Instructure is an excellent partner to the Networking Academy and Canvas is a great product. One of its strengths is the smooth and polished user experience. This is a testament to the terrific work of their product team that has been optimizing the experience for a decade.

Nevertheless, the strategic benefits of bringing the course management experience in house outweighed the many fine aspects of Canvas. There are two key reasons that drove this choice:

1. It enables the Networking Academy to expand its global reach. To expand our global reach, the NetAcad platform is transitioning to a federated architecture with multiple instances located across the world. Canvas is unfortunately not available in every region. We could not stay in Canvas while continuing to expand our global reach.
2. It allows the Networking Academy to be more responsive to changing dynamics in education. One example of this is the integration of Webex video conferencing and messaging into the learning experience to support distance learning. By bringing the solution in-house, we have been able to aggressively pursue this opportunity and will be able to release some of the first fruits in the coming months.

There are other benefits to the new course management experience that are summarized here, but the most salient driver of the decision is how it enabled the Networking Academy to even more aggressively pursue our mission to empower teaching and learning in every corner of the world. For these reasons, the Networking Academy has no plans to roll back the course management experience to Canvas.