APAC New and Next Webinar - February 2026
Hello, everyone. We'll give everyone a few minutes to join into our session before we get started. Just as you're settling in, would love to know where in the region you're joining us from. Hopefully, our chat function is enabled for you, and you can pop in the chat where you are in the region today. We'd love to see all of our geographies represented. Amazing.
Got some a and zed. See if we have anyone more broadly. Awesome. Got lots of people from across Australia. We've got New Zealand represented as well.
And nice to see lots of names that we recognize too. Very grateful for that. Alright. Just as everyone's settling in, if you are joining one of these webinars for the very first time, we're very grateful to have you here. And if you're a returning attendee, as you know, I love to chat about the weather.
So not only do I like to see where you're joining us from, I love to know what the weather is like where you are. You will maybe or maybe not know. I'm not a fan of cold. Being Canadian, it's just not something I do anymore. So, obviously, I always would love to know where in the region you're joining us from and, of course, what the weather's like where you are.
See lots of lovely names and lots of familiar names. A scorcher yesterday, I can see someone's just posted, and we're excited to see that as well. But thank you again for joining us. Let's get into things. We've got a lot to cover off today, and I'm super excited, as I said, that you've chosen to spend the time with us.
For our side of the world, for many of you, it's the start of a school year. I hope this settling in has gone well. I'm sure it's been incredibly busy, so thanks for choosing to spend your morning or afternoon with us wherever you are. Firstly, I will take a moment to quickly introduce my amazing colleagues that I'm joined by. So we have Aric Lim, one of our incredible solution engineers who will be in the chats with us today, and Sara Sara Frizel, our learning consultant.
The wealth of knowledge between these two people is incredible, and I'm so excited that they get to join with me today. We will be using the q and a functionality here in Zoom. So down the bottom of your screen, you'll see a little q and a icon. Please post any questions in there. Eric and Sarah will be prioritizing answering things in the q and a.
That really helps us keep track of the questions and provide clear responses that everyone can see. So please, if you have questions, add them into the q and a function. Sarah and Arik will prioritize there. They won't be keeping an eye on the chat necessarily, but, of course, you are most welcome to chat amongst colleagues in there and keep those social conversations going. But we'll be prioritizing q and a questions as well.
The chat function is there. Use it as needed. Thank you for sharing the weather and where you are. I love seeing our region represented. And as I said, if you're new to these sessions today, we're gonna be going through a number of things.
So I'll be going through updates that have happened in the last couple of months, predominantly in Canvas LMS. And then, of course, I'll share some other updates on some of our other solutions like Canvas catalog and Parchment digital badges as well. So let's get into things. As I said, we've got a lot to cover off, and I thought I would start with a recap on Ignite AI and just some of the exciting updates that we've had in this space over the last couple of months as well. For those of you who are newer to our Ignite offering, Ignite AI empowers educators and institutions to do more with less by embedding AI directly into the workflows that you're already using.
So we're looking to streamline those repetitive tasks to support high impact use cases for you and, of course, enable data driven decision making. So Ignite AI will help accelerate learner achievement overall and and keep you and your educators in that driver's seat. So last November, we had our chief customer officer, Rachel Orston, and our chief product officer, Sharon Vujisam, ran our very first new and next showcase. So this is our new and next webinar. We also had new and next showcase.
What they did was building on the success of these new and next product updates. New and next showcase was a webinar that we are looking to run twice a year. So the first one for this year will be happening in April, and we're gonna give you an opportunity to hear directly from the instructor leaders on a more regular basis. So at the end of last year, our first showcase was, of course, on Ignite AI. And understandably, there've been a lot of questions about the feature availability, what's gonna be included in Canvas LMS in base subscriptions.
So during the session, Rachel and Sharon shared that at Instructure, we're committed to offering some level of Ignite AI for all of our Canvas customers because we want institutions to be able to transform their teaching and learning with AI. We do have links to the recording that was made for this session. As I said, it was in November last year, and there will be another one happening in April. Now I also shared this slide towards the end of last year at our final new and next at the end of the year. And on this slide, it's a reminder of the features that we have been able to make available and, of course, what is still coming.
I'm gonna spend the next few slides in a moment just recapping some of these features. But before I do, I wanna note that last year, I shared we would be making all of our Ignite AI features available until thirty June. This is intended to help us learn about your usage patterns for GenAI tools, which, of course, has a this is a significant variable in predicting cost. Now what I'm really excited to share with you is that we've been able to extend this free period. And so now we are offering all of our Ignite AI functionality free until thirty September this year for our international customers.
This is a huge win to give you and your institution more time to experiment, for us to gather feedback, and really hear how these tools are helping you and your teaching and learning goals. After thirty June, we really wanna maintain essential features, as I just said, designed to support those teaching and learning use cases and, of course, support access for everybody at no additional cost. Over the next few months, our teams are going to work very closely with you to design a commercial structure that's transparent, that's equitable, and, of course, aligned to those real world use cases. We will share more details in advance so that you and your institution can make an informed decision about how you wanna adopt this functionality across your Canvas LMS. So there's more information on that coming, but really excited to share that we're extending the free period, in the region.
Now let's revisit some of the functionality that we have available, and we have a lot of great resources available on these things in the Canvas community as well. So let's revisit what's currently available now as feature options that can be enabled in Canvas. So first up, we have insights for discussions, which is available now. There are so many powerful teaching and learning experiences that we know come from discussions, from content and subject related learning to soft skills that we know come with communication and debating and negotiating in a discussion. So educators can leverage so much from a discussion board, but staying on top of that conversation, particularly in the large cohorts that we see here in APAC, is a manual and can can be a very time consuming, task.
So Ignite AI insights for discussions provides educators with a snapshot of how their discussion is going. It uses a clear traffic light system, so red, yellow, green, to really help them see quickly the quality of those discussions, not just the quantity. Educators will be able to focus their interventions where they need it most and, of course, provide meaningful active learning experiences for their learners. Next, we also have the generator for rubrics available as a feature option. After a really successful early adopter program, we saw the average rubric creation time drop from approximately ten minutes to under four minutes, so more than half the time saved.
Ignite AI generator for rubrics is an AI powered feature, and it helps educators quickly generate high quality editable rubrics for assignments within Canvas. It will analyze an assignment page that you have set up, the name, the description, to then suggest rubric criteria along with point values, performance levels, producing a clear and customizable rubric with criteria to save time and, of course, promote consistency. Educators, you are always in the driver's seat. You can review, edit, and expand on those AI generated rubric structures before publishing so you have full control over that rubric design. We know that this tool will streamline the rubric creation process, so it'll allow educators to focus on refining those criteria and performance levels rather than having to start from scratch.
And, of course, it supports alignment with assessment goals and learning outcomes. So by leveraging AI, the Ignite AI generator for rubrics will improve efficiency and consistency across your courses and programs and, of course, provide reliable standards aligned foundation for your assessment practices. I will quickly mention as a note to enable this particular feature, you do need to have enhanced rubrics enabled in your LMS as well. And I'll touch on enhanced rubrics later in this session too. Moving along, we also have Ignite AI translations for inbox, discussions, and announcements.
