Canvas

The NET+ Canvas program was designed in collaboration with educators and has been proven to meet the needs of the Internet2 community. Internet2 NET+ Canvas offers a customized evaluation and ramping process and streamlined contracting with a robust customer agreement developed and vetted by numerous university counsels and Internet2. The Internet2-Instructure NET+ partnership enables institutions to move rapidly through the LMS evaluation process, allowing for faster adoption of a superior learning platform.

Native Cloud and Managed Hosting

NET+ Canvas was designed for the cloud and that means no versions, no upgrades, no migrations, and no inconvenient down times. NET+ Canvas will always be updated with the latest features, bug fixes, and security enhancements. The NET+ Canvas program includes a specialized test instance and custom pilot and trial terms.

Instructure hosts NET+ Canvas on cloud-computing infrastructure provided by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and fully redundant storage infrastructure through Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon cloud infrastructure provides a highly available, scalable, and reliable platform, while also eliminating the time and expense of procuring, setting up, and maintaining in-house servers.

Scalability

The NET+ Canvas platform provisions resources automatically for superior performance during peak usage. A common complaint with competing systems is that they go down when usage spikes during finals or other high-demand periods. With automated peak load management, additional server capacity is added automatically as system activity increases.

NET+ Canvas comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is contractually agreed upon between Instructure and Internet2 in the Service Level Agreement. In addition, NET+ Canvas provides data protection through data replication, backup/restore and disaster recovery procedures at no additional charge.

Ease of Use

A familiar, intuitive interface means most users already have the skills they need to navigate, learn, and use NET+ Canvas. The NET+ Canvas program includes a custom repository of end-user-oriented documentation and training material developed by the participating universities, Instructure, and Internet2.

Students and faculty can conveniently access the NET+ Canvas system using their standard campus login credentials. NET+ Canvas supports Single Sign-On (SSO) through several types of federated identity management systems, including SAML2/Shibboleth, LDAP, CAS, and Active Directory. Instructure is a member of InCommon and a Service Provider.

Integration

Allows institutions and instructors to use the web tools that they want. Integration of Google Drive, a wiki, or many other third-party systems is easy using the NET+ Canvas open API, LTI, RSS or other integration methods. Beyond giving institutions the flexibility to develop their own integrations, NET+ Canvas will include current or planned integrations with other Internet2 NET+ services and the Internet2 research and education network.

Flexible Pedagogy

NET+ Canvas provides all the features you expect from a modern learning platform to support a variety of teaching styles.

Communication Preferences

Users can receive NET+ Canvas notifications via Facebook, SMS text messaging, email and other communication channels.

Mobile Apps

NET+ Canvas includes free mobile applications: SpeedGrader mobile and NET+ Canvas iOS. SpeedGrader mobile for the iPad lets instructors quickly review and grade assignments. The NET+ Canvas mobile app keeps users connected with the ability to view grades, class schedules, files, send and receive messages, participate in discussions and post video and audio comments.

Integrated Multimedia

Makes using multimedia easy by allowing you to access and insert audio, video, text, images and more during all learning contact point. Even directly recorded video or audio to leave interactive student feedback.

Analytics

Built-in Learning Analytics makes keeping track of student progress easy.

Learning Outcomes

Align Learning Outcomes with rubrics for institution-wide initiatives such as accreditation.

SpeedGrader

Breeze through grading in half the time while providing rich feedback on learning. With SpeedGrader for iPad (provided at no additional cost) even grading on the go is easy.

Accessibility, Compliance, and FERPA

NET+ Canvas is fully compliant with FERPA and with Sections 504 and 508 Accessibility Standards, including support for screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA. NET+ Canvas adheres to the latest ARIA specifications, avoids problematic content (like Flash) and even converts math equations to MathML automatically.