Instructure, a course-management software company that recently won a large contract in Utah, announced on Tuesday that it would make most of its software platform available for free under an open-source license.
Instructure is one of a wave of new entrants into an increasingly competitive market for learning-management software in higher education. The company’s year-old Canvas platform allows instructors and students to manage course materials, grades, and discussions online.
In offering its basic software for free, the company could offer new competition for Moodle and Sakai, the two main existing open-source platforms. Like commercial arms of those platforms, Instructure intends to make money from colleges by supporting, hosting, and extending its software.
In December, the company won a bid to provide software to a collection of Utah colleges that serve roughly 110,000 students, provoking a lawsuit from a competitor that lost that bid, Desire2Learn. The suit was quickly withdrawn. Instructure says it has signed contracts with a total of 25 colleges.
Josh Coates, Instructure’s chief executive, promoted the platform’s ease of use and its integration with outside services like Facebook and Google Docs. “I don’t consider what we’ve done at Instructure like rocket science,” Mr. Coates said. “But it feels like it because we’re sort of working in the context of the Stone Age.”
Mr. Coates is a tech-industry veteran who started Mozy, an online file-backup start-up that sold for $76-million in 2007. He said he viewed Blackboard, long the dominant platform, as vulnerable because, he said, its software was hopelessly outdated and its patents had been rejected.
To drive home that point, Instructure released a Web video on Tuesday that spoofs Apple Computer’s famous “1984″ advertisement that introduced the Mac. In the new ad, Big Brother is represented by Blackboard in place of IBM.
Mr. Coates minced no words in describing other competitors, either. Desire2Learn is “Blackboard Jr.,” he said; Moodle is “kind of kludgy”; Sakai is “off in left field a little bit.”
Blackboard and Desire2Learn both declined to comment.
Instructure’s officials said they hope its move into open source will help the software gain visibility and convince potential clients that they will not sell to Blackboard. But the open-source platform risks cannibalizing Instructure’s paying customers, and it will require the company to sustain an active development community around its software.
Kenneth C. Green, who directs the Campus Computing Project, said Instructure’s decision would further splinter the open-source choices available to colleges. He said Instructure was part of a “third generation” of learning-management companies that are trying to challenge Blackboard for dominance.
Colleges are typically resistant to switching their choice of major software, Mr. Green said. Even if moving to open-source software like Moodle or Instructure would save money, he said, many college leaders believe sticking with Blackboard is the safer choice.
“There are still a number of CIO’s who look at that and say that sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not a lot of money against the political costs of migrating my faculty,” Mr. Green said.
9 Responses to Upstart Course-Management Provider Goes Open Source
patrickmj - February 1, 2011 at 9:36 am
This is great news for universities. No worries that it “would further splinter the open-source choices”. That makes it sound like the choice is “open-source or not open-source”. More options, open-source or not, is a good thing, and Canvas is a very welcome new option.
pdestefano - February 1, 2011 at 9:45 am
I work with both Moodle and Bb, so more competition is always a good thing. if nothing else, it may incentivize (made up word?) those two platforms to become more flexible.
drchuck - February 1, 2011 at 11:41 am
This is a very cool development. Even though I was one of the founders of Sakai, through IMS I work with virtually everyone in the market place, commercial and otherwise. One more participant in the open source ares is purely a great idea. Open Source is not Moodle or Sakai and commercial is not just Desire2Learn and Blackboard. There is a rich ecosystem of choices. Products like LearningObjects, Jenzabar, OLAT, and ATutor are all real players in the space and each brings their own wonderful creativity to bear on the problems of teaching with technology.
For me, this is about teachers and students and giving those teachers and students choices. What I really want to see as the next evolution of the LMS marketplace is a situation where teachers can increasingly choose amongst a wide range of outstanding (and well-integrated) choices. So the market can become more heterogeneous and a campus population will no longer be held hostage by an single enterprise choice made mostly by IT folks thinking about system maintainability. I would encourage you to think about ways to provide your services to faculty members without forcing wholesale LMS replacement.
Think about infiltrating campuses virally and then when they wake up and 5 percent of the faculty members on a particular campus are choosing your solution then start charging the campus. And when 70 percent of the faculty are choosing your product – take over as the enterprise default. This is not as far-fetched as it might seem.
I will be in the Salt Lake Airport in a few hours in between flights. Too bad we could not have coffee to talk about this and draw some pictures on coffee-stained napkins.