This is now available as a feature option, and it's an AI powered functionality in Canvas that really enables users to instantly translate messages, discussion threads, and announcements in the context that they need it in. We wanna be able to support multilingual communications in your student cohorts. The translations are also configurable down to the course level. So if you need to disable that functionality in, say, a language centric course, you can do that. And discussion translations will allow your learners to translate an entire discussion thread to better understand in their own context and, of course, participate in those conversations.
This feature really helps foster accessibility and equity by removing those language barriers that some of us are aware of and ensuring that all of our learners can engage fully in the communications within their courses. And then we've got Ignite AI item authoring assistance for new quizzes. This is also available as a feature option. It streamlines quiz creation by generating questions based on your existing course materials in Canvas. So you can provide source materials such as a page in a Canvas module, maybe a reading passage, or even upload a document to this particular feature.
Then you can select focus topics. You can select standards or outcomes to measure, and then set the parameters like the depth of knowledge or even aligned to a particular taxonomy model. Ignite AI will then generate your multiple choice questions that are aligned, that are rigorous, and useful, saving you a bunch of time and effort required when having to do that from scratch. This tool, again, empowers our educators to focus more on analyzing assessment results and delivering meaningful feedback. So really helping support that learner growth, and we wanna make sure that this particular feature is continually improved through real world feedback and making sure that it evolves to meet your needs when you are using new quizzes.
And our newest Ignite AI feature coming next month is Ignite AI grading assistance for SpeedGrader. This feature will streamline the marking process, generating an initial rubric aligned score and some targeted feedback suggestions based on text based submissions, so things like essays or reports. And, of course, it will provide educators with a structured starting point while keeping the final marking decisions in their control at all times. This particular feature does not finalize marks, does not finalize feedback. Educators must review, they must adjust, and, of course, approve all of these suggestions before it is shared with learners.
This workflow is really intended to help educators move through rubric based marking more efficiently, especially when you're dealing with large cohorts that we know here in the region. Of course, it's gonna support timely rubric aligned feedback for learners. And we know because AI assisted grading can raise really important questions and conversations about accuracy, trust, and appropriateness, we are absolutely intentionally transparent about when and how this functionality is being used. So the grading assistance effectively will be we will publish more details on this in the community. We know this will introduce new processes into your key workflows.
So our goal here with Ignite AI grading assistance is to provide helpful, transparent, support for you, not automation without oversight. By using this grading assistance in the right context with clear rubrics and appropriate assignments, you can obviously save time and start from an unbiased place each time you're marking an assignment. So we do have some information about this. The nutrition facts are available in our community, and we're hoping to have release notes ready for you next month. Alright.
Now moving along, let's take a look at some of the updates that we have coming new or soon to Canvas. There's gonna be a bunch that I chat through for Canvas LMS, updates for SpeedGrader, updates to accessibility, Canvas apps. We have a new quizzes update as well as the assignment document processor in SpeedGrader. And I mentioned just before, we'll chat about enhanced rubrics and then some to do list improvements in Canvas mobile app and, lastly, Canvas career. So firstly, I did wanna call out an announcement that was made in July last year about the existing legacy login UI in Canvas.
This is going to be deprecated middle of the year this year. So on thirtieth of June twenty twenty six, we will be officially deprecating the legacy UI. If your institution has not opted into the new login UI date, your Canvas instance will automatically be migrated on the first of July twenty twenty six. So if you're not sure about this process or this is new information for you, please reach out to your CSM, get in touch, and let us know. To ensure compliance with web accessibility, some of the things that we've done with this new login UI is really introduce stricter theming rules to make sure we're adhering to those WCAG guidelines and, of course, new native features to replace some of the custom scripts that you're likely using on this page as well.
There is more detailed information in the product blog post that we can share in the chat, so I do encourage you to have a look. There is a little bit of lead time. As I mentioned, we'll be deprecating this on thirty June, so you can follow along in the blog post for more information. And next, into some more specific Canvas updates. Another one that we've been speaking about for the last little while is the performance and usability upgrades for SpeedGrader.
They are now on by default in Canvas, and there is still an option to opt out if you need more time managing this change in your institution. As a reminder, some of the benefits to this are optimized for large courses. You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't call out the scale we operate at here in APAC. We know this is a big issue for us. So we've engineered this to handle higher enrollment volumes, ensuring consistent performance and faster load times.
We've also aimed to minimize the learning curve, so helping you maintain the familiar SpeedGrader interface while minimizing the need for retraining or change management. And then, of course, this has been built for the future. We've made a lot of back end upgrades to the architecture, really laying the foundation for more ongoing enhancement in usability and performance that we wanna iterate over time. And one that I've been very excited to share and just thought I would give a timely reminder on is scheduling feedback. We now have the option for more control over your marking and feedback.
So the scheduled feedback release was built directly in response to the feedback we've heard here in the region for a while now. Now you can explicitly plan when your students get their rubric scores, when they get their comments, whether that's to start a dialogue before their marks are finalized or to hold on to feedback until students have had a chance to review something or participate in a moderation. This makes Canvas far more flexible and, of course, aligning to the marking and communication timelines based on your institution's pedagogical intent. So this was a very exciting announcement that I just wanted to reiterate. And another one that we're excited to give an update on is the course accessibility checker.
So while the existing RCE editor in Canvas LMS, it's has been a widely trusted tool for many years, We know that evolving accessibility standards and, of course, impending changes to accessibility guidelines need more from your institution, from your educators, and from your admins. Accessibility is top of mind for you as it is for us, and so we wanted to really improve that experience for you with the course accessibility checker. It's been designed to meet these growing demands by giving you accessibility checking and remediation at a course level, which is a huge time saver. We have the opportunity here for instructors and admins to see their course materials, check where they're not meeting WCAG two point one, double a accessibility requirements across web and mobile. And so that's for all the content sitting in Canvas built into pages.
Context as well. We're giving you the ability to easily see why issues are being flagged. So not only will you see where there are issues, what the issue is, but this tool will help explain why this problem is a problem within your LMS, why it matters, and, of course, how to resolve it, really helping you build your accessibility knowledge along the way. And, of course, we help remediate those commonly missed accessibility issues. So it's really designed to address those key workflows, those common things that come up when you're trying to ensure accessibility across your courses.
We are going to be releasing the course accessibility checker in two phases. So from next week, phase one will become available in Canvas, and this will include the course level central interface that you see on this slide here, which provides the accessibility information from a course point of view. It provides that bird's eye view of all of the accessibility issues. It will scan native Canvas content. So as I said, content that has been built into Canvas pages and Canvas assignments.
That is part of phase one. And then there will be a wizard style remediation tool. So a fast and intuitive way to review and fix those accessibility issues within your learning resources without having to jump across individual pages. So we wanna make sure things like heading structure, alt text on images, hyperlinks, that kind of information can be easily remediated in one place. The other things we have planned for later in this year in the terms of phase two are AI enabled remediation.
