Product Showcase: Delivering on the promise of a future-ready ecosystem
I'm here today to walk you through how we are living and Breathing the promises of a future ready ecosystem. So let's dive in. There are so many things we are doing across our products here at Instructure, and today I want to highlight some of those newly released products. Sorry, let me go back. There's three key themes that we'll be covering off today across the next forty five minutes, which reflect where we are investing and where we will continue to be keeping top of mind for the rest of twenty twenty Five. And while I'll be sharing with you some things that really impact your day to day workflows, AI is gonna be central to all the things we talk about.
We've already seen and heard a lot of that here this morning. Many of you have seen our journey with AI so far. We've connected with you, our end users. We've learned about your excitement, your apprehension, and of course, the role that AI is gonna bring to education. We've considered a thoughtful solutioning about this evolving technology with intentionality and purpose.
Today, I'm really excited to introduce to you Ignite AI. This is our in context AI solution, which is going to be a thoughtful conductor for AI in our ecosystem, designed to bring all the AI directly into the flow of teaching and learning. So no more separate logins, no more processes or fragmentation, just smart, accessible tools embedded directly in the systems that you use most, and it's powered by Amazon Bedrock. Our customers will benefit from secure enterprise grade AI foundation that ensures transparency, scalability, and flexibility to meet the needs of your institutions. So, just for a moment of housekeeping, the things that I'm going be sharing with you today are forward looking.
So, we're talking about a lot of things, I'll be showing you a lot of things, and they're not necessarily reflective of how things are actually going to look and behave in the future, because we know things will change based on our strategy, based on roadmap, and most importantly, the feedback from you as you start to get into these things. So with that out of the way, let's get straight into it. At Instructure, we know simplicity is not just a design choice, it's a necessity. Whether you're a classroom teacher, an instructional designer, or an administrator, part of the larger institution, this is something that remains true for you. Great learning experiences should be easy to access, intuitive to use, and tailored to the unique needs of your learners and your educators.
That's why our first theme today focuses on how we are delivering a more intuitive, personalized, and simple solution that will really help you with navigating this experience, so you can focus more on teaching and learning and not troubleshooting technology. So let's explore some of the ways that we're removing friction, starting at the beginning with content creation. We've fundamentally reimagined how you create course content in Canvas with the block content editor. This will be the new foundation for page creation. Paired with AI first interfaces, it empowers educators to create, to transform, and adapt content with simple prompts, cutting friction and giving teachers tools that will truly work.
And this isn't just a new editor, it's a powerful shift, making it easier than ever to design engaging, accessible, and flexible course content. With AI streaming those work for you that matter most. Everything about this block content editor has been shaped by what we've heard from you. It will be native in Canvas. It brings in a lot of that drag and drop functionality that you expect, With the flexibility of HTML as well for those of you that wanna be able to do more.
And it introduces a content preview, so you'll know that your pages can be great and consumable on any device, on the web, on a tablet, on a mobile. This is the core editing workflow for Canvas, We're taking time to try and get this right. We've listened so closely to teachers, to institutions, and many of you followed this journey with us since last year, helping shape its direction. But for this. So stay tuned.
One of the most delightful things that we've seen from twenty twenty five so far, differentiation tags, has really captivated institutions worldwide, and we've seen adopted seen it adopted for a variety of use cases, personalized learning being top of mind. When we introduced this ability to assign content to specific users and sections last year, you all shared that you wanted to do more. You needed more flexibility, specifically assigning modules, assignments, other course content, and not just sections or individual students, but to groups of students based on specific criteria. And so to address this and specific other use cases, we introduced differentiation tags, a brand new way to organize your students Manage targeted sets of learners and deliver customized content. Think about accommodations, Those of you who have learners that need extra time, maybe additional learning materials, or just managing a blended and a face to face cohort together.
We're doubling down on how to best support large courses with this feature, and the feedback that we're getting from customers across the board has really helped shape that. So we're taking this even further through capabilities like user level tagging with wider institutional organization, management, personalization, reporting, and all those other insights that you need. And while we're talking about the personalized learning experience, let's take a moment to think about the very first step in Canvas, the dashboard. For many years, the layout of this entry experience has been the same regardless of your role or purpose in Canvas. It's critical that we curate a a more personalized landing point, which is reflective of what's most important and most relevant to you based on your role, based on teaching and learning journey so far.
What should you be paying attention to? Where are you up to? What's happening? And of course, how to get there in the most simplest way. So as part of this work, we spent a lot of time connecting with learners to better understand their reality, their needs, and ensuring that we're solving for workflows in a way that really resonates with their day to day and when we need Canvas to just get out of the way. What we're doing is making it easier than ever for them to find the details that they really care about, their grades, their feedback, a holistic view of their courses, what's due and when, And for the first time, a simple way to gauge their learning progress. So in twenty twenty five, we're going to be launching a refreshed learner dashboard, which will be available for early adopters in the next month. We're also laser focused on elevating the educator experience, and we're deep in design validation For a reimagined dashboard for these users.
We recognized that everyone has their own version of what is meaningful, meaningful, so we're building the dashboards with customization, top of mind, to ensure that whether it's driven by personal preference or time of the year in the semester, you have the flexibility to surface what matters most. And with flexibility top of mind, we've made it even easier for learners to see what's important to them when and where they need it. We know that learning happens anywhere regardless of device, so giving learners quick visibility into what's due next for them without having to click into each individual course will certainly make things easier and help them prioritize their time. So we've now added a to do widget into the Canvas mobile app, which will help surface clear at a glance task lists. From across their enrolled courses.
And once you've understood where you're up to, it's time to get into the learning. In connecting with learners, we recognize that there is an opportunity to remove the distraction in how they navigate Canvas. To get to the next step of their learning process. We've taken the opportunity to make it clearer and more focused by introducing Work mode from the dashboard, launching a simplified, clean layout of exactly where they need to be and what they need to complete. Expediting that navigation experience and making it easier than ever to resume their learning.
We're also thinking about content consumption and navigation through the modules experience. We know that modules are critical for scaffolding, for sequencing all of your learning materials, but we also know and we hear all the time that it is not as intuitive as it could be. This is for every student who has said to you, I can't find it. Today, this area is almost identical for both educators and learners. So with both personas, we know that they have specific needs.
