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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> circa 2010

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

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

How does canvas compare to Brightspace?

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

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

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