So we in the background, we are working on using Ignite AI to introduce image and image alt text and table captioning because we know that's a great time saver that we can offer to educators. We are looking as well at scanning native Canvas content, so detecting issues in discussions, in announcements, and, of course, in your syllabi if you are publishing those as well. We're also exploring ways to create an administrator view. So having a simple list of courses with active and resolved issues for admins, of course, to follow-up on and at the root and subaccount level as well. So more iteration happening there, but the first, phase of this will be available from next week.
And moving on, we have the Canvas apps availability and exceptions now available as well. So root account admins previously didn't have a way to centrally manage their LTI one point three tool availability. So trying to restrict particular tools or even allow particular tools in different subaccounts became a very manual and inefficient process. So we've now introduced a new interface that allows your admins to manage that tool availability from one place. They can now search by subaccount as well or even by course and toggle that access with a really simple available or not yet available section or selection.
Sorry. This is a huge win, of course, for efficiency. We wanna be able to give admins more precise control over your ecosystem and, of course, ensuring that the right tools are in the right hands at all times, really reducing that administrative burden, particularly when it comes to LTI management. Now let's look at some of the work that's continuing to be done on NewQuizzes. I know this is one we are watching very closely here in APAC.
And with the work that's happening there, we know that NewQuizzes has felt like a separate experience mainly because it's lived in its own iframe. And so this does create hurdles for things like accessibility or compatibility issues with excessive assistive technologies. So what we've done is we've moved new quizzes out of its iframe, and it is now running natively in Canvas in a Canvas page. This is a big win. It's currently in beta environments, so we do encourage you to jump in and do some testing if you need to ahead of time, but it is available in production as well.
Basically, this is a huge under the hood change that really has a number of benefits. What we're doing of of course, first and foremost, is we're improving that accessibility for students who may be using things like screen readers. And then very importantly, we're laying the necessary foundation to bring us into parity with classic classic quizzes to remove the nature of the LTI functionality and, of course, support more advanced features in the future as we continue to progress with new quizzes. I know here in the region, we're watching this one really closely. I will absolutely be sharing more information as we continue to iterate on new quizzes.
And then we have the assignment document processing app. So if you've been following along with this one, you may have heard the word plagiarism checker used in there as well or plagiarism processing. We've now called this assignment document processing because we wanted to make sure it was cognizant of all the use cases that this particular functionality allows. So at the moment, instructors often have to jump between their different tools when they're checking for things like plagiarism or writing quality, and it just adds all these extra steps into their marking workflow and ultimately slows them down. What we've done is we've created an LTI one point three integration that allows tools like Turnitin or Packback, if you're using that, to be added directly into the assignments area in Canvas.
So reports like your Turnitin similarity report now show up directly in SpeedGrader, which is a huge efficiency win. It creates that single view for your marking so instructors can quickly and easily see that originality risk score and student submission all in the one place, streamlining that plagiarism detection. And, of course, it provides transparency for students when they're on their when they're submitting as well because they'll be able to see that report. We are gonna continue to iterate on this as well. As I mentioned, plagiarism checking is one particular case, but we've heard a number of use cases around document checking or review where we see great opportunity with this particular function.
And as I called out at the start of this, we are making we're we're making improvements to rubrics. And so enhanced rubrics is now available in Canvas LMS for you to turn on. The traditional rubric experience was functional. It was great, but it lacked some of the flexibility and some of that modern interface that we need for more complex grading. It also didn't support things like some of the AI work that we're looking to do and some of the AI tools that you're looking to leverage when working in Canvas LMS.
We are transitioning to enhanced rubrics, which will be the default experience from December nineteenth. So there's a little bit of time. It's currently a feature option until the twenty second of March, so about a month. And from the twenty second of March until the end of the year, it will be on by default. This is a new experience for our Canvas users, but we know that it allows for easier editing of rubric criteria.
It also makes the descriptions much nicer and provides a cleaner UI. So this is really the foundation of the future work that we'll be doing in SpeedGrader. Beyond the immediate usability, we know that this is really gonna unlock a lot of heavy hitting features that we're excited to talk about later in the year, like self assessment, multiple rubrics, and then, of course, Ignite AI generator for rubrics that I just spoke about earlier. So in order to unlock a lot of our newer functionality that's coming up, enhanced rubrics does need to be turned on. And moving along to my last Canvas update, I did wanna call out all the great work that is happening in our student mobile app.
This is a huge place that our learners go whether we are actively pointing them there or not. And so the to do list functionality has had some significant improvements in mobile. It's been redesigned into a more unified view that now includes things like their assignments, any course, or even institutional events that need that that they need to be notified about, and, of course, all their personal tasks. This will all be in one place. And so it really is a smarter default view showing the last four weeks and their current week of learning.
So a really nice snapshot of where they are. There's also new filtering options in there so a learner can customize the date ranges or even specific courses. And this update also introduces a faster way to tick things off and mark items as done. There's an undo option as well. And one I'm really excited about, there's dark mode.
I think this has been a really huge request from a number of our learners, So really excited to make dark mode a supported function in here as well. So really exciting work happening in our mobile app. Now I do wanna spend a quick amount of time just revisiting Canvas career for those of you who are newer to these sessions. Last year, we introduced our newest Canvas experience called Canvas Career, and it's been built on the backbone of Canvas that you know and love. And this experience is specifically for professional learning use cases, which we know for many of you are top of mind.
It's purpose curated for adult learners and, of course, focuses on things like skill development and career advancement, really enabling industry readiness, upskilling, and, of course, improved business outcomes. So we know that the needs of an adult learner and a professional organization are very different to those in higher ed or in k twelve. They take a more skills based approach really to learning, and sometimes that stuff can be difficult to track in a more traditional LMS. So Canvas Career has been designed to really help address those things. It delivers a dynamic role based learning experience.
It also turns insights into action, so it's much easier to track progress, see gaps in learning, and, of course, track engagement trends in real time. And it really simplifies that learning cycle. No jumping between different tools or different LMSs in your organization and having an analytics dashboard in one place. It is an LMS that's really designed to help you go faster and develop those build those better learning outcomes, particularly for your adult learners. One of the biggest differentiators with our focus on skills is that Canvas Career will help you align content to in demand industry recognized skills so you can build content that is aligned to those frameworks where you need to.
And, of course, we've made it easier to measure and improve with all of that real time data. So you can see how learners are progressing. You can see where those learners are dropping off, and, of course, which programs are offering the most value. We wanna make sure that these skills aligned programs can be readily readily available within days rather than months that you can assign by role very quickly. So we've made sure that that type of functionality is here so that you can do those things far more quickly in a scalable way.
And we know that resources are tight when it comes to professional learning. So Canvas Career does use AI to take a lot of repetitive tasks off of your team's plate. It does have functionality like content creation to support some of those programs that you need to build. And, of course, things like student facing AI where they can take notes, they can highlight content, and really use and and respond to their learning in a way that makes sense for them. There is now a dedicated space in the community so that you can stay up to date on Canvas career.
If you are interested in following along or wanna know more, I encourage you to check out the community. We will start publishing release notes in the same way we do, for all of our other products, but I wanted to make sure you're aware that Canvas career is now in community as well. Alright. Now we're gonna look at some updates beyond Canvas LMS, the ones that really make teaching and learning smarter, more engaging, and, of course, more accessible. So I have a number of updates to share on Canvas Studio and some improvements we've made with the captioning process, some updates on Canvas catalog, the log login and enrollment processes, and then enhancements that we've made to awarding and sharing Parchment digital badges.
So firstly, for those of you who have been leveraging our video platform, Canvas Studio, we've updated the captioning functionality to provide you and your learners with an improved experience. We currently have auto generated captions in Studio, which is great, a big time saver, but they're not always a hundred percent accurate. And that then requires time reviewing every single line. And when you're dealing with a thirty minute or a sixty minute video just to find some typos, it can be a little bit tedious and not the best use of anyone's time. So we've introduced a feature that will identify and highlight suspected inaccuracies.
So users can now toggle a switch to only show lines with suspected inaccuracies in the caption editor. It's a massive time saver, which we know is really important and really helps reduce the time needed to review a video and then improve accessibility. We've seen the time saved and the improvements improve by an average of thirty percent for our current users. So it lets our creators really focus on the parts of the video that need that human touch rather than having to sit there and review the whole thing. Moving on to catalog, for those of you who are catalog users or just interested to know more, many of you are probably using various identity providers, and so having a one size fits all login screen doesn't always align to the complexity of your institution and the identity infrastructures that you have in place.
So we've introduced a custom authentication mode that allows you to manage multiple primary and secondary login methods. So if you're using things like a Canvas login plus a Google login simultaneously, you can now do things like display those multiple authentication providers. You we've also replaced the Canvas discovery page with a fully integrated catalog native experience. There's customizable button labels and instructional text. We've also added the ability to preview and publish changes in real time without needing developer assistance and really making sure that we enforce access to these settings through new permissioning and maintaining those audit trails for you with the full logging in details in your audit log.
So it creates a more maintainable and user friendly onboarding experience. Students are also no longer gonna be confused about which credentials they need to use to log in as the preview screen will clearly present the options that match your institution and your existing infrastructure. And another exciting piece of news in catalog, this is a big one that I'm actually really excited to share because we've heard this request. It's been a huge request from our region for a while now, is we now have program level enrollment setting. Huge win.
I'm excited to tell you more about it. So in a program based learning model, students are often enrolling in a certificate, then they have to track where to where else to enroll, and it can become very manual to have to individually join each course or unit. Sometimes they can miss what they need to be enrolling in, and it creates support tickets. It creates confusion. We've added a program level toggle that automatically enrolls a student in all of the source associated courses or units from the moment they join that program.
Huge win. It's a set and forget approach. It significantly reduces that admin burden not only for students, but for you and your support staff. And students will get that more consistent seamless journey from the start, really helping you support your goals around a reliable enrollment experience. So huge win for our region, huge win for our catalog users.
Excite I'm really excited that I get to share that one today. And let's move on to some updates on Parchment digital badges, formerly known as Canvas credentials for those of you who've been following along. So up until recently, awarding a badge was sometimes a manual process, and it didn't have a way of syncing up with our Canvas grade book, especially when using things like letter grades or percentages. So we've now have an enhanced integration that reflects Canvas grading natively, and it includes full support for letter grade awarding as well. It automates the moment of achievement because the badge now stays perfectly aligned with the grade book without a manual intervention.
So students can receive their badge or credential instantly, and instructors or educators can trust that that data is accurate because it's coming straight out of the grade book. There is an amazing blog post that we can share in the chat that goes through everything in far greater detail, everything you're needing to know if you are looking to explore this functionality or, of course, enable it between Canvas and Parchment digital badges. We've also made a small but mighty enhancement to the sharing controls in badges. So for those of you who aren't using Parchment digital badges as yet, when a badge is earned, a learner is given a public URL every time they're issued a badge, and now they have the ability to turn off that sharing capability. Some learners don't always wanna publicize every single badge that they earn, or they might share specific badges in specific places depending on where they are either in their learning journey or even in their career.
So this feature really provides a centralized kill switch for that sharing to help them move beyond needing to manage things at an individual level or sharing links out one by one, which can be really tedious. We wanna give a simpler way to manage how their credentials are more accessible and, of course, empowering learners with that fine tuned security that they need so that they can confidently navigate their learning journey and confidently share their credentials where they need to. And our last parchment update is we are continuing, of course, to review our product accessibility requirements and our ability to meet those requirements. Accessibility has definitely been a repeated theme in today's update. So as we continue to review those things, we've made some continued improvements to Parchment Digital Badges.
We are WCAG two point two double a compliant, and we wanna make sure that we stay there. So, of course, we wanna align with global WCAG standards. We wanna make sure we're providing an accessible experience both to our admins and to our learners to deliver a clearer and more readable interface that benefits everybody regardless of how they are accessing our platform. Okay. So we've covered a lot of the little granular product updates across our products, but I did wanna take some time to review what's still coming this year because there is still a lot going on.
At the end of last year, I shared these details on this slide about what we're actively working on and what we're looking to bring to you throughout this year. We have a number of pieces of work that are currently in our early adopter program, meaning we have something ready. We are validating it with our users. We are hearing feedback and incorporating that feedback to make sure that we are giving you something meaningful and something that will delight you in your workflows and make sure you're getting what you need in your teaching and learning experiences. We also have ideas that we're exploring and validating.
So things that we are thinking could be a good idea, but we really wanna hear more from you. And I'm excited to share some of those things in our upcoming sessions as we meet throughout the year. So just wanted to revisit what you can still expect to come and what we'll be sharing more info on in the coming weeks and months. And on that, I did wanna mention the new and next series. You're here today or watching a recording, on our new and next webinars.
We've made a little a few changes to the way that these are gonna work based on the amazing feedback, based on your amazing attendance. We really wanna make sure that you're getting the most out of these sessions. So what we'll be doing going forward with new and next is, if you recall last year, I was running quarterly webinars. So once every three months, I would run a session. I would tell you all the things that have happened in product land, all of the amazing work that we've done, but it was a lot.
And I heard you. I covered a lot of things in these sessions. And sometimes it wasn't always easy to digest that many updates in one place. So what we're gonna do going forward is we're actually gonna start publishing these quarterly blog posts that have all of the relevant updates, all of the linked resources ahead of time, which will be really nice, I'm sure, for many of you. At the moment, there is a blog post available on our product page with the January updates, many of which I've covered today.
But what we will still continue to do is run these amazing webinars because I'm really grateful to get in front of a number of you, and we don't always have the luxury of meeting face to face. So we wanna make sure that here in APAC, you are still getting all of the value out of these sessions. And so what we're gonna do going forward is continue to run these sessions, but we're also gonna include more targeted product sessions and include things like specific product demos, customer showcases. And I'm really excited to get to work with our customers more closely and really showcase the amazing work that they're doing. So moving forward throughout the year, you will still see our amazing webinars happening.
