Canvas Features & Functionality
Why More and More Institutions are Choosing Canvas
Instructure, Inc. August 5, 2013
Why More and More Institutions are Choosing Canvas Canvas Features & Functionality
WHY MORE AND MORE INSTITUTIONS ARE CHOOSING CANVAS Like most learning management systems, Canvas provides core features and tools that help teachers and students succeed. So why do schools consistently choose Canvas over other learning management systems? Here are some of the reasons:
A Philosophy of Engagement, Service, and Transparency Institutions that join Canvas join a brilliant and open community of educators, learners, thoughtleaders, and technologists. It’s a community that was born and raised on our philosophy of engagement, service, and transparency. Our commitment to openness and transparency is visible in all of our communication and engagement with clients, from frank blog posts on voice.instructure.com, the community forums, and our annual open security audits, which, so far, no other LMS has been brave enough to follow.
“I am confident that you are better in touch with your users and better able to find the sweet spot between bloatware and minimalism than anybody else on the market." Neal Legler, Sr. Instructuional Designer Utah State University
The shared experience and spirit of innovation is amplified in the Canvas community because everyone is on the same version of Canvas. This makes community input about Canvas all the more meaningful, and so we encourage our users to share their ideas and experiences openly on our community forums. Our clients tell us that this openness—backed up by top-notch support and service—is both refreshing and necessary, because it proves that we value their voice and respond to the most critical or exciting ideas. Of course, in doing so, we’re acknowledging that Canvas is not perfect, but we’re also proving our commitment to continual improvement. When you share your ideas in the community forums, your ideas will not get lost in a black hole. We’ve been rolling out community-inspired improvements since day one, and many items in the 2013 Canvas Product roadmap are directly inspired by the open discussions in the community. Here are just some of those we undertook in the first half of 2013: •
Better statistics for user behavior and questions in Quizzes
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Full, automatic quiz regrade
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Grading quizzes by question, not just attempt
... and a great deal more. The open community around Canvas Network, our latest project dedicated to open, online learning, has also lead to significant feature enhancements—particularly for massive online courses. These improvements aren’t
25 September 2013
Instructure, Inc.
"Thank you for all you do each day to make the Canvas experience ever greater!" Rachel Dobkins Columbia Business School
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Why More and More Institutions are Choosing Canvas Canvas Features & Functionality critical to many schools today, but are just one way we’re blazing the trail for the innovators of tomorrow. Competitors may try to use our practice of transparency and openness against us, but we stand by the principle that transparency breeds trust, and openness leads to innovation.
A Better Way to Manage Change The old way of managing LMS updates was for the provider to bundle them into a monolithic service pack that would require additional cost, scheduling, system downtime, and faculty retraining. Canvas was designed for a better, faster, less disruptive paradigm. First and foremost, we believe that Canvas users shouldn’t have to wait 3 months or more for bug fixes or new features. So we built Canvas to accept updates without having to be taken down. We also practice an agile development philosophy that allows us to respond dynamically to community input, research in the field of education technology, and advances in social media, tools, and services on the open web. Second, we decided early on that teachers and students don’t deserve to languish on forgotten versions of their LMS. That’s why our users love Canvas’s true multi-tenant architecture that ensures everyone is up-to-date and fully patched. Third, we are committed to introducing changes gently and gradually, so that no teacher or student is faced with the challenge of re-learning the LMS whenever a version change or service pack arrives. Our incremental approach to change—and our advance release of the latest code to all clients on Canvas Beta—helps ensure that teachers and students are never overwhelmed. Our approach to change management focuses on positive changes that are less disruptive than the legacy model. That’s why we provide: •
Rapid-response, hands-free updates for security patches, bug fixes, and minor feature enhancements—typically with zero downtime
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Individual user opt-in/opt-out for significantly changed features or UI, like our latest Gradebook and Calendar
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Institutional opt-in/opt-out for new tools, like Analytics, Scheduler, and Attendance.
Though we do respond rapidly and agilely to the education space, we own the reality that sometimes features aren't always delivered as quickly as the community wants. Canvas is all about powerful features that are easy-to-use, and so we always thoughtfully explore alternatives (often on our community forums!) and thoroughly validate the user experience. This ensures that Canvas doesn’t become cumbersome or over-complicated.
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Instructure, Inc.
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Why More and More Institutions are Choosing Canvas Canvas Features & Functionality Flexibility That Liberates Teaching and Learning We want to ensure Canvas is making teaching and learning easier, which means making sure Canvas is simple to use, provides a variety of ways for meaningful user interaction, and gives users the flexibility to choose how and where they access Canvas. Here are just some ways we do that:
Simple, Elegant User Interface Powerful features don’t have to be hard to use. We’ve always believed that, and now our clients do, too. Canvas is exceptionally usable with an elegant, intuitive interface. No one wants to use a tool that is slow, cumbersome, or carries archaic features that are really just Band-Aids for the real problems. Canvas manages to provide powerful, yet elegant features with simplicity that increases your impact on learning.
