A software company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah aims to change Philippine classrooms by introducing a cloud-based learning management system that reduces the use of blackboards and paperbacks.
Instructure Inc., a software-as-a-service technology company established by two graduate students of Brigham Young University in Utah in 2008, is now in talks with public and private schools in the Philippines to try out Canvas LMS, used by some of the best schools in the world.
“Local market conditions in the Philippines are a big reason for Canvas being here and Canvas being able to help. We care deeply about education. We care deeply about the impact that Canvas makes to students, teachers and institutions. We believe that it is something important and powerful not just for Harvard University in the United States, but to all universities and schools, of all sizes, throughout Asia-Pacific including the Philippines,” Instructure sales director in Asia-Pacific Troy Martin tells journalists over dinner at Manila Peninsula Hotel in Makati City.
Canvas is a cloud-based LMS that allows teachers and students to experience education like never before, adopting the power of modern technologies in learning such as applications, video chat, movies, graphics, slides and photos, instead of just books and paperbacks. It can be accessed by teachers and students anytime through any computer, tablet or mobile device, according to Martin, who is based in Sydney.
The platform facilitates easy integration of content, applications, tools and services where students can also share inputs and participate in discussions.
“With this advancement, we’ve seen the ‘thinning of the walls’ of the classrooms over the years—engaging a larger, authentic community in the process,” Martin says.
“We are built for the cloud. One of the benefits of being based in the cloud is that we are able to access data and deliver data to our customers in ways that they would not experience previously. Every interaction is measured and monitored. An individual teacher is able to see how the class is performing. Canvas is built for collaboration, with ability to share content to a global resource,” he says.
“We are now actively speaking with potential customers in the Philippines. We are now in a position to serve the Philippine education system,” says Martin. Canvas is now used by some of the top schools in Hong Kong and Singapore, he says.
“When we talk to institutions in the Philippines, they talk about the business of education, the changing face of education and increased competition. Part of that increasing competition is needing to provide enhanced students’ experience. They are looking for competitive advantage. They are competing not only with other universities in the Philippines, but they are also competing on a regional basis. When we look at what the future of education looks like in the Philippines and further in the region, that competition for students will be very much driven by technology and impact of technology,” says Martin.
Being cloud-based, Canvas requires constant access to the Internet. The platform allows teachers to build courses, share tutorials including Youtube videos, record or upload audio and video messages, add slides, notify students of important updates and events through a calendar feature, chat with students anytime through web conferencing, allow collaboration with students, create assignments, undertake quizzes or tests, allow students to submit assignments online, assess or grade assignments or tests at half the time through a speedgrader app and gain insights into the performance of the whole class through analytics.
Students also have a portal where they can respond, react to teacher’s and classmates’ inputs and collaborate with one another.
BYU graduate students Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley established Instructure in 2008, with an initial funding from Mozy founder Josh Coates, who now serves as Instructure chief executive. The company launched Canvas LMS in 2011.
“Since 2011, the business has been growing substantially. We now have over 2,000 customers in over 35 countries and 10 million active users on Canvas platform,” Martin says. He says a single customer can be as large as an entire school district in the US.
“Canvas works for K-12, vocational education and higher education,” he says. “It is 100-percent native cloud. Unlike some of the learning technologies that institutions were used to in the past, Canvas was built with modern foundation. It was built for the cloud.”
Martin says Instructure now has more than 750 employees, with offices in Salt Lake City, London, Sao Paolo, Sydney and Hong Kong.
The company posted a 59-percent growth in revenue in the first quarter of 2016, as it welcomed its 2,000th customer and realized meaningful improvements in margins on a year-on-year basis.
Among its newest customers are the University of California-Davis, Regional School District 18 in Connecticut, Dunlap School District 323 in Illinois, University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and University of Adelaide in Australia.
Other well-known customers are Harvard University, University of California-Berkeley, California Community Colleges, Stanford Business School, Cisco Networking Academy, Juilliard School of Music, University of Washington, Columbia Business School, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, SIM-University in Singapore, University of Auckland in New Zealand, SCEGGS Darlinghurst in Sydney and Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
“We believe that Canvas should be accessible to a wide range of educational institutions. Our market in Asia-Pacific generally includes universities, both public and private, vocational institutions, and K-12, both public and private,” says Martin.
Canvas offers a glimpse of the future of education. “Canvas demonstrates how open technologies and modern technologies can really be used in terms of best practice in educational environment. It is the approach we have taken that we think is the future of education. That’s why when you look at the US, whole school districts have taken up Canvas, as well as large institutions. They recognize this is the technology platform, the ecosystem platform that they can use to really engage students with technology,” says Martin.
On how customers assess the success of Canvas platform, Martin says: “We have an extremely high retention rate with Canvas. That is the number one way of measuring the success of Canvas in the longer term.”
Martin says Instructure does not claim that the Canvas technology directly improves students’ academic performance. “We believe that it is not technology that improves students’ outcomes. It is the ability of schools or institutions to engage students and faculty more with that technology and how that has the potential to lead to improved student outcomes.”
He says while Instructure does not necessarily promote paperless education, schools and students can save on cost of papers and ink used in printing assignments.
“Think of Canvas as a catalyst for institutions to make sure students are skilled for the future. This is really about helping schools communicate with students in a way by using technologies that students are familiar with, and actually get a great educational experience with technology, rather than just entertainment experience,” he says.
Martin says while Instructure aims to get both public and private schools as customers, the experience in Australia is that private schools tend to embrace the Canvas platform earlier than public institutions do, given the available resources.
He denies that Canvas is cost-prohibitive, saying it is actually transparent in terms of pricing. Canvas is an annual upfront subscription, based on the number of students in an institution, he says, without disclosing actual figures.
Martin says as the Philippines adopts the K-12 program, local schools can adopt the Canvas platform as a springboard for the future. “We believe in IT’s ability to spring education forward,” he says.