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.
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."
Definitely has my interest.