Lou Pugliese, former CEO of Blackboard and a senior innovation fellow at Arizona State University, which also recently began the switch from Blackboard to Canvas, said Blackboard will need to be "convincing" that it can deliver on its long-term product roadmap at its annual conference, BBWorld, in Orlando, Fla., next week.
Jared Stein, vice president of higher education strategy for Canvas, said that it was successful because “higher education wants an easy-to-use, reliable platform that encourages engagement between people and is open for DIY innovation.”.
Canvas doesn’t have as many features as Blackboard, but it does include “most of the features that we know faculty use,” said Gibson. “No product is perfect,” he said. “But it’s been a good transition for us.”. Now that Canvas is the “hot product,” Instructure has been trying to aggressively increase its fees, said Gibson.