Update: The video was briefly broken as Instructure inexplicably chose the day after their big announcement to change their YouTube account. I have updated the post with the new URL and it should be working now. Note that anybody else who linked to Instructure’s videos before today is going to have the same problem. The new channel for Instructure’s videos is http://www.youtube.com/canvaslms.
Instructure has just announced that they will be releasing an open source version of their Canvas LMS product. Between this announcement, the winning of the Utah Education Network contract (109,000 college students and 40,000 K12 students), and the oh-so-ever-brief lawsuit by Desire2Learn about that win, Instructure has been making quite a splash lately. In this post, I’m going to look a little more closely at the company, the software, and the business model.