An LMS Canvas in the Cloud
I read online that 34 Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges had migrated to a cloud-based LMS from their legacy learning management systems. This followed a consortium-wide faculty review process. All of the institutions had been using Angel, which was acquired by Blackboard back in 2009.
I feel like I have spent every year since 2000 in higher education evaluating learning management systems. I am quite tired of it. And I am convinced that a good teacher can teach well using almost any LMS they are given. It's more important that a school use one and stick to it. If that means going open source to avoid takeovers and companies disappearing after a few years, then so be it.
Those colleges are moving to Instructure Canvas, an LMS available in both proprietary and open source editions.
The proprietary version is a cloud-based LMS hosted by Instructure in partnership with Amazon Web Services that includes "premium" features not found in the open source edition. Otherwise, it offers the tools common to almost any learning management systems: discussion, outcomes management, a rubric tool, automated grading, groups, a test generator, chat and video, and mobile tools.
The company is looking to K-12 as well as higher education.
Cloud services (certainly a big buzz topic the past year or two) has advantages: automated provisioning that can bring new servers into play as needed; no dedicated IT resources on campus to maintain the software or to setting up and configuring your own servers.
Of course, for a price, that has always been offered by the big commercial LMS companies that offered hosted services.
Online reviews of Canvas have generally been positive and, according to Instruction, Canvas has been adopted by more than 200 organizations since January 2011.
I feel like I have spent every year since 2000 in higher education evaluating learning management systems. I am quite tired of it. And I am convinced that a good teacher can teach well using almost any LMS they are given. It's more important that a school use one and stick to it. If that means going open source to avoid takeovers and companies disappearing after a few years, then so be it.
Those colleges are moving to Instructure Canvas, an LMS available in both proprietary and open source editions.
The proprietary version is a cloud-based LMS hosted by Instructure in partnership with Amazon Web Services that includes "premium" features not found in the open source edition. Otherwise, it offers the tools common to almost any learning management systems: discussion, outcomes management, a rubric tool, automated grading, groups, a test generator, chat and video, and mobile tools.
The company is looking to K-12 as well as higher education.
Cloud services (certainly a big buzz topic the past year or two) has advantages: automated provisioning that can bring new servers into play as needed; no dedicated IT resources on campus to maintain the software or to setting up and configuring your own servers.
Of course, for a price, that has always been offered by the big commercial LMS companies that offered hosted services.
Online reviews of Canvas have generally been positive and, according to Instruction, Canvas has been adopted by more than 200 organizations since January 2011.
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