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I asked Devin Knighton, director of public relations for Instructure Canvas, for a timeline of the company's major milestones and sales partnerships. Devin also indicated that the next milestone will be learning analytics, coming in Q1 of 2012.
My hope in publishing Instructure's timeline is to encourage and facilitate as much transparency, openness and knowledge sharing between Instructure and the EDU community as possible. I'd like to see Instructure step up its communication with higher ed, finding ways to document and share the process of starting an ed tech company in a manner beyond the traditional practices in our industry.
I tend to think that companies in the ed tech space are far too reluctant to share product roadmaps with the community, worrying that this will put them at a competitive disadvantage. This reluctance to share product roadmaps is, I believe, both counterproductive and ineffective. It is not the tech features that drive long term success, but the execution around these features. If Instructure is to be truly disruptive, then the company should experiment with a different way of communicating and collaborating than is the norm in the ed tech world.
If anyone from Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, or Sakai (am I missing anyone?) is interested in posting a similar timeline please leave a comment - as I'm happy to use this space to share this information.
Instructure's Timeline:
Summer 2008:
- Instructure is founded by Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley
Fall 2008:
- Instructure receives its first angel investment -- from Josh Coates
March 2010:
- Instructure closes a Series A of $1.1M
Summer 2010:
- Instructure soft launches with a website and a few sales people
- First customer onboard: Brigham Young University Hawaii's distance education program
- Park City School district chooses Instructure
- Westminster chooses Instructure
Fall 2010:
- Josh Coates joins Instructure as CEO
January 2011:
- The Utah Education Network chooses Instructure (17 institutions of higher ed in the state of Utah)
February 2011:
- Wharton School of Business selects Canvas
- Bucks chooses Canvas
- Instructure goes open source with 26 institutions that have chosen Canvas
April 2011:
- Howard Community College chooses Instructure
- Instructure closes an $8 million Series B round of financing
- Instructure reaches 30 institutions
June 2011:
- University of Mary Washington chooses Instructure
July 2011:
- Auburn University chooses Instructure
August 2011:
- instructure Hosts its First User Conference
- Instructure passes 50 customers
September 2011:
- New Mexico State University chooses Canvas
- Brown University chooses Canvas
October 2011:
- Instructure passes 75 customers
- Maricopa Community Colleges choose Instructure
What questions would you like to ask Instructure?
Have any of you checked out the platform at http://www.instructure.com/? What do you think?
How would you evaluate Canvas the competition?
