lecture/slides that my teacher has uploaded, upload assignments for my teacher to grade, view a roster of the other kids in my class, participate on a bulletin-board for "class discussions", view my grades, and my teacher can send out emails to the entire class fairly easily (enter text in a box, select which students of that class to send to, hit submit).
It's okay, but there are definitely some issues. Like, not being very user-friendly (I constantly help out my instructors with how to use it). Also it doesn't work very well in Chrome =/
Blackboard hurts Universities because it's overly expensive and unintuitive for the price.
This new site looks great. I worked on http://moodle.org/ back in the day which is a great opensource alternative. It's now deployed in most if not all California State Universities. This is a great space to work in.
Best of luck to them. It's quite difficult to convince faculty to switch over from tools they are comfortable using -- especially porting over their existing lessons and modules. Focusing on the UI is definitely the right approach as Bb is clearly lacking in this space. Regardless, the LMS market is long overdue for a shake up.
On another note, many universities already run and contribute to the open source Sakai LMS. It's a Java-based LMS developed and maintained by a consortium of universities. A small to mid-size university can get it running very quickly as a pilot on 1 or 2 servers using Tomcat and MySQL. It's easy to customize and it integrates seamlessly with existing university portals via CAS. Throw in a SAN for user files and it's a very powerful, scalable and low-cost LMS option that is much more usable than Bb.
> It's quite difficult to convince faculty to switch over from tools they are comfortable using
This statement assumes faculty are comfortable using Blackboard... I have yet to meet one who is. I've had to use it for my TA duties and the expression about running nails across a chalkboard is ripe for a pun.
When I was at NYU, we all had blackboard. We mostly used various google offerings to route around it (google groups for class mailings, google docs for sharing, etc).
No one I've ever met who has used Blackboard has ever expressed anything nice about it. Professor friends of mine actively avoid it; they use Wordpress instead. Others use Moodle.
In fact, it's so bad that my alma mater has put out a call for something else. http://webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/ (Admittedly, they make it sound like it's due to licensing, but if people were happy with it, they wouldn't be asking.)
LMS strikes me as a problem best dealt with at the course level, not the university level. Give profs some web space and let them put up something and go from there. The centralized "hub of all courses" seems overly complex.
I have a professor who uses Sakai (the university as a whole used Blackboard, but switched to Moodle, another open source option, this year). Sakai may be better than Blackboard, but that's not saying much. The ui is still terrible and it's filled with inconsistent and confusing behaviors. I've no idea what it's like from the instructors perspective, but as a student it's barely usable.
Moodle is about the same as Sakai in this regard, but Blackboard is simply terrible. This is clearly a market that needs to be shaken up, and I hope these guys are the ones to do it.
I agree that there are some UI issues in Sakai. I particularly dislike how the back button does not work as expected due to the way the sessions are maintained. However, with the source being available, it is only a matter of time before improvements are made.
Sakai's forum feature is pretty impressively broken, I had a professor try to get students to use it and it was an enormous, ongoing disaster as people were thwarted by the UI at every turn.
I am alum/tech support/TA at Univ. of Michigan which is one of the major contributors to Sakai so I have seen all sides of it. The actual services are pretty good, but the user interface is horrible. In defense of Sakai, the developers know the UI is horrible and are working on it. I have my doubts they will succeed since it's such a huge project.
I asked pg at startup school about doing an edtech startup, and his answer was something like "Well, schools move to slowly to ever get traction, but if you ever did get traction, Blackboard would sue the crap out of you immediately."
(That said, I'm still planning an edtech startup. Best of luck to instructure!)
I think any serious competitor is going to have a hard time since Blackboard has been known to sue on their ridiculous patents... their legal history is sickening...
From getting to know the guys at Instructure over the years I'm sure they have considered everything that might be coming down the pipe. If anybody can navigate the waters and succeed competing with Blackboard, it's them.
Agreed. I work tech support here at my university, and the calls received about Blackboard are ridiculous and are always no fun to troubleshoot. I like the company name, 'Instructure', but where does 'Canvas' come into play? Didn't we just see that with 4chan's new shindig?
My school has been primarily blackboard, but some of my classes were actually ported to canvas at the beginning of the spring term.
I have to say canvas is a lot friendlier and actually a joy to use. I dont know if its how my school has Blackboard signed up, but just the fact that I stay authenticated for longer than 10 minutes is a nice step up.
Most of the papers teachers post open up using scribd which is so much easier than dealing with a docx file or pdf.
I think Instructure is taking a step in the right direction, and I hope they can make through all of the crap Blackboard and Universities will give them.
Yeah, I didn't get that either. It seemed to imply that Instructure was about to get their ass handed to them as Napoleon did on his ill fated venture. Seemed contrary to the tone of his post supporting the startup.
I wish them well! There's definitely room for innovation in this space.
One thing that bothers me, though (and this is based on a quick run-through of their demo, so I'm prepared to be set straight if this is not correct):
It looks like they've made the same mistake as Blackboard, WebCT, etc. by making resource type (files, assignments, discussion forums, etc.) the primary organizational method rather than organizing by instructional unit.
It may make good sense from a programming perspective to put all the discussion forums together, all the downloadable files together, all the external web links together, but that's not the mental model that teachers use. To a teacher teaching (e.g.) American history, the PDF of the Gettysburg Address and the PDF of the Declaration of Independence don't "go together". Instead, the Gettysburg Address "goes together" with the discussion forum on the American Civil War and the link to the National Park Service page on the Battle of Gettysburg.
Most teachers would prefer to build the Civil War unit in one place, rather than clicking back and forth between the file section and the discussion forum section and whatnot.
Canvas does have a "Module" type that lets you do this, more or less, but it's not the primary schema for organization.
If they want this system to have maximum comprehensibility and usability for teachers and students alike, I'd recommend that they promote their Modules to the top level, and make them the primary organizational method for the system.
Moodle gets this right -- few of the others do. When you start a new Moodle course, you see a list of weeks (or topics) to which you can then add files, discussion forums, web links...on an ad hoc basis. While you CAN click on links in Moodle to see all the files in one place, all the assignments in one place, and so on, in practice no one ever does that (except maybe at the beginning of the semester when the students click on the assignments link to make a note of all the due dates).
You don't have to copy Moodle slavishly, but please don't copy the organizational schemas of Blackboard and WebCT. They just plain suck.
This quote is from the Technology page on the instructure.com website, "In the 1990’s it was Java and in the 2000’s it was PHP and .NET. The platform for Web 2.0 and beyond is Ruby."
Is PHP really considered old technology? FaceBook and a ton of other new and relatively new startups, including fflick.com use PHP. I am working on a startup and I certainly want to stay ahead of the curve with the latest technology; I have decided on PHP—because I am most proficient with this over the others. I know Ruby is like the hot, new girl right now, but that does not necessarily make PHP and Java old technologies. Am I wrong? Must I go after the hot new girl to keep my mojo?
For my computer architecture class at Berkeley, they decided to give Bb a try. It lasted about three weeks before they gave up and reverted to the tried and true command-line scripts for submitting assignments and viewing grades. Hopefully canvas will fare a little better.
The user experience is so bad that many course lecturers make their own site or just avoid using websites at all. The only question I have though is how do you pitch it to universities when the people who suffer under the product usually aren't the ones making the purchasing decision?