Students need a clear, organized way to see their courses and navigate their content. Educators need an interface where they can see content creation, management, allocation of content to better support that learning delivery. So that's why I'm thrilled to share that starting with the learner, we're redesigning this module's experience. Launching an early adopter program for this as well later in the month and rolling out to everyone this year. This is incredibly exciting as we're able to support our students not only in having a leaner, more modern interface, but we're also doubling down on those indicators of learning progression within a course to help them best understand what they need to complete and what is still to come.
And greater clarity for our learners means greater clarity for our teachers. Helping to close the loop between learning and teaching support. Your educators need an easier way to surface data about their students. For For example, who needs extra support, especially in a larger cohort? Oftentimes, this intervention can be very reactive and can include juggling multiple learners, possibly getting involved when it's Too late for them. This has been a top request in the APAC region, so we're really thrilled to remove this hurdle for educators by providing them with a simplified way to respond to learners more proactively.
In our intelligent insight solution, we've expanded permissions for educators. Now, teachers can set criteria that matter most to them and your institution in order to proactively identify those students and learners who might need more attention. And Just as students in need of attentions empowers educators, ask your data, equips admins with the analytics that they need to drive data at scale. Those of you who are using Intelligent Sites have experienced greater visibility in your institution's teaching and learning effectiveness. And we've heard that your subaccount admins would also benefit from having discreet administrative access points to enable better decision making.
Ask Your Data now supports subaccount queries for Quick, meaningful insights and so sub account admins can see the data that's most meaningful to them when when and where they need it. And before we move into our next theme, to wrap up our focus on delivering intuitive, personal, and simplified workflow. It would be remiss of me not to introduce to you all today a brand new Canvas Introducing Canvas Career. Built on the backbone of the Canvas that you know and love, this experience unlocks the value of professional learning use cases, specifically which we've heard from many of you are top of mind. It's purpose curated for adult learners, and it focuses on skill development and career advancement, enabling industry readiness, upskilling, and improve business outcomes.
You've you'll be able to have the power to manually assign users to relevant learning, enroll automatically by role or department, and you'll get all the insights you need within a dashboard as well that tracks real time progress, engagement, and skill development. Plus, Ignite AI will also be in there surfacing alerts, recommended actions, and help you stay ahead and respond to your learner's needs. As a learner, they can easily track their progress across a program, engage with coaching, and even note taking and real time support. One. Now let's move to our second theme this morning, adaptable evaluation.
In order to meet broader global pedagogical landscapes and to deliver some of the longer term evolving needs of our customers, we need to strengthen the flexibility of our evaluation and Feedback approach. This focus is also really timely with all the AI conversation where institutions really need to reevaluate their approach to assessment, and I've had a lot of those conversations with you in the last couple of days. So it's critical that we can diversify the ways that we help support these needs. As As education evolves, so must the ways that we are learning, which Ryan touched on just for. One size fits all evaluation no longer meets the needs of the diverse learners in today's education setting.
Whether it's understanding real time learning progress, ensuring academic integrity, or authentic evaluation, it all needs to be clear. That's why our second theme today focuses on enhancing the versatility of learning evaluation because greater assessments should empower, not limit the teaching and learning journey. Today we've been quite prescriptive, and Ryan was talking about assessment for, of, and as, so we really want to look at how learning and evaluation is being delivered. We cultivate these grading capabilities and workflows, and we want to make sure they're less rigid for you. So today, we're gonna be looking at evaluation in a couple of ways.
Firstly, format. These types of evaluation methods that institutions can leverage and make sure that you get key insights from teaching and learning, and of course, flexibility. Giving more options for how institutions release and manage key elements of the workflow. Within the evaluation journey itself, self evaluation is one of the most valuable skills that educators can foster in their students, but it hasn't always been easy to capture in Canvas. We've solved for this by providing your learners with a dedicated space to reflect on their work, embedding that self reflection directly into your evaluation work flows and helping your learners develop those critical evaluation skills, taking greater ownership of their progress, and of course, engaging more deeply with that feedback.
Justice self assessment improves personal reflection, peer review can help collaboration and critical analysis by engaging your learners in evaluating each other's work. Peer review is a bit like karaoke. Some people love it, some people are terrified, some people share way more than you think they should. So you've told us in Canvas this hasn't been as easy as it should be, and it hasn't been as intuitive. So we're making it easier to improve allocation, distribution, so that these reviews can be assigned more efficiently.
Clear expectations will guide your learners through the process, making it easier for them to provide that meaningful feedback. Your educators will have greater control and visibility, ensuring that the process runs smoothly from start to finish. Better peer review management lets your learners focus on that meaningful feedback, deepen their learning, and build those real world communication skills, giving your educators a streamlined process that strives Sorry. Sorry, drive stronger outcomes. And while peer review can grow trust, proctoring protects it.
Academic integrity is critical to meaningful assessment in any format, and you've told us that issues in quizzes can be really hard to detect. Tech. So new quizzes now includes powerful proctoring update. Dates. Multi session detection flags attempts to access quizzes more than once.
File upload restrictions prevents learners from attaching an unauthorized document to essay questions. And IP monitoring in quiz logs Helps verify that test taker's identity and spot any irregular patterns. These safeguards protect the credibility of your online assessments and reduce that risk of academic misconduct to give you confidence in your results. And what about the future of quizzes themselves? Many of you have been following our journey, and we've continued to evolve our quizzing solution. We're We're actively working towards parity with Classic quizzes.
So we're closing that feature gap, and we're laying a future ready foundation for assessment. Can now ensure that culturally appropriate experience And we are finally bringing survey question types into new quizzes so that evaluative experience can be directly in your Canvas So we've enhanced the precision of new quizzes and its flexibility. And as a teacher, something I'm very passionate about, and again it was something Ryan spoke about earlier, is how we can reimagine assessment itself to make it more authentic, more interactive, more learner driven, and less about the end product. Traditional assignments are typically one way. So learners respond, They submit.
They wait for feedback. Which can be a missed opportunity to intervene and have conversations, deeper questioning, and provide personalized support. This can limit their critical thinking. It can leave knowledge gaps unaddressed, and of course, there's all the academic integrity issues. So in an exciting groundbreaking collaboration, we're introducing LLM assignments as part of our partnership with OpenAI.
