The Utah Higher Education consortium, with input from Chief Information Officers, Chief Academic Officers, LMS administrators, Utah Education Network (UEN), and Instructure, has decided to move hosting of the Canvas LMS from UEN to the Instructure cloud. The transition to the cloud will take place over the next few months and will be seamless to end users.

Moving Canvas to the cloud will provide several advantages, including economics (cost savings the the consortium), quality of service (same environment as other Instructure clients and a more efficient support structure), and agility (automatic provisioning of servers based on system load).

FAQs about this change to Canvas Cloud are now available. If you have any additional questions about this change, please contact Scott Allen at
801-581-5382.

Instructure Canvas was selected in December 2010 as the Learning Management System to replace Blackboard Vista for all public higher education institutions in Utah in a competitive RFP process (see press release). This phased migration will take place over the next few semesters until summer, 2012, when all courses will be migrated from Blackboard Vista to Canvas. UEN hosts and provides support for Canvas for all public higher education institutions in Utah.

UEN negotiated group pricing for Utah K-12 schools and districts that would like to license Instructure Canvas. The following schools/districts are participating in this license for the 2011-2012 school year:

• Granite School District
• Jordan School District
• Davis School District
• Tooele County School District
• Nebo School District
• Murray School District
• SUCCESS Academy
• City Academy

Please see the Utah K-12 Canvas Community course for a schedule of topics for webinars and archived sessions.

Here are some helpful resources for Canvas users:

• Canvas Users List - listserv for Canvas users
• K12LMS List - listserv for K-12 users
• Canvas Guides - documentation for students, teachers, and administrators
• UEN Canvas Wiki - developed by UVU and other consortium schools
• Canvas Video Tutorials - Video tutorials produced by Instructure
• Canvas Videos - Instructure videos, including InstructureCon sessions
• Canvas Community - forum moderated by Canvas "Coaches"
• Best Practices Webinar Archives - links to archived presentations from Canvas coaches
• Product Release Notes - release notes for bi-weekly Canvas updates
• uencanvas Twitter feed
• K-12 Canvas Meeting - Wimba meetings for K-12 Canvas users
• Utah K-12 Canvas Community - schedule for upcoming webinars and links to recordings of prior webinars