Miguel Guhlin Another Think Coming Challenge Claims, Uncover Reality

by mguhlin

TxDLA - Presentation on Instructure Canvas LMS

EdTech

St. Phillip’s College has been transitioning from Blackboard/WebCT to Instructure Canvas. A small group reviewed Instructure, made a presentation to the Board, and the Board approved purchase in October. They hope to have a training in Spring, and by Spring 2013, they will be fully converted to the new LMS.

Estelita Young (Instructure, Director of Sales) started in February, 2011 with Instructure. She’s worked for WebCT, Wimba and has been teaching online. Instructure Canvas came on the horizon and she shares how she struggled with “the friction of what has to happen when you want to deliver content online.” Instructure Canvas has been awarded a contract with UT Austin.

Estelita Young
estelita@instructure.com
972-839-2490
6415 South 3000 East
Suite 100
Salt Lake City, UT 84121
instructure.com

Two graduate students were given an assignment by their professor…they were to look for whatever wasn’t working. After 7 months of feedback, making changes, adjustments, they sat down to write it…they used Ruby on Rails.

Canvas (https://canvas.instructure.com/login) has a dashboard and features the following:

  1. OpenAPI

  2. Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) Integration

  3. Email notifications to multiple accounts

  4. Pictures in Class Roster - not yet available but will be in 2012.

  5. Provides interactions and sends notification through GoogleDocs, Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Delicious, Diigo. Students just get a notification. Get notifications via multiple venues.

  6. Students want to be notified in a variety of ways…all of it is tracked inside of Canvas.

  7. Students can export ePortfolio as HTML or the school can keep it running.

  8. Nice full screen calendar…features drag-n-drop events in the calendar. Neat thing is that it updates the syllabus, sends out student notifications and assignment due dates automatically. It also has a calendar feed that can be put into Outlook or other stuff.

  9. Does the faculty have a dashboard of all recent activity? Yes.

  10. Instructure can import course content from other LMS (Moodle Course Import tool is under development).

  11. Blackboard/Vista

  12. Angel Learning

  13. Supports Common Course Cartridges

  14. Cengage

  15. D2L Export

  16. McGraw Hill

  17. QIT

  18. Easy adjustment of events and due dates for imported course—automatically adapts course dates during import.

  19. Allows you to access the syllabus

  20. Course elements are automatically hyperlinked when inserted into Syllabus, such as:

  21. Wiki

  22. Word documents

  23. Images

  24. Links

  25. YouTube video embedding

  26. Flickr Creative Common Image search

  27. Equation editor (LaTeX support)

  28. Record/Upload Media from the content editor

  29. Scribd is used to share

  30. Kaltura video support

  31. BigBlueButton for audio conferences

  32. Can it support control-release? Only if it’s been released.

  33. Can documents like Academic Honesty policy, or other items that need to be preloaded. Response: Think of Canvas courses as templates…you can set those up ahead of time for faculty to work from.

  34. Support for SpeedGrader - available on iPad as an app as well as other places. Click the link to see more info and videos via YouTube.

  35. Provides speech recognition when using Google Chrome browser

  36. Making sure Canvas makes sure students are turning in their work:

  37. TurnItIn

  38. Respondus

  39. Axium

  40. http://www.proctoru.com/ (mentioned but not sure if it is supported or not)

  41. Authentication Measures:

  42. You can see time on task (course level)

  43. NavBar:

  44. Customizable

  45. Elements can be controlled via Navigation

  46. Elements

  47. Announcements

  48. Syllabus

  49. Discussions

  50. Modules

  51. Assignments

  52. Conferences

  53. Wimba

  54. BigBlueButton

  55. Chat

  56. Outcomes

  57. Quizzes

  58. People

  59. Files

  60. Pages

  61. Grades

  62. Wikis

  63. Supports Mobiles devices

  64. Native App for IoS devices (e.g. iPhone,iPod,Ipad)

  65. Android

  66. Access it via mobile web browser

  67. No Java at all

  68. File Manager

  69. All ASP model (“in the cloud”)

Reflections

  • Slick system

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure