Salt Lake City: Livability in the 21st Century

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CANVAS BY INSTRUCTURE
Right: Instructure’s workspace reflects two of their guiding principles:
openness and modernity. Also, their unofficial mascot is the panda.
Below: Instructure recently relocated to four whole floors of a beautiful
building right at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains.
Instructure, Inc., was founded in 2008 by Brian
Whitmer and Devlin Daley, two graduate students
in the computer science program at Brigham Young
University, who wanted to develop an easy-to-use
software application to facilitate online learning.
So that is exactly what they did.
But before they wrote any code, Whitmer and Daley
launched a “product validation tour” to learn more
about the needs of their stakeholders. In a Geo Metro
with no air conditioning, they drove throughout the
West, visiting seventeen universities and gathering
critical feedback from students, faculty, and administrators
that would lay the groundwork for their
Canvas by Instructure learning management system or LMS.
Not bad for a couple of college students on a road trip.
Instructure’s first investor was Josh Coates, the technology
entrepreneur who founded the cloud-based file backup
service called Mozy, and who joined Instructure as CEO in
2010. That year, Coates and his skeleton crew of twenty
employees had landed just a handful of customers when
they won a major contract with the Utah Education
Network (UEN) to provide Canvas as the statewide LMS
at all Utah public schools and state-funded colleges
and universities. Selected as the most innovative of eight
systems in a highly-competitive evaluation process, Canvas
became the new online learning platform for more than
100,000 Utah students.
Following its success with UEN, Instructure formally
launched Canvas in February 2011. As open-source
software and the only true, native cloud LMS, it set a new,
open standard for education technology. In 2012, Cisco
Networking Academy, known as “the world’s largest classroom,”
announced it would use Canvas to deliver online
IT courses to more than a million students worldwide.
S A L T L A K E C I T Y — L i v a b i l i t y i n t h e 2 1 s t C e n t u r y
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