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Comment by matthewfcarlson | Hacker News Reader

I remember circa 2010 a friend of mine at college was like “blackboard sucks, let’s build something new”. At the time I poo pood the idea and lo and behold canvas came out a year later. Outside looking in, they been crushing it.

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One of my mentors created Blackboard. It used to be very very good, but he sold it to private equity, and they immediately fired all of the customer support and developers, 3xd prices overnight leading to the 'blackboard sucks' problem. This gave the opening for Canvas to eventually come on to the scene and dominate.

My wife and I each have to use it as we're both following an online master's at the same university... it's definitely gone downhill (compared to the days where I originally used it ~20 yrs ago in college; tracker-riddled, slow); surprisingly, a recent change made it so that you can only attend online lessons in Chrome (haven't had time to see if this is just a user-agent thing).

I believe Canvas was also sold to private equity pretty recently too. https://www.instructure.com/press-release/instructure-to-be-...

canvas was bought by PE for the first time in 2020 https://www.thomabravo.com/portfolio/instructure

..and be acquired by PE so the cycle can continue.. https://www.instructure.com/press-release/instructure-to-be-... sigh. Barbarians at the gate probably didn't double down on security

Was that Matt Pittinsky?

No it was Dan Cane. He’s gone on to found a second decacorn called ModMed. Truly one of my role models.

I worked in a college IT department around that time and the common belief was that all LMSes suck. There are just too many different ways that too many different people want to do things that it's just bound to be hated. Kind of like Jira / Asana for software dev project management.

LMS’s are a lot like programming languages. There’s the ones people complain about and the ones no one uses.

I'm an LMS admin and yeah, that sounds about right.

As someone who has used both as a student and a TA I find blackboard miles better, much easier to find what i'm looking for and my professors seem to have better luck laying out their course on blackboard than canvas.

I actually disagree, based on my time using Blackboard as an admin, student, and teacher. Although my experience is a few years out of date, I found the interface cumbersome and the performance slow.

It depends on what vintage of Blackboard your IT team has installed. We moved from a circa 2011 BB instance to Canvas in 2022, and it was hands down superior. A different university is running the most recent BB and it’s similar to Canvas.

I used both and could not tell you the major differences. I feel like they are equivalent in the bread and butter features. Most people don't use 99% of the functions they bake into these. Just use it to hold the syllabus, maybe hold the slides, submit assignments, and spreadsheet for grades. All stuff you can do with email + spreadsheet already. Maybe throw in a shared drive for larger files, which every university in the country already pays for.

"Equivocal describes something ambiguous, uncertain, or open to multiple interpretations, often used to intentionally mislead or evade."

do you mean equivalent ?.

yes

Blackboard got a lot better in response to the flood of customers heading to canvas.

> circa 2010

Instructure, "the developer and publisher of Canvas," was founded in 2008 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructure

That sounds like “circa 2010” to me. And Canvas was launched in 2011, according to the article you linked.

Blackboard, the Canvas predecessor, was so unstable that we called it BlackOutBoard

I remember my university switched to Moodle around that time. I wonder if they're still popular.

Maybe schools should be self-hosting something like Sakai instead.

How does canvas compare to Brightspace?

They are definitely crushing it on sales. The actual product is a radioactive dumpster fire that is simultaneously hostile to students, teachers, and parents.

Yeah but the customer is the administrators who never have to make contact with the real world

Well, now's probably a good time to release something...

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