MATURITY MODEL REPORT

Canvas is a cloud-based educational technology platform with extensive Learning Management

System (LMS) capabilities. Canvas is hosted as a subscription service by Instructure on Amazon
Web Services' cutting-edge cloud architecture (AWS). Full system monitoring, automatic
provisioning, "Hands-Free" update/upgrade services, Basic Support Package, online Standard
Training Package, beta environment, and a test/training instance are all part of Instructure's
comprehensive installation and hosting services. Canvas' architecture, AWS infrastructure, and
Instructure's hosting and support services combine to provide Canvas the industry's most
dependable, available, adaptable, and scalable cloud-based LMS.

CMMI Data Management Maturity (DMM) Model

The DMM establishes a gradated route to maturity by defining the core business processes of
data management as well as specialized capabilities. It is a six-category framework of data
management best practices that aid businesses in benchmarking their skills, identifying
strengths and weaknesses, and using their data assets to boost business performance.

As shown in Figure below, the model consists of 20 data management process areas and 5
supporting process areas that are categorized into five categories. Each category has
corresponding processes areas that fall into them. These process areas are the primary way of
communicating the model's themes, aims, techniques, and sample work deliverables.

As these process areas are measured by different levels of maturity obtained by that system,
We will be measuring the Canvas data System maturity based on this model. We will pick all the
25 process areas and would be measuring the maturity level gained by Canvas, Instructure in
the particular process area, and would also suggest some improvements need in the process
areas.
1. Data Management Strategy

1.1. Data Management Strategy

I think overall data management strategies are quite impressive for Canvas
Instructure. So, I think it has reached level 5 in process area.

1.2. Communications

Canvas uses different techniques to communicate to its community, stakeholders and

users. Some of the ways are:
• Guides
Canvas Guides, Troubleshooting Guides, Canvas for Elementary, Canvas
Catalog, Canvas Commons, Canvas Mobile, Canvas Network, Canvas Studio,
Student Information Systems (SIS), Canvas Video Guides, Canvas Resource
Documents, Resources by Language
• Release notes
enCASE Release Notes, Impact Release Notes, MasteryConnect Release
Notes, Portfolium Release Notes, Videri Release Notes, Question Forum,
Community Guides
• Additional Resources
Question Forum, Training, Release Notes, Community Guides, Resources by
Language
Canvas documentation has been almost perfect from engaging different languages to
even make video guides, and even very useful for the audience, accurate but it’s a bit
not well organized and the community does respond to user problems quickly, if
response is not received for some days the problem is automatically marked as solved.

These are the various standards followed by Canvas to communicate with others. So, I
think it is pretty optimized and sits at level 5 in maturity model.

1.3. Data Management Function

The figure below shows the data management operation where firstly data is divided in
to different domains and each domain is handled by trustee, steward and steward
team. I think they sit at level 4 in the maturity model, because they still can perform
analysis with performance metric to come up with efficient operational method.
2. Data Governance

2.1. Governance Management

Canvas Data is currently available to more than 30 customer universities, including the
University of Central Florida and Utah State University. They are using the data to
create plans that will improve services and products. Unizin, a consortium of forward-
thinking higher education institutions, for example, has been building unique services
for its members by exploiting Canvas Data's premium capabilities, such as real-time
data stream capability based on the IMS Caliper RAM standard.
Within Canvas, the phrases account and sub-account refer to organizational units.
Every Canvas instance has the ability to have a hierarchy of accounts and sub-accounts,
but it only has one account at first (referred to as the root account). Accounts comprise
subaccounts, courses, and sections, which may all be added directly in Canvas, using
 the API, or through SIS imports.

Institutions can design a hierarchical structure that best suits their purposes.
Administrators can be appointed to specified sub-accounts with account-level access.
Account-level permissions are specified by the root account admin and flow down the
hierarchy but not up. Sub-account administrators can change account-level permissions
for their sub-account. Admins in a single account have administrative access to that
account as well as any sub-accounts inside that account. Furthermore, an admin can
relocate a course inside its sub-account, but not across sub-accounts unless they are
also the admin of each sub-parent account's account.
Mst admin account settings, with the exception of Terms, SIS imports, Authentication,
and a few account settings, can be adjusted or, in the case of permissions, overridden
under a sub-account.
I think the current level of maturity of Canvas Data Governance Management is three,
as from the above figure we can make conclusions that the Management is more well
defined but it isn’t applying any statistical/quantitative techniques to measure if
governance efforts are changing organizational behaviors appropriately.