AI guided conversation tasks designed to spark meaningful goal aligned dialogue. Your educators can set clear learning objectives, and the AI engages your learners in dynamic, responsive discussions that adapt to their answers and challenges their thinking in real time. Key learning evidence is then fed back to the grade book. So this will transform assignments From static tasks into active learning experiences. Learners will get instant Learners will get instant tailored feedback, and it will deepen their understanding and build confidence.
And your educators can assess the learning not just the final outcome. And when it comes time to capture all of that learning, this is where Canvas Portfolio comes in. Your learners complete such valuable work. They develop important skills, and they need a place to demonstrate what they have learned. Your educators need better ways to capture that evaluation, and they need to provide assessment results without juggling multiple tools.
Tools. Portfolio in Canvas will give your learners two powerful pathways directly in Canvas. First, they can be guided through a structured educator led portfolio that will align with the institutional goals and the course curriculum. Your educators will be able to assign those portfolios to learners, tying them to not only course assessments, But they can also span them across a program like a capstone type of evaluation. Second, your learners will also be able to create something called a showcase portfolio that reflects their unique academic journey.
So whether they wanna showcase something for graduation or career readiness or their lifelong learning journey, portfolios will be that living record that helps them reflect that authentic achievement. As I mentioned at the start of this theme, we're making continuous improvements to our assessment capabilities and the workflows. So I've just shared with you some of the formats that we're looking at, and now we'll spend some time looking at flexibility and some of the great AI stuff that we're gonna be bringing to you soon. As we think about the arc of the learning evaluation journey, it all starts with how assessments are created, And for many of you, this means a rubric. What learners need to demonstrate and how you're assessing these.
Just a quick show of hands, who loves creating a rubric from scratch? Anybody? I don't see a maybe. Sir Menon. Okay. Not many people in here love creating a rubric. They're time consuming.
Getting a good rubric is so important, but it takes a lot of time. And so we wanna make sure that you have a meaningful rubric and can create one easily to save you that time. We're currently developing a capability that will leverage AI to generate a rubric for you. It will improve the quality and reduce the time spent on the task. And while AI will help you expedite that process, your teachers will still be able to edit, to amend, and ensure that that end result is suitable and reflective of your needs.
We have an early adopter program for this kicking off later in the month, and we intend to deliver this into feature preview in October. So we're really excited to see how you use this functionality in your day to day. We're also evolving our flexibility in the approach to academic integrity, combining the best of both our native plagiarism tools and our partner integrations to create that more unified modern experience. The goal is to deliver the best of both worlds, A single view workflow where students can submit through any path, and educators get that full visibility right within Canvas when they're ready to review those submissions and give that feedback. This streamlined experience in includes AI and plagiarism detection directly in SpeedGrader, helping educators efficiently evaluate student work without needing to Switch tools.
And assignments aren't the only place where this integrity matters. We're expanding this capability as well, starting with discussions. So students' work can be reviewed with that same level of insight and support. And when it comes to grading, we know how valuable submission insights are for learners, but we know this is also incredibly time consuming. I know how excited you'll be to get your hands on this One, first pass grading assistance.
We're currently developing a solution to generate draft scores and feedback that uses AI, which is powerful not only through the lens of maximizing your time But But also reducing those administrative hours, most importantly, protecting your submissions from bias, which inevitably creeps in as we spend a long time marking. I'm a teacher myself. I mark essays, and I know when I'm getting really hungry, I'm not very nice when I'm marking, so I need something that will take that bias away from me. Imagine having a starting perspective where you can review, evaluate, and iterate upon without having to start from scratch every single time. We know getting this right is crucial, so we've already been conducting a comprehensive pilot of this functionality with over a hundred customers, and we wanna ensure that we get this right for this offering.
We are aiming to launch the early adopter program for this next month, so stay tuned for more information. And for even more flexibility, I wanna call to attention the teacher app. Many of you may not know we have a Canvas Teacher app. It offers convenience across many teaching tasks. However, we recognize that as much as there's a lot of things you love to do in an app, there's a lot of things that you avoid like marking.
The marking experience in the Canvas teacher app has not been ideal. But with the changing expectations, the volumes and avenues Thank you. Of how marking is delivered, it's just about the web experience at the moment. So we recognize that we need to evaluate and enhance the app capabilities. Whether you're evaluating practical demonstrations of skills and competency Delivering assessment in low bandwidth or simply just finding a way to mark while you're waiting in line for your Hubei cheese doughnuts, we're going to have a more robust way to do this in the Canvas teacher app.
We're upgrading the mobile speed grader experience so So that it provides all of that functionality that you know and love from the Canvas web experience. But But we're also looking at additional features, things that will just be unique to the app experience as well. Ultimately, we wanna provide a richer, more intuitive speed grader experience across any device. And for the ultimate flexibility that might be a bit long overdue, over the years, we've heard from many of you that you need more flexibility on when marks and feedback are delivered to your students. There have been many times over the years when I teach where I get an email from my students saying, where are my grades? Where is my feedback? Hasn't been released yet.
Oh, I forgot to publish. So later this month, we are addressing that. Two key things that I do wanna call out. Firstly, the ability to Schedule release of marking components when it's most meaningful for you. So scores and feedback.
You will be able to set and forget first time. Second, we are decoupling that experience of rubrics and feedback in comments. So, for example, if you want students to see their assignment feedback before they see the result You can separate that and schedule those out to be released, which is incredibly powerful for your learners. Minutes. Finally, for educators and administrators and our learners, we all have one thing in common.
We are stretched really thin. Time is one of the most precious resources in education, let alone anything else. So every click, every extra step, all those extra manual tasks, they can add up really quickly. And that's why our third theme today focuses on smarter workflows, streamlining those day to day tasks that power learning so you can spend more time in meaningful teaching and learning experiences and less time managing all those administrative tasks. We're delivering smart, time saving enhancements that help everyone stay focused on what matters most, teaching and learning and student success.
Success. When every click counts, every moment should be about keeping learning on track. Our new YouTube experience in Canvas Studio does exactly that with a safer way to leverage YouTube videos in Canvas. YouTube is a rich source of educational content, but in an education setting, it can actually be a complete minefield of distractions that pull your learners off task. For institutions that restrict YouTube, this is also a way for learners to be missing out on some of that valuable information because there isn't a safe way or a secure way to use them.