Welcome to the Jungle.
josh_coates - February 1, 2011 at 12:52 pm
@drchuck,
thanks for the warm welcome. it’s good to be here. ;-)
we actually have a ‘free for teachers’ program for non-profit institutions, and it’s been a great way to introduce instructure to institutions.
i’ll have to take a raincheck on the coffee – but i’m sure we’ll get to catch up down the road!
-josh
tueschyld - February 1, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Very interesting news for someone that has used a myriad of platforms. I like to see options and something cost effective for use with a broad spectrum client base. I look forward to seeing how it compares with the “players” in the market right now. I rather appreciate the boldness of the statements of the CE of Instructure. I hope they can step up to the plate and deliver as claimed. Thanks for the article.
tom4cam - February 1, 2011 at 7:54 pm
Devlin Daley showed me Canvas a year ago, and even at that early stage I was blown away. Their use of top collaboration tools like Google Docs integration was brilliant! Without the obscure navigation and clunky UI that has come to define the LMS, I had to keep reminding myself that I was looking at a something designed for academia. Is it *legal* to create an LMS this usable?
Nice move going open source. It’s probably the only way to avoid getting eaten by Blackboard sooner or later. I wish Instructure much success! (If we’re all really lucky, maybe Blackboard will use your code…)
matthewhamilton - February 1, 2011 at 8:04 pm
Certainly seems to be the way of the future, open source, freely shared content, which in a sense puts a premium on novel, unique intellectual capital – a thumbs up to this era for the democratization of knowledge and learning that it has heralded in for a great portion of the world’s population via access to affordable and sharable technologies.
itschronicle - February 2, 2011 at 3:08 pm
While joining in the lauding of another open source alternative, I frankly take exception to a view suggesting that LMS adoption is a field upon which ‘guerrilla warfare’ is waged by highly-idealized players and coffee-klatch co-conspirators. I find it ironic that there is this suggestion for a grass-roots infiltration without forcing wholesale LMS cutover, but in the end that seems to be the intent of the commenter; a slow awakening to a world where whomever’s product is dominant and forces the other out. How nice. How much is lost and wasted in this house-to-house battle, rather than a more intensive and coordinated effort by the right players to provide ‘the right’ system? Also ironic is that this is EXACTLY how Blackboard made its way onto campuses in the 1990s, replacing home-grown systems (or establishing a LMS where none existed).
While the broader market is indeed better served as it becomes more heterogeneous, it is not clear to me that a wildly heterogeneous campus LMS environment is as productive as one more focused, providing consistency for faculty and especially for students. In fact it *is* clear to me that it is likely NOT better to have an untended garden of architectures and environments. Let’s look at social networking for comparative landscape: Facebook is very customizable so that individuals can have freedom and creativity in their presentation and use; but it is still in the singular shell of Facebook, rather than a half-dozen different social network systems. (MySpace is where exactly today?)
The comment that LMS is a “… choice made mostly by IT folks thinking about system maintainability” is both accurate and undeserving of pejorative. Of course system maintainability (availability, supportability, sustainability and any other -ability you want to add) is critical; ask any instructor or student about this if the system is not available or not working correctly, not populated with data from enterprise systems, and not supported by real on-campus people answering phones or providing walk-up service. These things just don’t provide themselves and insinuating that they can is facile; and faculty and students are not interested in slugging through issues with a “welcome to the jungle” enthusiasm. It is silly to assume that everything would be better if the IT folks got out of the way. Read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ lately? You may envision a better campus without all the centralized IT interference. See how that works if it vanishes like Keyser Soze.
To reinforce a good point made — decisions about LMS should be made by the faculty, though with input from students (the people who learn with it) and in close consultation with IT (the people responsible for ensuring its “maintainability” for faculty and students to use). That’s how it was done here. However, this partnership selection process receives no benefit from Machiavellian machinations on the part of product developers and technical mavens who are focused on coffee-stained-napkin-planned conquests, let alone their own business model. And regarding Mr. Coates’ comments on other open/community source LMS: While I and other adopters of these open LMS solutions are happy to concur with sentiments expressed regarding Bb, comments regarding other open source products sounds a bit like the competitive salesman pushing his version of ‘free’, when perhaps his motivations are to get customers eating his burgers so as to pay him for fries to go along with them, and the refreshing beverage they’d use to wash the mouthful down.