Human Interactions, Emphasis on Human Canvas makes person-to-person interactions a priority, and lets teachers and students restore humanness to online learning through integrated media, diverse ways of communication, and rich feedback for assignments and assessments. Users can integrate with outside media, such as YouTube, Flickr, and other web resources, or record their own video or audio on any Canvas page. Users can communicate within Canvas through Canvas Discussions, Canvas Conversations, Google Drive, Chat, and Conferencing. Students and teachers engage in feedback via private grading notes/comments—in text form, audio and/or video—between the instructor and the student attached to the submitted assignment, as a file attachment to the submitted assignment, and/or as comments attached to the associated rubric.
Mobile Apps That Real People Use Canvas mobile isn’t just a gimmick, it’s a recognition that students and teachers alike benefit from moving learning beyond the walls of the classroom and into an increasingly connected world. Canvas provides native mobile apps that help students learn and teachers engage, grade, and give feedback on both iOS and Android. Canvas mobile apps are not only rated higher than those provided by other LMS, they’re also 100% free.
“I love SpeedGrader for my iPad. It makes grading the assignments easy. I select the course I am teaching, select the assignment to grade, and off I go.” GenjiFletcher Apple App Store
Cloud: More than Just a Buzzword Canvas is the only cloud-native learning platform built on Amazon Web Services, the most established and trusted cloud-hosting provider in the world. Canvas offers unparalleled uptime, stability, and security as a true cloud learning platform, as well as several key innovations in hosting that no other major LMS provides: 25 September 2013
Instructure, Inc.
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Why More and More Institutions are Choosing Canvas Canvas Features & Functionality
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True multi-tenant architecture proven to scale for millions of users around the world
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99.9% uptime SLA for all clients
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Automated provisioning, ensuring optimum performance for all users regardless of usage spikes.
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Real-time data replication across geographical regions, providing resiliency and rapid recovery from datacenter failures
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Automated failover (in the case of database or datacenter outages) to other datacenters, availability zones, or even regions.
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Makes traditional "backups" obsolete. Courses can simply persist on Canvas in their original form, because we’re built to grow as you do.
Robust Yet Simple Data Access with Modern Web Standards Historically, institutions have had to rely on direct database queries in order to access LMS data. While this approach does allow a broad scope of data access, it’s also complicated, introduces security risks, and can hinder your development of custom integrations or services across the institution. A direct database approach also tends to be fragile when upgrades take place: direct integrations you may have custom-built may break without warning when a service pack or new version number introduces database changes. Instead, Canvas provides stable, secure data access via our open API. This robust and everexpanding API uses the modern, industry-standards of REST and JSON. There are no special clubs to pay to join or developer kits to download; Canvas clients can safely build-on and integrate their external systems using whatever languages they prefer. Canvas’s open API lets us both continually innovate without worry about data access changing or breaking.
Blazing Trails to Better Teaching and Learning Canvas is best known for making powerful tools easy to use, focusing on improving teaching and learning without sacrificing the human experience. We continually and thoughtfully expand and refine the Canvas feature set by priorizing those things that have the most impact on learning outcomes. We’re pleased to see many of the things we’ve blazed trails on being emulated by competitors, and we’ll continue to set the pace with tools that research show support engaged learning. Here are just two examples scheduled for release before the end of the year:
Live Classroom Polling One of the most effective ways to engage students in classroom learning and give teachers immediate feedback on class understanding is through instant response polling and questions. Canvas is making this possible without additional hardware or software: teachers trigger the 25 September 2013
Instructure, Inc.
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Why More and More Institutions are Choosing Canvas Canvas Features & Functionality questions, and learners use their own mobile devices to answer questions, vote on surveys, and initiate peer instruction. Results are immediately available for review, or can be analyzed later. Canvas Live Polling seamlessly connects F2F learning with online environments.
Inline Learning Activities Research has shown that learning is best when content is immediately reinforced with practice, and misunderstandings are examined mid-stream. So, Canvas is making it easy to to embed quick learning activities directly into content pages. Start a content page with an instant poll, mix individual quiz questions between hypothesis and conclusion videos, let students chat as they read through—all within a single page. Then, view time-on-task data to understand student interaction patterns. If you want more information on the Canvas Roadmap, just let us know.
25 September 2013
Instructure, Inc.
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Why More and More Institutions are Choosing Canvas Canvas Features & Functionality What People Say About Canvas "While the other applications were the next version, Canvas was the next generation" Steve Leask, Project Manager New Mexico State University "Canvas helps students and faculty feel more connected by building relationships in ways that other LMSs haven’t provided." Ben Neiswender, Division of New Learning Westminster College "Canvas will change the way teachers think about teaching and students approach to learning" Frank Abrahams, Associate Dean for the Arts Rider University “Canvas outclasses … any other LMS I've worked with by an extraordinary margin.” Grover Saunders, Web Media Design Engineer James Madison University “Canvas is revolutionary.” Kevin Yee, UCF Interdisciplinary Studies University of Central Florida
Our users talk with love, energy, and a commitment to sharing and learning from innovative approaches to teaching and learning. What is wonderful about Canvas is that our competitors haven’t been able to fully replicate what makes Canvas so different. We stick to our philosophy of transparency, service, and engagement because we’ve learned to trust our clients as much as they trust us. If, in the end, any questions or doubts remain, reach out to us. We’re ready to listen and respond in the Canvas way: openly.
25 September 2013
Instructure, Inc.
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