They're just gonna start to be a little more product focused, and hopefully help you see the value in the things that you're doing and and where we can help you with that. So on that note, I will mention that our next new and next webinar is actually gonna be happening next month. And we're specifically gonna look at Parchment digital badges and just how badging can be done effectively in Australia and New Zealand. We are going to have a chat during this session with our customers and also do a product demo specifically related to an Australian use case that I'm excited to share with you next month. We're also gonna be doing a specific session for Asia, so there'll be more details coming on that soon.
But for now, to sign up to this webinar, you actually need to go to our new and next registration page. At the moment, you're gonna probably see the registration for this session. This is gonna become our one stop shop. So this page is going to evolve and become a more meaningful place for you. So I encourage you to bookmark the new and next registration page because we will continue to update that page with the recordings.
So you'll see the recording from today's session when it's available in the coming days, and you'll see that page update to include the registration link for the next webinar. So you can stay up to date on what's happening in one place, hopefully making your lives a little bit easier. Please bookmark it. It's a great place to go back and look at some of our previous recordings as well because we will start making those available in a central spot. The registration page for the badges webinar will hopefully become available, in the next week or so, so you can certainly register for that one.
And another, announcement towards the end of last year, we shared that we are already thinking about CanvasCon twenty twenty six, and here we are in twenty twenty six. CanvasCon a and zed is happening in August on the twenty fourth and twenty fifth of August. We're heading back to Sydney, and we're so excited to see you all there when we get to that spot and that time, which will probably come very quickly. Now early bird tickets are going on sale next week at ten AM Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time, so I would suggest putting it in your calendar or bookmarking the registration page as well to avoid missing out on those early bird tickets. We are so excited to see you there.
We love these events. I love getting to interact with all of you when you come along and just, again, hearing the amazing things that are happening out there in our institutions. So, hopefully, we'll get to see you at CanvasCon ANZ in Sydney. And, of course, our amazing colleagues and customers in the Philippines, we will have details on CanvasCon Philippines coming soon as well. So stay tuned for that information.
Alright. As always, I wanna thank you for choosing to spend your time with Sarah, Aric, and I today. Thank you for being active in the chats and raising some amazing questions. We did cover a lot. I know it can be a lot to digest, so please reach out if you think of questions after the fact.
And before we wrap up today, as always, I would love your feedback. I really wanna make sure that these sessions are impactful for you and that you're getting what you need when you choose to spend your time with me. So if you can take a moment to complete our little survey, I would be very grateful for any feedback. But thank you again for joining us. It's a busy time of the year as it always is, but grateful that you made the time today.
And thank you to my amazing colleagues, Sarah and Aric, for manning the chats. It's been I see great combo happening, and I'm very grateful. So thanks again, everyone. Have a great afternoon, and I hope to see you all soon. Thanks, everyone.
Got some a and zed. See if we have anyone more broadly. Awesome. Got lots of people from across Australia. We've got New Zealand represented as well.
And nice to see lots of names that we recognize too. Very grateful for that. Alright. Just as everyone's settling in, if you are joining one of these webinars for the very first time, we're very grateful to have you here. And if you're a returning attendee, as you know, I love to chat about the weather.
So not only do I like to see where you're joining us from, I love to know what the weather is like where you are. You will maybe or maybe not know. I'm not a fan of cold. Being Canadian, it's just not something I do anymore. So, obviously, I always would love to know where in the region you're joining us from and, of course, what the weather's like where you are.
See lots of lovely names and lots of familiar names. A scorcher yesterday, I can see someone's just posted, and we're excited to see that as well. But thank you again for joining us. Let's get into things. We've got a lot to cover off today, and I'm super excited, as I said, that you've chosen to spend the time with us.
For our side of the world, for many of you, it's the start of a school year. I hope this settling in has gone well. I'm sure it's been incredibly busy, so thanks for choosing to spend your morning or afternoon with us wherever you are. Firstly, I will take a moment to quickly introduce my amazing colleagues that I'm joined by. So we have Aric Lim, one of our incredible solution engineers who will be in the chats with us today, and Sara Sara Frizel, our learning consultant.
The wealth of knowledge between these two people is incredible, and I'm so excited that they get to join with me today. We will be using the q and a functionality here in Zoom. So down the bottom of your screen, you'll see a little q and a icon. Please post any questions in there. Eric and Sarah will be prioritizing answering things in the q and a.
That really helps us keep track of the questions and provide clear responses that everyone can see. So please, if you have questions, add them into the q and a function. Sarah and Arik will prioritize there. They won't be keeping an eye on the chat necessarily, but, of course, you are most welcome to chat amongst colleagues in there and keep those social conversations going. But we'll be prioritizing q and a questions as well.
The chat function is there. Use it as needed. Thank you for sharing the weather and where you are. I love seeing our region represented. And as I said, if you're new to these sessions today, we're gonna be going through a number of things.
So I'll be going through updates that have happened in the last couple of months, predominantly in Canvas LMS. And then, of course, I'll share some other updates on some of our other solutions like Canvas catalog and Parchment digital badges as well. So let's get into things. As I said, we've got a lot to cover off, and I thought I would start with a recap on Ignite AI and just some of the exciting updates that we've had in this space over the last couple of months as well. For those of you who are newer to our Ignite offering, Ignite AI empowers educators and institutions to do more with less by embedding AI directly into the workflows that you're already using.
So we're looking to streamline those repetitive tasks to support high impact use cases for you and, of course, enable data driven decision making. So Ignite AI will help accelerate learner achievement overall and and keep you and your educators in that driver's seat. So last November, we had our chief customer officer, Rachel Orston, and our chief product officer, Sharon Vujisam, ran our very first new and next showcase. So this is our new and next webinar. We also had new and next showcase.
What they did was building on the success of these new and next product updates. New and next showcase was a webinar that we are looking to run twice a year. So the first one for this year will be happening in April, and we're gonna give you an opportunity to hear directly from the instructor leaders on a more regular basis. So at the end of last year, our first showcase was, of course, on Ignite AI. And understandably, there've been a lot of questions about the feature availability, what's gonna be included in Canvas LMS in base subscriptions.
So during the session, Rachel and Sharon shared that at Instructure, we're committed to offering some level of Ignite AI for all of our Canvas customers because we want institutions to be able to transform their teaching and learning with AI. We do have links to the recording that was made for this session. As I said, it was in November last year, and there will be another one happening in April. Now I also shared this slide towards the end of last year at our final new and next at the end of the year. And on this slide, it's a reminder of the features that we have been able to make available and, of course, what is still coming.
I'm gonna spend the next few slides in a moment just recapping some of these features. But before I do, I wanna note that last year, I shared we would be making all of our Ignite AI features available until thirty June. This is intended to help us learn about your usage patterns for GenAI tools, which, of course, has a this is a significant variable in predicting cost. Now what I'm really excited to share with you is that we've been able to extend this free period. And so now we are offering all of our Ignite AI functionality free until thirty September this year for our international customers.