2.2. Metadata Management

GILLILAND’S TYPOLOGY

Table 1. A Typology of Data Standards

Type Examples

Data structure standards (metadata element sets,
schemas). These are “categories” or “containers” of
data that make up a record or other information
object.
Canvas Data formats and APIs may be used
by administrators to get insight into subjects
such as accreditation, refining course design,
monitoring student involvement, and
enabling student intervention.
Type
Data value standards (controlled vocabularies, thesauri,
controlled lists). These are the terms, names, and other
values that are used to populate data structure
standards or metadata element sets.
Data content standards (cataloging rules and codes).
These are guidelines for the format and syntax of the
data values that are used to populate metadata
elements.
Data format/technical interchange standards
(metadata standards expressed in machine-readable
form). This type of standard is often a manifestation of
a particular data structure standard (see above),
encoded or marked up for machine processing.
The metadata management is quite good, it is optimized and changes are regularly made to
improve governance. So, it sits at level 5.
3. Data Quality
3.1. Data Quality Strategy
The Most Important Data Quality Strategies
1. Every day, focus on source data.
Examples
The Canvas Data schema, which is part of the
Canvas Data Portal, offers documentation
that describes all of the table data that is
exported from Canvas.
Database records from canvas are
transformed into fact and dimension tables.
Put succinctly, fact tables contain
measurements, and dimension tables
contain the different dimensions that can be
used to slice and aggregate the data
Current Catalog Release, Past Catalog
Releases, Catalog Release Resources, Product
blogs and
Canvas Data dictionary.
Open web standards, CSV, HTTP/HTTPS,
iCalendar, IMS Enterprise XML, IMS LTI, IMS
QTI, JSON, REST API, RSS, HTML/HTML5,
OAuth, jQuery, SCORM 1.2 and higher
(content only), SMS, and SMTP
 On a daily basis, validating, monitoring, and updating data in source databases
(SIS, HR & Finance, Special Education, and so on) reduces the risk of
downstream systems becoming contaminated.
2. Make use of a solitary, protected procedure.
Running reports and ad hoc queries, sending spreadsheets, and manually
searching for data mistakes takes time and puts student information at danger. A
better way is to implement an established data quality strategy for all data
consumers, departments, and school personnel across the district.
3. Address the issue of business rule compliance.
Before data is given to state and federal authorities, it should be reviewed for
potential fundamental and complicated flaws.
4. Take use of the learning opportunity.
The ability to reinforce data standards, methods, and policies by including school
personnel in the process of evaluating and cleaning up data is a great way to do
so. Including explicit data cleanup instructions will result in improved data input in
the future. Greater accountability will result from empowering school workers to
take responsibility of the data quality process.
5. Keep track of the development.
Metrics should be used and made apparent throughout the area
By looking at the strategies applied for maintaining data quality, I can say that the
system is continuously monitoring data quality and have been making necessary
improvements from the stakeholder’s feedback, So I think they have level 5 maturity in
this field.

3.2. Data Profiling

Canvas Data parses and gathers over 280 million rows of daily Canvas data, which it
then exports as tab delimited (.txt) flat files. Customers can access files uploaded to
Amazon S3 and download them. Canvas Data provides free flat files to all Canvas
clients. Canvas Data's Professional Services team provides a paid Redshift service. The
Canvas Data Admin for an institution must also be a Canvas admin. The Canvas Data
Admin must be conversant with the institution's data governance policies and
standards, as well as having a solid understanding of IP address ranges and database
connection strings.

So, there are separate set of rules, content and quality for data according to the
User/admin role. So, this process area is at level 3 where it is only defined and
followed. They need to make further analysis to improve the data quality.
3.3 Data Quality Assessment
The certify takes care of data quality, it has certain rules/standards for data quality for
certain users

This very well optimized, it also uses different analytics procedures to develop or
redefine the data quality assessment which would improve the overall data quality. So this
sits at 5th level in the maturity model.

3.3. Data Cleansing

As mentioned in the data quality strategies, those are the steps used to clean the data
effectively and Canvas uses the predefined rules to clean the data. So I think it has reached
the level 5 in maturity model.
4. Data Operations
4.1. Data Lifecycle Management

The above picture shows the data flow, and I think they have well defined process flow, but
they don’t seem to be doing data lifecycle impact analysis, and to identify, estimate, and
schedule changes to interfaces and data sets. So, they sit at level 3 in the maturity model.

4.2. Data Requirements Definition

Instructure Canvas maintains a defined data requirement policy, which is followed to
provide excellent data services to their stakeholders. It also uses canvas analytics to
suggest improvements in data production that will satisfy business objectives. So I think
it sits at level 5 in the maturity model.
4.3. Provider Management
What is Certify?
Certify ensures district data is accurate, complete, and up to date by enabling districts
to proactively detect and quickly resolve data problems.