There's also growing concern about learner privacy when it comes to using third party platforms. The YouTube player for education provides a distraction free and privacy first viewing experience for all YouTube videos in Studio. Your learners will experience uninterrupted videos in an anonymous signed out state. So that will reduce data collection. Captions from YouTube are also carried over to maintain your accessibility compliance, And this is available to all Canvas Studio customers at no additional cost.
Educators can now confidently incorporate YouTube content into their courses without having to worry about those distractions or that data privacy. It's another step towards a future ready privacy centric ecosystem that keeps the focus where it belongs, on teaching, learning, and student success. And we know the migration can take a lot of time, so we are supporting the conversion of YouTube videos to Studio embedded media through a course level migration tool through Canvas Studio to assist you with that process. We recognise the experience of searching for LTI tools, learning about them before installing, and managing this feels like it's a lot in too many places with multiple steps and all those places that you need to go to just to get that workflow. We 've streamlined this all for admins now in terms of how they can install, configure, deploy, and oversee their LTI tools across your institution in a completely new area called Canvas apps.
The new app registration process offers a simplified UI, the ability to preview the placements and permissions of a tool, and also manage these configurations directly in the same apps page. Additionally, Canvas apps offers a monitor area for analyzing LTI usage, We've heard consistently from you that you want more flexibility and more granularity in where your tools are deployed, so we've enabled this deployment at a subaccount level as well. We also know how tedious accessibility can be. Content accessibility is a major concern for our institutions. And while we're committed to making sure that our platform is continuously accessible, we're also developing tools to help with your content accessibility remediation.
These tools will be able to scan your entire course, not page by page, for non compliant content, like inaccessible PDFs or color contrast issues on your page. It will also use AI to help generate suggestions for you and help you remediate these things, such as adding in text tags or suggesting more appropriate color options, and you can click that AI button to help you. This will be available to opt in for an early adopter program next month as well. And for your assessments, creating high quality quiz questions is another time consuming task. Educators often have to start from scratch, manually drafting questions, checking that they align with content, checking for accuracy, and this can take away from all of your other teaching and learning priorities.
We're solving for this by including Ignite AI quiz question generation in new quizzes. Your educators can automatically create questions based on course content or even materials that they upload and provide. Ignite AI will draft those questions and make sure they align and give your educators that strong starting point that they can review, edit, and improve, of course. This will result in faster quiz creation, more consistent alignment with your course content, and more time for teaching and supporting your learners. Sorry.
We're also leveraging Ignite AI to enhance learner to educator interactions, And we know it's not always easy to keep up with every discussion post, especially when you're dealing with larger groups. So when the conversation starts moving too fast, we will have discussion summaries. You can get a quick recap of what's happening across your discussion posts. Discussion summaries will analyze the conversation threads with the click of a button and highlight the main ideas, So areas of confusion or even points that might need more attention. This will help your educators quickly understand the flow of the discussion, spot any unanswered questions, and focus the responses where the learners might need more support, and of course, where they can have more impact.
This keeps the discussions productive and ensures that your learners feel heard. It helps your educators respond in a more timely way and a more targeted way. So the result is more engaged conversations, stronger understanding of your course material, and less time being lost to some of those Endless posts. And summaries can help you see where a discussion stands. Discussion insights will take that a step further.
It will help you engage and learn about the quality of those contributions. Currently, your educators can track how many times someone has posted or replied, but it can be really difficult to evaluate the quality of those contributions. Manually reviewing every single comment to gauge the depth, to gauge the relevance and engagement, it can take time, and it can delay some intervention that may be needed. Discussion insights will analyze the content of your learner's posts, assessing their quality and engaging levels, and it will surface patterns of participation, highlight standout contributions, and identifies where your learners may be under participating or even completely off track. Your educators will get a clear, faster picture of how discussions are driving that learning, enabling them to recognize strong contributions, reengage quiet learners, and guide those conversations towards deeper understanding.
It results in richer class dialogue and more equitable participation and, ultimately, stronger learning outcomes. So so far, I've covered a whole bunch of Ignite AI features that are coming soon to Canvas. And while we've heard throughout the day the theme of AI, we know that there is so much appetite for AI use in education, and understandably, there is also a lot of reluctance. Current tools are siloed, overly specific. You are jumping between multiple systems, and there's no unified flexible way to use AI within Canvas.
This is where Ignite Agent comes in. Ignite Agent is a powerful premium AI tool that's designed to handle more complex tasks and engage with various AI solutions within your Canvas ecosystem using a single prompt. Think of it as a catchall for AI assistance when you have a specific prebuilt use case that isn't available. Your educator can ask it questions or give it commands related to your courses and your learners. As Ryan spoke about earlier, Ignite AI will use an agentic workflow, meaning it will be capable of suggesting, making decisions, planning, executing complex, multi step tasks to help you achieve your goals.
It will be able to orchestrate tasks by potentially routing different parts of a request to various AI agents within your ecosystem, including institutional or third party tools as well. The a from the educator's perspective, it aims to provide a unified experience rather than requiring them to interact with multiple AI tools. A key feature of Ignite AI will be its transparency. It will always show its work, outlining the steps that it plans to take and allowing educators to review and approve each action. It builds confidence, ensuring that your educators always remain in control.
It connects deeply with over seven hundred Canvas APIs to execute complex tasks from a single prompt. For example, it can identify a group of struggling students. It can create differentiation tags for them. It can then generate remedial assignments for that group of learners, and then use your third party AI tool to draft some additional content for them, all within a single prompt. Due to the compute intensive nature and differentiated capabilities, Ignite AI will be offered as an add on product to Canvas rather than a default feature.
When it comes to your AI use, activity doesn't always equal impact. So we're really excited to bring Ignite Agent to you so that you can enhance your AI use, and ultimately get the outcomes that matter to you in teaching and learning. So I've covered a lot. There's been a lot of different features that we've talked about throughout today, and that's just a small part of it. There is so much more to come as we head into the rest of this year, in the last few months of the year.
So to stay connected, there's a couple of things I will call out. The first being our new and next webinar, which I run quarterly. The next one's actually next week. So if you'd love to sign up, I'd love to see you there. We'll be running through some of the things we've discussed today as well as more features, more functionality that you'll be able to expect in Canvas soon.
The other thing is Canvas Career, which I showed earlier on. If you are interested in staying up to date on how we are progressing with Canvas Career or want to learn more, please feel free to sign up and follow our journey there. Thank you.
We've already seen and heard a lot of that here this morning. Many of you have seen our journey with AI so far. We've connected with you, our end users. We've learned about your excitement, your apprehension, and of course, the role that AI is gonna bring to education. We've considered a thoughtful solutioning about this evolving technology with intentionality and purpose.
Today, I'm really excited to introduce to you Ignite AI. This is our in context AI solution, which is going to be a thoughtful conductor for AI in our ecosystem, designed to bring all the AI directly into the flow of teaching and learning. So no more separate logins, no more processes or fragmentation, just smart, accessible tools embedded directly in the systems that you use most, and it's powered by Amazon Bedrock. Our customers will benefit from secure enterprise grade AI foundation that ensures transparency, scalability, and flexibility to meet the needs of your institutions. So, just for a moment of housekeeping, the things that I'm going be sharing with you today are forward looking.
So, we're talking about a lot of things, I'll be showing you a lot of things, and they're not necessarily reflective of how things are actually going to look and behave in the future, because we know things will change based on our strategy, based on roadmap, and most importantly, the feedback from you as you start to get into these things. So with that out of the way, let's get straight into it. At Instructure, we know simplicity is not just a design choice, it's a necessity. Whether you're a classroom teacher, an instructional designer, or an administrator, part of the larger institution, this is something that remains true for you. Great learning experiences should be easy to access, intuitive to use, and tailored to the unique needs of your learners and your educators.
That's why our first theme today focuses on how we are delivering a more intuitive, personalized, and simple solution that will really help you with navigating this experience, so you can focus more on teaching and learning and not troubleshooting technology. So let's explore some of the ways that we're removing friction, starting at the beginning with content creation. We've fundamentally reimagined how you create course content in Canvas with the block content editor. This will be the new foundation for page creation. Paired with AI first interfaces, it empowers educators to create, to transform, and adapt content with simple prompts, cutting friction and giving teachers tools that will truly work.
And this isn't just a new editor, it's a powerful shift, making it easier than ever to design engaging, accessible, and flexible course content. With AI streaming those work for you that matter most. Everything about this block content editor has been shaped by what we've heard from you. It will be native in Canvas. It brings in a lot of that drag and drop functionality that you expect, With the flexibility of HTML as well for those of you that wanna be able to do more.
And it introduces a content preview, so you'll know that your pages can be great and consumable on any device, on the web, on a tablet, on a mobile. This is the core editing workflow for Canvas, We're taking time to try and get this right. We've listened so closely to teachers, to institutions, and many of you followed this journey with us since last year, helping shape its direction. But for this. So stay tuned.
One of the most delightful things that we've seen from twenty twenty five so far, differentiation tags, has really captivated institutions worldwide, and we've seen adopted seen it adopted for a variety of use cases, personalized learning being top of mind. When we introduced this ability to assign content to specific users and sections last year, you all shared that you wanted to do more. You needed more flexibility, specifically assigning modules, assignments, other course content, and not just sections or individual students, but to groups of students based on specific criteria. And so to address this and specific other use cases, we introduced differentiation tags, a brand new way to organize your students Manage targeted sets of learners and deliver customized content. Think about accommodations, Those of you who have learners that need extra time, maybe additional learning materials, or just managing a blended and a face to face cohort together.
We're doubling down on how to best support large courses with this feature, and the feedback that we're getting from customers across the board has really helped shape that. So we're taking this even further through capabilities like user level tagging with wider institutional organization, management, personalization, reporting, and all those other insights that you need. And while we're talking about the personalized learning experience, let's take a moment to think about the very first step in Canvas, the dashboard. For many years, the layout of this entry experience has been the same regardless of your role or purpose in Canvas. It's critical that we curate a a more personalized landing point, which is reflective of what's most important and most relevant to you based on your role, based on teaching and learning journey so far.
What should you be paying attention to? Where are you up to? What's happening? And of course, how to get there in the most simplest way. So as part of this work, we spent a lot of time connecting with learners to better understand their reality, their needs, and ensuring that we're solving for workflows in a way that really resonates with their day to day and when we need Canvas to just get out of the way. What we're doing is making it easier than ever for them to find the details that they really care about, their grades, their feedback, a holistic view of their courses, what's due and when, And for the first time, a simple way to gauge their learning progress. So in twenty twenty five, we're going to be launching a refreshed learner dashboard, which will be available for early adopters in the next month. We're also laser focused on elevating the educator experience, and we're deep in design validation For a reimagined dashboard for these users.
We recognized that everyone has their own version of what is meaningful, meaningful, so we're building the dashboards with customization, top of mind, to ensure that whether it's driven by personal preference or time of the year in the semester, you have the flexibility to surface what matters most. And with flexibility top of mind, we've made it even easier for learners to see what's important to them when and where they need it. We know that learning happens anywhere regardless of device, so giving learners quick visibility into what's due next for them without having to click into each individual course will certainly make things easier and help them prioritize their time. So we've now added a to do widget into the Canvas mobile app, which will help surface clear at a glance task lists. From across their enrolled courses.
And once you've understood where you're up to, it's time to get into the learning. In connecting with learners, we recognize that there is an opportunity to remove the distraction in how they navigate Canvas. To get to the next step of their learning process. We've taken the opportunity to make it clearer and more focused by introducing Work mode from the dashboard, launching a simplified, clean layout of exactly where they need to be and what they need to complete. Expediting that navigation experience and making it easier than ever to resume their learning.
We're also thinking about content consumption and navigation through the modules experience. We know that modules are critical for scaffolding, for sequencing all of your learning materials, but we also know and we hear all the time that it is not as intuitive as it could be. This is for every student who has said to you, I can't find it. Today, this area is almost identical for both educators and learners. So with both personas, we know that they have specific needs.
Students need a clear, organized way to see their courses and navigate their content. Educators need an interface where they can see content creation, management, allocation of content to better support that learning delivery. So that's why I'm thrilled to share that starting with the learner, we're redesigning this module's experience. Launching an early adopter program for this as well later in the month and rolling out to everyone this year. This is incredibly exciting as we're able to support our students not only in having a leaner, more modern interface, but we're also doubling down on those indicators of learning progression within a course to help them best understand what they need to complete and what is still to come.
