Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

While UEN is preparing a production-grade instance of the Instructure Canvas learning management system for the Utah System of Higher Education Consortium, we’ve begun a wiki to document Canvas’s features, and to develop faculty and staff training materials. And while my own institution, Utah Valley University, is hosting the wiki, the authoring and maintenance of this wiki is a new, collaborative effort involving most of Utah’s colleges and universities (more…)

…and kicks off with a bangin’ new promo:

A nice homage to Apple--clearly one of Instructure’s design inspirations.

If you didn’t pick it up in the video, this release coincides with Instructure’s announcement that they’ve just opened their source code under the AGPLv3 license.

We just selected Canvas as our State’s LMS here in Utah, and this news only reinforces my opinion that the guys at Instructure are looking a lot farther ahead than anyone else in the LMS business. This isn’t to take any credit away from Moodle, which will always have a special place in my open source heart, but, well, if you haven’t tested Canvas--from either a “traditional” LMS or un-LMS perspective--it’s pretty easy to hop in and give it a test drive.

And now my Canvas package download is done. Expect some installation notes later on.

Instructure Canvas allows teachers to record video from a web cam directly into course pages, discussion posts or even as assignment feedback. It occurred to me that I can easily record my desktop activity instead of my web cam using a similar set-up to what I’ve used to live-stream conference presentations. A 3rd-party desktop app allows you to delineate video sources in place of the web cam, including the user’s desktop. While I still use the commercial software WebcamMax, this time I tested a free software called ManyCam (more…)

I’m pleased to repeat the news that local Utah company Instructure has won the RFP for the State of Utah’s LMS to replace Blackboard Vista. Here’s a snippet of the press release from Utah Education Network’s web site:

UEN committee selects Instructure to provide statewide Learning Management System for state colleges and universities
(Salt Lake City, UT) – A selection committee representing Utah colleges and universities has chosen Utah-based Instructure to provide a statewide Learning Management System (LMS) for Utah college students and faculty (more…)