This is a huge win to give you and your institution more time to experiment, for us to gather feedback, and really hear how these tools are helping you and your teaching and learning goals. After thirty June, we really wanna maintain essential features, as I just said, designed to support those teaching and learning use cases and, of course, support access for everybody at no additional cost. Over the next few months, our teams are going to work very closely with you to design a commercial structure that's transparent, that's equitable, and, of course, aligned to those real world use cases. We will share more details in advance so that you and your institution can make an informed decision about how you wanna adopt this functionality across your Canvas LMS. So there's more information on that coming, but really excited to share that we're extending the free period, in the region.
Now let's revisit some of the functionality that we have available, and we have a lot of great resources available on these things in the Canvas community as well. So let's revisit what's currently available now as feature options that can be enabled in Canvas. So first up, we have insights for discussions, which is available now. There are so many powerful teaching and learning experiences that we know come from discussions, from content and subject related learning to soft skills that we know come with communication and debating and negotiating in a discussion. So educators can leverage so much from a discussion board, but staying on top of that conversation, particularly in the large cohorts that we see here in APAC, is a manual and can can be a very time consuming, task.
So Ignite AI insights for discussions provides educators with a snapshot of how their discussion is going. It uses a clear traffic light system, so red, yellow, green, to really help them see quickly the quality of those discussions, not just the quantity. Educators will be able to focus their interventions where they need it most and, of course, provide meaningful active learning experiences for their learners. Next, we also have the generator for rubrics available as a feature option. After a really successful early adopter program, we saw the average rubric creation time drop from approximately ten minutes to under four minutes, so more than half the time saved.
Ignite AI generator for rubrics is an AI powered feature, and it helps educators quickly generate high quality editable rubrics for assignments within Canvas. It will analyze an assignment page that you have set up, the name, the description, to then suggest rubric criteria along with point values, performance levels, producing a clear and customizable rubric with criteria to save time and, of course, promote consistency. Educators, you are always in the driver's seat. You can review, edit, and expand on those AI generated rubric structures before publishing so you have full control over that rubric design. We know that this tool will streamline the rubric creation process, so it'll allow educators to focus on refining those criteria and performance levels rather than having to start from scratch.
And, of course, it supports alignment with assessment goals and learning outcomes. So by leveraging AI, the Ignite AI generator for rubrics will improve efficiency and consistency across your courses and programs and, of course, provide reliable standards aligned foundation for your assessment practices. I will quickly mention as a note to enable this particular feature, you do need to have enhanced rubrics enabled in your LMS as well. And I'll touch on enhanced rubrics later in this session too. Moving along, we also have Ignite AI translations for inbox, discussions, and announcements.
This is now available as a feature option, and it's an AI powered functionality in Canvas that really enables users to instantly translate messages, discussion threads, and announcements in the context that they need it in. We wanna be able to support multilingual communications in your student cohorts. The translations are also configurable down to the course level. So if you need to disable that functionality in, say, a language centric course, you can do that. And discussion translations will allow your learners to translate an entire discussion thread to better understand in their own context and, of course, participate in those conversations.
This feature really helps foster accessibility and equity by removing those language barriers that some of us are aware of and ensuring that all of our learners can engage fully in the communications within their courses. And then we've got Ignite AI item authoring assistance for new quizzes. This is also available as a feature option. It streamlines quiz creation by generating questions based on your existing course materials in Canvas. So you can provide source materials such as a page in a Canvas module, maybe a reading passage, or even upload a document to this particular feature.
Then you can select focus topics. You can select standards or outcomes to measure, and then set the parameters like the depth of knowledge or even aligned to a particular taxonomy model. Ignite AI will then generate your multiple choice questions that are aligned, that are rigorous, and useful, saving you a bunch of time and effort required when having to do that from scratch. This tool, again, empowers our educators to focus more on analyzing assessment results and delivering meaningful feedback. So really helping support that learner growth, and we wanna make sure that this particular feature is continually improved through real world feedback and making sure that it evolves to meet your needs when you are using new quizzes.
And our newest Ignite AI feature coming next month is Ignite AI grading assistance for SpeedGrader. This feature will streamline the marking process, generating an initial rubric aligned score and some targeted feedback suggestions based on text based submissions, so things like essays or reports. And, of course, it will provide educators with a structured starting point while keeping the final marking decisions in their control at all times. This particular feature does not finalize marks, does not finalize feedback. Educators must review, they must adjust, and, of course, approve all of these suggestions before it is shared with learners.
This workflow is really intended to help educators move through rubric based marking more efficiently, especially when you're dealing with large cohorts that we know here in the region. Of course, it's gonna support timely rubric aligned feedback for learners. And we know because AI assisted grading can raise really important questions and conversations about accuracy, trust, and appropriateness, we are absolutely intentionally transparent about when and how this functionality is being used. So the grading assistance effectively will be we will publish more details on this in the community. We know this will introduce new processes into your key workflows.
So our goal here with Ignite AI grading assistance is to provide helpful, transparent, support for you, not automation without oversight. By using this grading assistance in the right context with clear rubrics and appropriate assignments, you can obviously save time and start from an unbiased place each time you're marking an assignment. So we do have some information about this. The nutrition facts are available in our community, and we're hoping to have release notes ready for you next month. Alright.
Now moving along, let's take a look at some of the updates that we have coming new or soon to Canvas. There's gonna be a bunch that I chat through for Canvas LMS, updates for SpeedGrader, updates to accessibility, Canvas apps. We have a new quizzes update as well as the assignment document processor in SpeedGrader. And I mentioned just before, we'll chat about enhanced rubrics and then some to do list improvements in Canvas mobile app and, lastly, Canvas career. So firstly, I did wanna call out an announcement that was made in July last year about the existing legacy login UI in Canvas.
This is going to be deprecated middle of the year this year. So on thirtieth of June twenty twenty six, we will be officially deprecating the legacy UI. If your institution has not opted into the new login UI date, your Canvas instance will automatically be migrated on the first of July twenty twenty six. So if you're not sure about this process or this is new information for you, please reach out to your CSM, get in touch, and let us know. To ensure compliance with web accessibility, some of the things that we've done with this new login UI is really introduce stricter theming rules to make sure we're adhering to those WCAG guidelines and, of course, new native features to replace some of the custom scripts that you're likely using on this page as well.
There is more detailed information in the product blog post that we can share in the chat, so I do encourage you to have a look. There is a little bit of lead time. As I mentioned, we'll be deprecating this on thirty June, so you can follow along in the blog post for more information. And next, into some more specific Canvas updates. Another one that we've been speaking about for the last little while is the performance and usability upgrades for SpeedGrader.
They are now on by default in Canvas, and there is still an option to opt out if you need more time managing this change in your institution. As a reminder, some of the benefits to this are optimized for large courses. You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't call out the scale we operate at here in APAC. We know this is a big issue for us. So we've engineered this to handle higher enrollment volumes, ensuring consistent performance and faster load times.