And greater clarity for our learners means greater clarity for our teachers. Helping to close the loop between learning and teaching support. Your educators need an easier way to surface data about their students. For For example, who needs extra support, especially in a larger cohort? Oftentimes, this intervention can be very reactive and can include juggling multiple learners, possibly getting involved when it's Too late for them. This has been a top request in the APAC region, so we're really thrilled to remove this hurdle for educators by providing them with a simplified way to respond to learners more proactively.
In our intelligent insight solution, we've expanded permissions for educators. Now, teachers can set criteria that matter most to them and your institution in order to proactively identify those students and learners who might need more attention. And Just as students in need of attentions empowers educators, ask your data, equips admins with the analytics that they need to drive data at scale. Those of you who are using Intelligent Sites have experienced greater visibility in your institution's teaching and learning effectiveness. And we've heard that your subaccount admins would also benefit from having discreet administrative access points to enable better decision making.
Ask Your Data now supports subaccount queries for Quick, meaningful insights and so sub account admins can see the data that's most meaningful to them when when and where they need it. And before we move into our next theme, to wrap up our focus on delivering intuitive, personal, and simplified workflow. It would be remiss of me not to introduce to you all today a brand new Canvas Introducing Canvas Career. Built on the backbone of the Canvas that you know and love, this experience unlocks the value of professional learning use cases, specifically which we've heard from many of you are top of mind. It's purpose curated for adult learners, and it focuses on skill development and career advancement, enabling industry readiness, upskilling, and improve business outcomes.
You've you'll be able to have the power to manually assign users to relevant learning, enroll automatically by role or department, and you'll get all the insights you need within a dashboard as well that tracks real time progress, engagement, and skill development. Plus, Ignite AI will also be in there surfacing alerts, recommended actions, and help you stay ahead and respond to your learner's needs. As a learner, they can easily track their progress across a program, engage with coaching, and even note taking and real time support. One. Now let's move to our second theme this morning, adaptable evaluation.
In order to meet broader global pedagogical landscapes and to deliver some of the longer term evolving needs of our customers, we need to strengthen the flexibility of our evaluation and Feedback approach. This focus is also really timely with all the AI conversation where institutions really need to reevaluate their approach to assessment, and I've had a lot of those conversations with you in the last couple of days. So it's critical that we can diversify the ways that we help support these needs. As As education evolves, so must the ways that we are learning, which Ryan touched on just for. One size fits all evaluation no longer meets the needs of the diverse learners in today's education setting.
Whether it's understanding real time learning progress, ensuring academic integrity, or authentic evaluation, it all needs to be clear. That's why our second theme today focuses on enhancing the versatility of learning evaluation because greater assessments should empower, not limit the teaching and learning journey. Today we've been quite prescriptive, and Ryan was talking about assessment for, of, and as, so we really want to look at how learning and evaluation is being delivered. We cultivate these grading capabilities and workflows, and we want to make sure they're less rigid for you. So today, we're gonna be looking at evaluation in a couple of ways.
Firstly, format. These types of evaluation methods that institutions can leverage and make sure that you get key insights from teaching and learning, and of course, flexibility. Giving more options for how institutions release and manage key elements of the workflow. Within the evaluation journey itself, self evaluation is one of the most valuable skills that educators can foster in their students, but it hasn't always been easy to capture in Canvas. We've solved for this by providing your learners with a dedicated space to reflect on their work, embedding that self reflection directly into your evaluation work flows and helping your learners develop those critical evaluation skills, taking greater ownership of their progress, and of course, engaging more deeply with that feedback.
Justice self assessment improves personal reflection, peer review can help collaboration and critical analysis by engaging your learners in evaluating each other's work. Peer review is a bit like karaoke. Some people love it, some people are terrified, some people share way more than you think they should. So you've told us in Canvas this hasn't been as easy as it should be, and it hasn't been as intuitive. So we're making it easier to improve allocation, distribution, so that these reviews can be assigned more efficiently.
Clear expectations will guide your learners through the process, making it easier for them to provide that meaningful feedback. Your educators will have greater control and visibility, ensuring that the process runs smoothly from start to finish. Better peer review management lets your learners focus on that meaningful feedback, deepen their learning, and build those real world communication skills, giving your educators a streamlined process that strives Sorry. Sorry, drive stronger outcomes. And while peer review can grow trust, proctoring protects it.
Academic integrity is critical to meaningful assessment in any format, and you've told us that issues in quizzes can be really hard to detect. Tech. So new quizzes now includes powerful proctoring update. Dates. Multi session detection flags attempts to access quizzes more than once.
File upload restrictions prevents learners from attaching an unauthorized document to essay questions. And IP monitoring in quiz logs Helps verify that test taker's identity and spot any irregular patterns. These safeguards protect the credibility of your online assessments and reduce that risk of academic misconduct to give you confidence in your results. And what about the future of quizzes themselves? Many of you have been following our journey, and we've continued to evolve our quizzing solution. We're We're actively working towards parity with Classic quizzes.
So we're closing that feature gap, and we're laying a future ready foundation for assessment. Can now ensure that culturally appropriate experience And we are finally bringing survey question types into new quizzes so that evaluative experience can be directly in your Canvas So we've enhanced the precision of new quizzes and its flexibility. And as a teacher, something I'm very passionate about, and again it was something Ryan spoke about earlier, is how we can reimagine assessment itself to make it more authentic, more interactive, more learner driven, and less about the end product. Traditional assignments are typically one way. So learners respond, They submit.
They wait for feedback. Which can be a missed opportunity to intervene and have conversations, deeper questioning, and provide personalized support. This can limit their critical thinking. It can leave knowledge gaps unaddressed, and of course, there's all the academic integrity issues. So in an exciting groundbreaking collaboration, we're introducing LLM assignments as part of our partnership with OpenAI.
AI guided conversation tasks designed to spark meaningful goal aligned dialogue. Your educators can set clear learning objectives, and the AI engages your learners in dynamic, responsive discussions that adapt to their answers and challenges their thinking in real time. Key learning evidence is then fed back to the grade book. So this will transform assignments From static tasks into active learning experiences. Learners will get instant Learners will get instant tailored feedback, and it will deepen their understanding and build confidence.
