Instructure Launches To Root Blackboard Out Of Universities

This is my impression after 30 minutes of fumbling with it:

The look for end-users is clean and feels great. Way better than Blackboard for end-users. Canvas seems to promote a more self-service adhoc approach which would be attractive for small installs.

Unfortunately the admin interface seems non-existant.

How do I sanely create and populate thousands of courses?

User admin tools are primitive. Where is the ability for the administrator to change a users password? How can I see what classes they are enrolled in, what their roles are, etc? Can the administrator globally disable a user for non-payment without deleting?

How do faculty roll the content from one course into multiple sections and then roll that content over to a new course next semester? No anti-cheat integration?

Anyway those are the concerns I was able to find in the first 30 minutes.

It looks undeployable here which is a shame. Here is to hoping it gets better soon.

Edit: I just spotted the course copy functionality. Scratch that one off the list. Still not impressed with the central admin tools exposed in the UI. Our faculty would prefer not having to populate the user lists in their courses, etc.

Edit 2: Thought I'd be done playing with it but not yet. I can't get over how awesome the end-user UI is. As I just sent off to a co-worker: "The end-user UI is stupendously good compared to Blackboard. Stunningly good in comparison. It's like taking the best of Facebook and turning it into an LMS. Hide this from users."

Definitely has my interest.

In fact, it's so bad that my alma mater has put out a call for something else. http://webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/ (Admittedly, they make it sound like it's due to licensing, but if people were happy with it, they wouldn't be asking.)

LMS strikes me as a problem best dealt with at the course level, not the university level. Give profs some web space and let them put up something and go from there. The centralized "hub of all courses" seems overly complex.

One thing that bothers me, though (and this is based on a quick run-through of their demo, so I'm prepared to be set straight if this is not correct):

It looks like they've made the same mistake as Blackboard, WebCT, etc. by making resource type (files, assignments, discussion forums, etc.) the primary organizational method rather than organizing by instructional unit.

It may make good sense from a programming perspective to put all the discussion forums together, all the downloadable files together, all the external web links together, but that's not the mental model that teachers use. To a teacher teaching (e.g.) American history, the PDF of the Gettysburg Address and the PDF of the Declaration of Independence don't "go together". Instead, the Gettysburg Address "goes together" with the discussion forum on the American Civil War and the link to the National Park Service page on the Battle of Gettysburg.

Most teachers would prefer to build the Civil War unit in one place, rather than clicking back and forth between the file section and the discussion forum section and whatnot.

Canvas does have a "Module" type that lets you do this, more or less, but it's not the primary schema for organization.

If they want this system to have maximum comprehensibility and usability for teachers and students alike, I'd recommend that they promote their Modules to the top level, and make them the primary organizational method for the system.

Moodle gets this right -- few of the others do. When you start a new Moodle course, you see a list of weeks (or topics) to which you can then add files, discussion forums, web links...on an ad hoc basis. While you CAN click on links in Moodle to see all the files in one place, all the assignments in one place, and so on, in practice no one ever does that (except maybe at the beginning of the semester when the students click on the assignments link to make a note of all the due dates).

You don't have to copy Moodle slavishly, but please don't copy the organizational schemas of Blackboard and WebCT. They just plain suck.