We've also aimed to minimize the learning curve, so helping you maintain the familiar SpeedGrader interface while minimizing the need for retraining or change management. And then, of course, this has been built for the future. We've made a lot of back end upgrades to the architecture, really laying the foundation for more ongoing enhancement in usability and performance that we wanna iterate over time. And one that I've been very excited to share and just thought I would give a timely reminder on is scheduling feedback. We now have the option for more control over your marking and feedback.
So the scheduled feedback release was built directly in response to the feedback we've heard here in the region for a while now. Now you can explicitly plan when your students get their rubric scores, when they get their comments, whether that's to start a dialogue before their marks are finalized or to hold on to feedback until students have had a chance to review something or participate in a moderation. This makes Canvas far more flexible and, of course, aligning to the marking and communication timelines based on your institution's pedagogical intent. So this was a very exciting announcement that I just wanted to reiterate. And another one that we're excited to give an update on is the course accessibility checker.
So while the existing RCE editor in Canvas LMS, it's has been a widely trusted tool for many years, We know that evolving accessibility standards and, of course, impending changes to accessibility guidelines need more from your institution, from your educators, and from your admins. Accessibility is top of mind for you as it is for us, and so we wanted to really improve that experience for you with the course accessibility checker. It's been designed to meet these growing demands by giving you accessibility checking and remediation at a course level, which is a huge time saver. We have the opportunity here for instructors and admins to see their course materials, check where they're not meeting WCAG two point one, double a accessibility requirements across web and mobile. And so that's for all the content sitting in Canvas built into pages.
Context as well. We're giving you the ability to easily see why issues are being flagged. So not only will you see where there are issues, what the issue is, but this tool will help explain why this problem is a problem within your LMS, why it matters, and, of course, how to resolve it, really helping you build your accessibility knowledge along the way. And, of course, we help remediate those commonly missed accessibility issues. So it's really designed to address those key workflows, those common things that come up when you're trying to ensure accessibility across your courses.
We are going to be releasing the course accessibility checker in two phases. So from next week, phase one will become available in Canvas, and this will include the course level central interface that you see on this slide here, which provides the accessibility information from a course point of view. It provides that bird's eye view of all of the accessibility issues. It will scan native Canvas content. So as I said, content that has been built into Canvas pages and Canvas assignments.
That is part of phase one. And then there will be a wizard style remediation tool. So a fast and intuitive way to review and fix those accessibility issues within your learning resources without having to jump across individual pages. So we wanna make sure things like heading structure, alt text on images, hyperlinks, that kind of information can be easily remediated in one place. The other things we have planned for later in this year in the terms of phase two are AI enabled remediation.
So we in the background, we are working on using Ignite AI to introduce image and image alt text and table captioning because we know that's a great time saver that we can offer to educators. We are looking as well at scanning native Canvas content, so detecting issues in discussions, in announcements, and, of course, in your syllabi if you are publishing those as well. We're also exploring ways to create an administrator view. So having a simple list of courses with active and resolved issues for admins, of course, to follow-up on and at the root and subaccount level as well. So more iteration happening there, but the first, phase of this will be available from next week.
And moving on, we have the Canvas apps availability and exceptions now available as well. So root account admins previously didn't have a way to centrally manage their LTI one point three tool availability. So trying to restrict particular tools or even allow particular tools in different subaccounts became a very manual and inefficient process. So we've now introduced a new interface that allows your admins to manage that tool availability from one place. They can now search by subaccount as well or even by course and toggle that access with a really simple available or not yet available section or selection.
Sorry. This is a huge win, of course, for efficiency. We wanna be able to give admins more precise control over your ecosystem and, of course, ensuring that the right tools are in the right hands at all times, really reducing that administrative burden, particularly when it comes to LTI management. Now let's look at some of the work that's continuing to be done on NewQuizzes. I know this is one we are watching very closely here in APAC.
And with the work that's happening there, we know that NewQuizzes has felt like a separate experience mainly because it's lived in its own iframe. And so this does create hurdles for things like accessibility or compatibility issues with excessive assistive technologies. So what we've done is we've moved new quizzes out of its iframe, and it is now running natively in Canvas in a Canvas page. This is a big win. It's currently in beta environments, so we do encourage you to jump in and do some testing if you need to ahead of time, but it is available in production as well.
Basically, this is a huge under the hood change that really has a number of benefits. What we're doing of of course, first and foremost, is we're improving that accessibility for students who may be using things like screen readers. And then very importantly, we're laying the necessary foundation to bring us into parity with classic classic quizzes to remove the nature of the LTI functionality and, of course, support more advanced features in the future as we continue to progress with new quizzes. I know here in the region, we're watching this one really closely. I will absolutely be sharing more information as we continue to iterate on new quizzes.
And then we have the assignment document processing app. So if you've been following along with this one, you may have heard the word plagiarism checker used in there as well or plagiarism processing. We've now called this assignment document processing because we wanted to make sure it was cognizant of all the use cases that this particular functionality allows. So at the moment, instructors often have to jump between their different tools when they're checking for things like plagiarism or writing quality, and it just adds all these extra steps into their marking workflow and ultimately slows them down. What we've done is we've created an LTI one point three integration that allows tools like Turnitin or Packback, if you're using that, to be added directly into the assignments area in Canvas.
So reports like your Turnitin similarity report now show up directly in SpeedGrader, which is a huge efficiency win. It creates that single view for your marking so instructors can quickly and easily see that originality risk score and student submission all in the one place, streamlining that plagiarism detection. And, of course, it provides transparency for students when they're on their when they're submitting as well because they'll be able to see that report. We are gonna continue to iterate on this as well. As I mentioned, plagiarism checking is one particular case, but we've heard a number of use cases around document checking or review where we see great opportunity with this particular function.
And as I called out at the start of this, we are making we're we're making improvements to rubrics. And so enhanced rubrics is now available in Canvas LMS for you to turn on. The traditional rubric experience was functional. It was great, but it lacked some of the flexibility and some of that modern interface that we need for more complex grading. It also didn't support things like some of the AI work that we're looking to do and some of the AI tools that you're looking to leverage when working in Canvas LMS.
We are transitioning to enhanced rubrics, which will be the default experience from December nineteenth. So there's a little bit of time. It's currently a feature option until the twenty second of March, so about a month. And from the twenty second of March until the end of the year, it will be on by default. This is a new experience for our Canvas users, but we know that it allows for easier editing of rubric criteria.
It also makes the descriptions much nicer and provides a cleaner UI. So this is really the foundation of the future work that we'll be doing in SpeedGrader. Beyond the immediate usability, we know that this is really gonna unlock a lot of heavy hitting features that we're excited to talk about later in the year, like self assessment, multiple rubrics, and then, of course, Ignite AI generator for rubrics that I just spoke about earlier. So in order to unlock a lot of our newer functionality that's coming up, enhanced rubrics does need to be turned on. And moving along to my last Canvas update, I did wanna call out all the great work that is happening in our student mobile app.
