I’ve just had my first official blog post for Instructure (my new employer–more on that soon) posted on the company blog: Canvas Tastes Like Open. This post explains some of the ways that the Canvas LMS is truly open, and how Instructure has advocated and supported openness since day 1, be that open source, open licensing, open sharing, or open learning experiences.
So check it out and leave a comment there if you can!
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.
Nixty.com is billed as “a truly disruptive educational platform”, a free, public LMS aimed at delivering both traditional and informal, open educational experiences. Seth Gurell and I reviewed Nixty pretty thoroughly this week, then co-wrote this review. Michael Feldstein, Alan Levine, and others[1],[2],[3] have already provided some insights and serious commentary on the idea of Nixty and its claims. Our review neglects that side of the discussion and focuses on the basic features, usability, and feasibility of the system from a designer and a user perspective (more…)
There’s so much buzz about the iPad you can taste it! And it ain’t all minty! I got my paws on one Tuesday afternoon, and found it not revolutionary as Apple prophesied, but rather as many have described: a big iPod Touch (which is essentially a phone-less iPhone).
Now like the iPhone/Touch the iPad can use thousands of “apps”– miniature applications developed solely for use on iPhone/iTouch/iPad, and sold through the Apple store. What’s always been disconcerting about the app development process is that (more…)
We’ve used dotProject in my Instructional Design Services unit for almost two years. dP is an open source project management and task tracking tool that has benefited our unit organizationally, and has helped us follow-through on projects in a more efficient manner. It has also helped me as a manager manage staff resources and understand time-to-delivery of common project types.
However, dP is not without its flaws (more…)
I traveled to Denver this week for WCET 2009, and though I was sunk with a cold on the second day, so far I’ve enjoyed participating in the conference, and, as always, have found the Twitter backchannel (#wcet09) a great way to connect with more ideas, and more people (more…)
It was a gorgeously sweet-smelling rainy day, but I managed to bring
myself into the confines of a BYU classroom to attend David
Wiley's IPT 692R: Intro to Open Education. Today we're looking
at how an institution, BYU in particular, might approach institutional
policy and practice supportive of open licensing of teaching materials
and research publications (more…)
In David Wiley‘s IPT 692r – Intro to Open Ed course students have fragmented into two small groups, each of which has chosen to research and catalog appropriate open resources that may be used to fulfill learning objectives for one of the secondary education core curricula for the state of Utah. As I have begun searching for, tagging, and sharing resources, I’ve begun to consider the long-enduring web question: link or copy? (more…)
The UVU campus is nearly uninhabited today as we swing into spring break. There’s no spring break at BYU, though, so I took advantage of my lightened workload to make it up to David Wiley‘s IPT 692r – Intro to Open Ed course early, motivated in part by the fact that Russ Carlson, President of Blackboard, would be joining us in a discussion of the future of the learning management system (LMS) with respect to open education (more…)
