Updates on Canvas Data 2, Data Access Platform

[Edina_Tipter]

Let’s just start in medias res because I am pretty sure that most of you are curious about not just the state of the Canvas Data 2 but also about what comes next (and why it didn’t come yet).

The questions I expect you might be wondering about are: 

• What are the next steps after we started the early access and the actual state?
• When will we make it available for more customers and what features will it include initially?
• When are we planning to deprecate CD1?

Despite the temporary semi-vacuum of updates, our vision remains the same: Help institutions leverage the power of data across all Canvas portfolio products and beyond to pave their ways into fact driven decision making and student success. BUT in order to achieve this, several teams have to work together—they depend on each other and coordinate the work across the product portfolio (which is BIG).

As we are still in the early access stage with 6 beta customers—and thanks to the precious feedback we received from the institutions who were and still are part of this—some minor but also some major issues/blockers have been identified that we first thought we could fix, and we spent a good amount of time doing that. As time passed by, and as we also better understood the customer use cases, we took a big breath: the decision was made to re-architecture the solution to make the right technical calls for the long term. This decision enables us to deliver a reliable, stable, and scalable product while trying to be as forward- looking as possible. This decision, however, puts us back into the research stage (luckily past the midpoint already) where we are finishing off some proof of concepts. During this time we had to go through and learn some hard lessons. One of them is that the development/product team went over some difficult periods and was destabilized—we lost some key individuals—but most importantly these events have triggered improvements that we put in place on both the product side and technical level. Now we are confident in the future and expect a quick spin-off going forward. We believe in relentless improvement and learning from the past.

At the moment, we are focusing all of our efforts on designing an adequate solution and delivering it as soon as possible. There is no week where this task is not discussed, evaluated or monitored. As part of our learning curve, we also do not want to commit to things before they are evaluated from a feasibility point of view. Therefore, the timeline that everybody is looking for, including features, will come out in a few weeks. Keep an eye out for the next blog post mid October, that will reveal a lot more about the future plans including adding more customers to the already existing early access/beta cohort.

Last but not least, as a sign of listening to the voice of the customer—listening to you—we realized that previous communication might have given the impression that we plan the deprecation of CD1 within 6 months from the CD2 beta release. Let me clarify that we will try to accommodate your needs and find the right balance and give enough time for migrating your data and setting your systems up for CD2. We will link this timeline to the General Availability of the product and not the beta itself. In the meantime, as most of you already know, here you can find the CD2 schema mapping we are providing for your convenience and to enable you with a smoother transition.

All I can say is that we really appreciate your patience, and we are sure we will make you happy, so keep an eye out for the next updates.