And your educators can assess the learning not just the final outcome. And when it comes time to capture all of that learning, this is where Canvas Portfolio comes in. Your learners complete such valuable work. They develop important skills, and they need a place to demonstrate what they have learned. Your educators need better ways to capture that evaluation, and they need to provide assessment results without juggling multiple tools.
Tools. Portfolio in Canvas will give your learners two powerful pathways directly in Canvas. First, they can be guided through a structured educator led portfolio that will align with the institutional goals and the course curriculum. Your educators will be able to assign those portfolios to learners, tying them to not only course assessments, But they can also span them across a program like a capstone type of evaluation. Second, your learners will also be able to create something called a showcase portfolio that reflects their unique academic journey.
So whether they wanna showcase something for graduation or career readiness or their lifelong learning journey, portfolios will be that living record that helps them reflect that authentic achievement. As I mentioned at the start of this theme, we're making continuous improvements to our assessment capabilities and the workflows. So I've just shared with you some of the formats that we're looking at, and now we'll spend some time looking at flexibility and some of the great AI stuff that we're gonna be bringing to you soon. As we think about the arc of the learning evaluation journey, it all starts with how assessments are created, And for many of you, this means a rubric. What learners need to demonstrate and how you're assessing these.
Just a quick show of hands, who loves creating a rubric from scratch? Anybody? I don't see a maybe. Sir Menon. Okay. Not many people in here love creating a rubric. They're time consuming.
Getting a good rubric is so important, but it takes a lot of time. And so we wanna make sure that you have a meaningful rubric and can create one easily to save you that time. We're currently developing a capability that will leverage AI to generate a rubric for you. It will improve the quality and reduce the time spent on the task. And while AI will help you expedite that process, your teachers will still be able to edit, to amend, and ensure that that end result is suitable and reflective of your needs.
We have an early adopter program for this kicking off later in the month, and we intend to deliver this into feature preview in October. So we're really excited to see how you use this functionality in your day to day. We're also evolving our flexibility in the approach to academic integrity, combining the best of both our native plagiarism tools and our partner integrations to create that more unified modern experience. The goal is to deliver the best of both worlds, A single view workflow where students can submit through any path, and educators get that full visibility right within Canvas when they're ready to review those submissions and give that feedback. This streamlined experience in includes AI and plagiarism detection directly in SpeedGrader, helping educators efficiently evaluate student work without needing to Switch tools.
And assignments aren't the only place where this integrity matters. We're expanding this capability as well, starting with discussions. So students' work can be reviewed with that same level of insight and support. And when it comes to grading, we know how valuable submission insights are for learners, but we know this is also incredibly time consuming. I know how excited you'll be to get your hands on this One, first pass grading assistance.
We're currently developing a solution to generate draft scores and feedback that uses AI, which is powerful not only through the lens of maximizing your time But But also reducing those administrative hours, most importantly, protecting your submissions from bias, which inevitably creeps in as we spend a long time marking. I'm a teacher myself. I mark essays, and I know when I'm getting really hungry, I'm not very nice when I'm marking, so I need something that will take that bias away from me. Imagine having a starting perspective where you can review, evaluate, and iterate upon without having to start from scratch every single time. We know getting this right is crucial, so we've already been conducting a comprehensive pilot of this functionality with over a hundred customers, and we wanna ensure that we get this right for this offering.
We are aiming to launch the early adopter program for this next month, so stay tuned for more information. And for even more flexibility, I wanna call to attention the teacher app. Many of you may not know we have a Canvas Teacher app. It offers convenience across many teaching tasks. However, we recognize that as much as there's a lot of things you love to do in an app, there's a lot of things that you avoid like marking.
The marking experience in the Canvas teacher app has not been ideal. But with the changing expectations, the volumes and avenues Thank you. Of how marking is delivered, it's just about the web experience at the moment. So we recognize that we need to evaluate and enhance the app capabilities. Whether you're evaluating practical demonstrations of skills and competency Delivering assessment in low bandwidth or simply just finding a way to mark while you're waiting in line for your Hubei cheese doughnuts, we're going to have a more robust way to do this in the Canvas teacher app.
We're upgrading the mobile speed grader experience so So that it provides all of that functionality that you know and love from the Canvas web experience. But But we're also looking at additional features, things that will just be unique to the app experience as well. Ultimately, we wanna provide a richer, more intuitive speed grader experience across any device. And for the ultimate flexibility that might be a bit long overdue, over the years, we've heard from many of you that you need more flexibility on when marks and feedback are delivered to your students. There have been many times over the years when I teach where I get an email from my students saying, where are my grades? Where is my feedback? Hasn't been released yet.
Oh, I forgot to publish. So later this month, we are addressing that. Two key things that I do wanna call out. Firstly, the ability to Schedule release of marking components when it's most meaningful for you. So scores and feedback.
You will be able to set and forget first time. Second, we are decoupling that experience of rubrics and feedback in comments. So, for example, if you want students to see their assignment feedback before they see the result You can separate that and schedule those out to be released, which is incredibly powerful for your learners. Minutes. Finally, for educators and administrators and our learners, we all have one thing in common.
We are stretched really thin. Time is one of the most precious resources in education, let alone anything else. So every click, every extra step, all those extra manual tasks, they can add up really quickly. And that's why our third theme today focuses on smarter workflows, streamlining those day to day tasks that power learning so you can spend more time in meaningful teaching and learning experiences and less time managing all those administrative tasks. We're delivering smart, time saving enhancements that help everyone stay focused on what matters most, teaching and learning and student success.
Success. When every click counts, every moment should be about keeping learning on track. Our new YouTube experience in Canvas Studio does exactly that with a safer way to leverage YouTube videos in Canvas. YouTube is a rich source of educational content, but in an education setting, it can actually be a complete minefield of distractions that pull your learners off task. For institutions that restrict YouTube, this is also a way for learners to be missing out on some of that valuable information because there isn't a safe way or a secure way to use them.