• Data quality platform.

• Business rules engine.
• Continual validation and refresh of data.
• Push model for daily data quality results.
 • Designed to scale.
Daily Data Action Process

The source data quality is checked by the process mentioned above and it has various
performance metrics for checking data quality. So, I think it sits at level 5 in the maturity.

5. Platform and Architecture

5.1. Architectural Approach

Current level of maturity in this process area is three, as the architectural bases have been
formed and well defined. And it has to achieve level 4 in which it has to conduct statistical
analysis of performance and data quality improvements are used as input to the architectural
design process.
 5.2. Architectural Standards
Canvas was especially built to work well with other standards-based technologies such as IMS
Global Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), allowing Canvas to smoothly connect with 5
September 2013 Instructure, Inc.

Examine the best-of-breed tools. Canvas will always benefit from its position at the vanguard of
LMS innovation by easily adopting new and improved tools while phasing out and replacing
outdated technologies with this strategy and design.

The architectural standards are well defined and are continuously improved based on
the stakeholder’s feedback, So this makes it to attain 5th level in the maturity model.

5.3. Data Management Platform

Canvas is a dynamic Ruby on Rails web application built on cloud-native, multi-tenant
architecture capable of automatically scaling to serve tens of millions of users.
For US customers, Instructure uses two Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions, ensuring
that client data is not stored outside of the United
States:
• US East (Northern Virginia) Region with 3 EC2 Availability Zones
• US West (Oregon) Region with 3 EC2 Availability Zones

For international clients, Instructure uses the following AWS regions:

• Canada Central (Montreal) Region with 2 EC2 Availability Zones
• EU West (Ireland) with 3 EC2 Availability Zones
• EU Central (Germany) Region with 2 EC2 Availability Zones
• Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region with 2 EC2 Availability Zones
• Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region with 2 EC2 Availability Zones.
Canvas' cloud architecture, which is based on Amazon Web Services infrastructure,
offers unrivaled availability, scalability, and dependability. Canvas design and AWS
infrastructure are entirely horizontally scalable, allowing for nearly infinite capacity
through the deployment of additional resources. Canvas provides: • Computing
resource redundancy with active monitoring for failure detection and automatic fail-
over
• Real-time performance tuning via Automated Provisioning of resources to respond to
spikes and peak usage times to minimize performance degradation • Data protection
via data replication, backup/restore, and disaster recovery procedures • Load balanced
application servers and aggressive data caching for superior web performance
 I think the Data Management Platform has attained a maturity level of 5 as they are
making continues migrations and improvements based on the feedback and they
always do release notes for the changes and update all the stackeholders.

5.4. Data Integration

Canvas is a standards-based platform with an open API and a large collection of
supported third-party connectors, allowing institutions to readily enhance Canvas's
capabilities to meet their unique needs.
Table 4 lists Canvas supported integrations with third-party content, tools, and services.
And I think canvas has good data integration policies, and they are optimized. So, the
maturity level they currently are in is five.
 5.5. Historical Data, Archiving, and Retention

Customer data is automatically backed up in real-time and on a 24-hour basis to several

geographic locations in the customer's territory, assuring data security and
dependability in the case of a disaster or outage of any magnitude. With no additional
strain on our computers, the database is backed up from one active database to
another. Static files are kept safe in geographically redundant storage systems.
Recovery backups are encrypted using the AES-GCM 256-bit technique and kept in a
highly secure place. Full database backups (also known as "snapshots") are kept by
Instructure for up to 12 months. We save 4-hour snapshots (data backed up every four
hours) for 42 hours, daily snapshots for 60 days, and monthly snapshots for a year.
Object data such as files, documents, and uploaded media, etc., are recoverable in the
event of a deletion or modification for one year.
Canvas uses its historical data to analyze and make necessary changes to improve their
business process and data quality. But their retention policy is not optimized as
retention time period of a user's data cannot be changed upon a valid inspection
request.
So, I think Canvas is on maturity level 4 in this process area.

Conclusion

This report has compared all the levels in maturity model for all the 5 main categories as
defined in the CMMI model. And each process area is given a level based on the noticed reports
from Canvas Instructure.

References:

1. https://community.canvaslms.com/

2. https://canvas.instructure.com/

3. https://info.canvas.net/coppa

4. https://www.instructure.com/corporate-education

5. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4327214-instructure-is-undervalued-dont-tender your-shares

6. https://www.instructure.com/sites/default/files/file/2021-01/Canvas-Architecture Jan-2021.pdf

7. https://portal.inshosteddata.com/docs/api