This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Back in 2008, Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley, graduate students in computer science at Brigham Young University, were given an assignment to identify the worst software for supporting online management of educational content.
That was a no-brainer because it was right there at their fingertips. The learning management system, or LMS, they used every day was Blackboard's Vista, found at BYU and almost every other Utah university.
"Surely, we were going to go out there and find something better," Daley said. "I was shocked that there was not."
So the pair set out to develop a platform that was intuitive and accessible from anywhere and any device. Their vision was a flexible system where everything was no more than a couple clicks away. Hardly two years later, the students' idea for the perfect LMS, dubbed Canvas, is making a splash in the billion-dollar market.
Educational technology specialists are praising it as a paradigm-shifting breakthrough in a market long dominated by Blackboard. The Utah Education Network recently chose Canvas over the sector's dominant products to serve a consortium of higher education institutions, a multi-million-dollar, multiyear contract. By the fall of 2012, every public college student and faculty member in Utah will be using Canvas to exchange course content, discussions and assignments.
Last week, Daley and Whitmer's company, Instructure, announced Canvas would be available as "open-source" software, basically giving it away.
"It gets our software in the hands of educators. It's the quickest way to get it out into the market," said CEO Josh Coates. "Philosophically we are an open company. You can't get any more open than open-source."
Canvas was incubated in a computer science class Daley and Whitmer took from Coates, a BYU volunteer adjunct professor, in the spring of 2008. Coates is a tech guru from California who became wealthy by founding and selling companies.
That summer they called Coates to try and sell him on their idea of building software to challenge Blackboard. At the time, Blackboard controlled the market, although its share has slipped from 75 to 63 percent since 2005.
"The education market is broken and needs to be changed. Innovation has been stagnant for five years," said Coates. "Blackboard's domination through acquisitions and lawsuits has put a chill on this market."
The company often sued its competitors, but the courts put a stop to the litigation when Blackboard's patents were invalidated, opening the door to newcomers, according to Coates. He figured his students were on to something.
"I said, 'You can't just go after a billion-dollar company. Let's talk.' I sent them on an assignment: Visit two dozen universities and find out if what you want to build is something they want to buy," Coates said. That summer, the students drove around California and Nevada, dropping in on technology officers at 17 campuses to talk about their ideas for Canvas. After incorporating their feedback, Daley and Whitmer went back to Coates.
"I wrote them a check. 'Here's your seed money,' " said Coates. The pair went to work writing code, while Coates signed on as an unpaid CEO of Instructure. The company, with 20 employees operating out of a sparsely furnished suite in Cottonwood Heights, released Canvas last summer and to date has signed up 26 institutions and school districts, with another 100 in the process of evaluating it.
"It's a system that was built for today, rather than for 10 years ago," Whitmer said.
Canvas was the hands-down favorite of the eight platforms evaluated by a Utah consortium of schools in December because it was easy to navigate and cheaper to use, imposing a smaller load on UEN servers. But flexibility was its big draw. No longer will students have to log in every time they need to check on a course. They'll get notification on Facebook pages, cell phones, or e-mail, whichever device they prefer.
"Instructure created a level of mobility for students to use their phones and iPads to access their portfolios," said UEN director Michael Peterson. "It integrates video in a seamless way."
The committee found that platforms offered by established firms "were still in the same old box," Peterson said, while Canvas exploded the box.
Utah's decision to go with Canvas rattled another finalist. Desire2Learn subsidiary D2L challenged the contract award but eventually dropped its threat of litigation.
UEN will start migrating Canvas to its servers this summer and gradually convert its entire system over the next year. The Utah College of Applied Technology, Westminster College and the Park City School District also committed to Canvas.
Ironically, BYU is the only Utah university that has yet to sign on with Instructure.
New online learning tool
Higher education is increasingly delivered and managed online, and two BYU computer science students have designed software that is easier to use and maintain, with greater flexibility. Canvas, which all Utah college students will soon be using, allows faculty to deliver messages, content and assignments to students in any format or device, whether it's a text message, Facebook, e-mail or iPad.