There's also growing concern about learner privacy when it comes to using third party platforms. The YouTube player for education provides a distraction free and privacy first viewing experience for all YouTube videos in Studio. Your learners will experience uninterrupted videos in an anonymous signed out state. So that will reduce data collection. Captions from YouTube are also carried over to maintain your accessibility compliance, And this is available to all Canvas Studio customers at no additional cost.
Educators can now confidently incorporate YouTube content into their courses without having to worry about those distractions or that data privacy. It's another step towards a future ready privacy centric ecosystem that keeps the focus where it belongs, on teaching, learning, and student success. And we know the migration can take a lot of time, so we are supporting the conversion of YouTube videos to Studio embedded media through a course level migration tool through Canvas Studio to assist you with that process. We recognise the experience of searching for LTI tools, learning about them before installing, and managing this feels like it's a lot in too many places with multiple steps and all those places that you need to go to just to get that workflow. We 've streamlined this all for admins now in terms of how they can install, configure, deploy, and oversee their LTI tools across your institution in a completely new area called Canvas apps.
The new app registration process offers a simplified UI, the ability to preview the placements and permissions of a tool, and also manage these configurations directly in the same apps page. Additionally, Canvas apps offers a monitor area for analyzing LTI usage, We've heard consistently from you that you want more flexibility and more granularity in where your tools are deployed, so we've enabled this deployment at a subaccount level as well. We also know how tedious accessibility can be. Content accessibility is a major concern for our institutions. And while we're committed to making sure that our platform is continuously accessible, we're also developing tools to help with your content accessibility remediation.
These tools will be able to scan your entire course, not page by page, for non compliant content, like inaccessible PDFs or color contrast issues on your page. It will also use AI to help generate suggestions for you and help you remediate these things, such as adding in text tags or suggesting more appropriate color options, and you can click that AI button to help you. This will be available to opt in for an early adopter program next month as well. And for your assessments, creating high quality quiz questions is another time consuming task. Educators often have to start from scratch, manually drafting questions, checking that they align with content, checking for accuracy, and this can take away from all of your other teaching and learning priorities.
We're solving for this by including Ignite AI quiz question generation in new quizzes. Your educators can automatically create questions based on course content or even materials that they upload and provide. Ignite AI will draft those questions and make sure they align and give your educators that strong starting point that they can review, edit, and improve, of course. This will result in faster quiz creation, more consistent alignment with your course content, and more time for teaching and supporting your learners. Sorry.
We're also leveraging Ignite AI to enhance learner to educator interactions, And we know it's not always easy to keep up with every discussion post, especially when you're dealing with larger groups. So when the conversation starts moving too fast, we will have discussion summaries. You can get a quick recap of what's happening across your discussion posts. Discussion summaries will analyze the conversation threads with the click of a button and highlight the main ideas, So areas of confusion or even points that might need more attention. This will help your educators quickly understand the flow of the discussion, spot any unanswered questions, and focus the responses where the learners might need more support, and of course, where they can have more impact.
This keeps the discussions productive and ensures that your learners feel heard. It helps your educators respond in a more timely way and a more targeted way. So the result is more engaged conversations, stronger understanding of your course material, and less time being lost to some of those Endless posts. And summaries can help you see where a discussion stands. Discussion insights will take that a step further.
It will help you engage and learn about the quality of those contributions. Currently, your educators can track how many times someone has posted or replied, but it can be really difficult to evaluate the quality of those contributions. Manually reviewing every single comment to gauge the depth, to gauge the relevance and engagement, it can take time, and it can delay some intervention that may be needed. Discussion insights will analyze the content of your learner's posts, assessing their quality and engaging levels, and it will surface patterns of participation, highlight standout contributions, and identifies where your learners may be under participating or even completely off track. Your educators will get a clear, faster picture of how discussions are driving that learning, enabling them to recognize strong contributions, reengage quiet learners, and guide those conversations towards deeper understanding.
It results in richer class dialogue and more equitable participation and, ultimately, stronger learning outcomes. So so far, I've covered a whole bunch of Ignite AI features that are coming soon to Canvas. And while we've heard throughout the day the theme of AI, we know that there is so much appetite for AI use in education, and understandably, there is also a lot of reluctance. Current tools are siloed, overly specific. You are jumping between multiple systems, and there's no unified flexible way to use AI within Canvas.
This is where Ignite Agent comes in. Ignite Agent is a powerful premium AI tool that's designed to handle more complex tasks and engage with various AI solutions within your Canvas ecosystem using a single prompt. Think of it as a catchall for AI assistance when you have a specific prebuilt use case that isn't available. Your educator can ask it questions or give it commands related to your courses and your learners. As Ryan spoke about earlier, Ignite AI will use an agentic workflow, meaning it will be capable of suggesting, making decisions, planning, executing complex, multi step tasks to help you achieve your goals.
It will be able to orchestrate tasks by potentially routing different parts of a request to various AI agents within your ecosystem, including institutional or third party tools as well. The a from the educator's perspective, it aims to provide a unified experience rather than requiring them to interact with multiple AI tools. A key feature of Ignite AI will be its transparency. It will always show its work, outlining the steps that it plans to take and allowing educators to review and approve each action. It builds confidence, ensuring that your educators always remain in control.
It connects deeply with over seven hundred Canvas APIs to execute complex tasks from a single prompt. For example, it can identify a group of struggling students. It can create differentiation tags for them. It can then generate remedial assignments for that group of learners, and then use your third party AI tool to draft some additional content for them, all within a single prompt. Due to the compute intensive nature and differentiated capabilities, Ignite AI will be offered as an add on product to Canvas rather than a default feature.
When it comes to your AI use, activity doesn't always equal impact. So we're really excited to bring Ignite Agent to you so that you can enhance your AI use, and ultimately get the outcomes that matter to you in teaching and learning. So I've covered a lot. There's been a lot of different features that we've talked about throughout today, and that's just a small part of it. There is so much more to come as we head into the rest of this year, in the last few months of the year.
So to stay connected, there's a couple of things I will call out. The first being our new and next webinar, which I run quarterly. The next one's actually next week. So if you'd love to sign up, I'd love to see you there. We'll be running through some of the things we've discussed today as well as more features, more functionality that you'll be able to expect in Canvas soon.
The other thing is Canvas Career, which I showed earlier on. If you are interested in staying up to date on how we are progressing with Canvas Career or want to learn more, please feel free to sign up and follow our journey there. Thank you.