This is a huge place that our learners go whether we are actively pointing them there or not. And so the to do list functionality has had some significant improvements in mobile. It's been redesigned into a more unified view that now includes things like their assignments, any course, or even institutional events that need that that they need to be notified about, and, of course, all their personal tasks. This will all be in one place. And so it really is a smarter default view showing the last four weeks and their current week of learning.
So a really nice snapshot of where they are. There's also new filtering options in there so a learner can customize the date ranges or even specific courses. And this update also introduces a faster way to tick things off and mark items as done. There's an undo option as well. And one I'm really excited about, there's dark mode.
I think this has been a really huge request from a number of our learners, So really excited to make dark mode a supported function in here as well. So really exciting work happening in our mobile app. Now I do wanna spend a quick amount of time just revisiting Canvas career for those of you who are newer to these sessions. Last year, we introduced our newest Canvas experience called Canvas Career, and it's been built on the backbone of Canvas that you know and love. And this experience is specifically for professional learning use cases, which we know for many of you are top of mind.
It's purpose curated for adult learners and, of course, focuses on things like skill development and career advancement, really enabling industry readiness, upskilling, and, of course, improved business outcomes. So we know that the needs of an adult learner and a professional organization are very different to those in higher ed or in k twelve. They take a more skills based approach really to learning, and sometimes that stuff can be difficult to track in a more traditional LMS. So Canvas Career has been designed to really help address those things. It delivers a dynamic role based learning experience.
It also turns insights into action, so it's much easier to track progress, see gaps in learning, and, of course, track engagement trends in real time. And it really simplifies that learning cycle. No jumping between different tools or different LMSs in your organization and having an analytics dashboard in one place. It is an LMS that's really designed to help you go faster and develop those build those better learning outcomes, particularly for your adult learners. One of the biggest differentiators with our focus on skills is that Canvas Career will help you align content to in demand industry recognized skills so you can build content that is aligned to those frameworks where you need to.
And, of course, we've made it easier to measure and improve with all of that real time data. So you can see how learners are progressing. You can see where those learners are dropping off, and, of course, which programs are offering the most value. We wanna make sure that these skills aligned programs can be readily readily available within days rather than months that you can assign by role very quickly. So we've made sure that that type of functionality is here so that you can do those things far more quickly in a scalable way.
And we know that resources are tight when it comes to professional learning. So Canvas Career does use AI to take a lot of repetitive tasks off of your team's plate. It does have functionality like content creation to support some of those programs that you need to build. And, of course, things like student facing AI where they can take notes, they can highlight content, and really use and and respond to their learning in a way that makes sense for them. There is now a dedicated space in the community so that you can stay up to date on Canvas career.
If you are interested in following along or wanna know more, I encourage you to check out the community. We will start publishing release notes in the same way we do, for all of our other products, but I wanted to make sure you're aware that Canvas career is now in community as well. Alright. Now we're gonna look at some updates beyond Canvas LMS, the ones that really make teaching and learning smarter, more engaging, and, of course, more accessible. So I have a number of updates to share on Canvas Studio and some improvements we've made with the captioning process, some updates on Canvas catalog, the log login and enrollment processes, and then enhancements that we've made to awarding and sharing Parchment digital badges.
So firstly, for those of you who have been leveraging our video platform, Canvas Studio, we've updated the captioning functionality to provide you and your learners with an improved experience. We currently have auto generated captions in Studio, which is great, a big time saver, but they're not always a hundred percent accurate. And that then requires time reviewing every single line. And when you're dealing with a thirty minute or a sixty minute video just to find some typos, it can be a little bit tedious and not the best use of anyone's time. So we've introduced a feature that will identify and highlight suspected inaccuracies.
So users can now toggle a switch to only show lines with suspected inaccuracies in the caption editor. It's a massive time saver, which we know is really important and really helps reduce the time needed to review a video and then improve accessibility. We've seen the time saved and the improvements improve by an average of thirty percent for our current users. So it lets our creators really focus on the parts of the video that need that human touch rather than having to sit there and review the whole thing. Moving on to catalog, for those of you who are catalog users or just interested to know more, many of you are probably using various identity providers, and so having a one size fits all login screen doesn't always align to the complexity of your institution and the identity infrastructures that you have in place.
So we've introduced a custom authentication mode that allows you to manage multiple primary and secondary login methods. So if you're using things like a Canvas login plus a Google login simultaneously, you can now do things like display those multiple authentication providers. You we've also replaced the Canvas discovery page with a fully integrated catalog native experience. There's customizable button labels and instructional text. We've also added the ability to preview and publish changes in real time without needing developer assistance and really making sure that we enforce access to these settings through new permissioning and maintaining those audit trails for you with the full logging in details in your audit log.
So it creates a more maintainable and user friendly onboarding experience. Students are also no longer gonna be confused about which credentials they need to use to log in as the preview screen will clearly present the options that match your institution and your existing infrastructure. And another exciting piece of news in catalog, this is a big one that I'm actually really excited to share because we've heard this request. It's been a huge request from our region for a while now, is we now have program level enrollment setting. Huge win.
I'm excited to tell you more about it. So in a program based learning model, students are often enrolling in a certificate, then they have to track where to where else to enroll, and it can become very manual to have to individually join each course or unit. Sometimes they can miss what they need to be enrolling in, and it creates support tickets. It creates confusion. We've added a program level toggle that automatically enrolls a student in all of the source associated courses or units from the moment they join that program.
Huge win. It's a set and forget approach. It significantly reduces that admin burden not only for students, but for you and your support staff. And students will get that more consistent seamless journey from the start, really helping you support your goals around a reliable enrollment experience. So huge win for our region, huge win for our catalog users.
Excite I'm really excited that I get to share that one today. And let's move on to some updates on Parchment digital badges, formerly known as Canvas credentials for those of you who've been following along. So up until recently, awarding a badge was sometimes a manual process, and it didn't have a way of syncing up with our Canvas grade book, especially when using things like letter grades or percentages. So we've now have an enhanced integration that reflects Canvas grading natively, and it includes full support for letter grade awarding as well. It automates the moment of achievement because the badge now stays perfectly aligned with the grade book without a manual intervention.
So students can receive their badge or credential instantly, and instructors or educators can trust that that data is accurate because it's coming straight out of the grade book. There is an amazing blog post that we can share in the chat that goes through everything in far greater detail, everything you're needing to know if you are looking to explore this functionality or, of course, enable it between Canvas and Parchment digital badges. We've also made a small but mighty enhancement to the sharing controls in badges. So for those of you who aren't using Parchment digital badges as yet, when a badge is earned, a learner is given a public URL every time they're issued a badge, and now they have the ability to turn off that sharing capability. Some learners don't always wanna publicize every single badge that they earn, or they might share specific badges in specific places depending on where they are either in their learning journey or even in their career.
So this feature really provides a centralized kill switch for that sharing to help them move beyond needing to manage things at an individual level or sharing links out one by one, which can be really tedious. We wanna give a simpler way to manage how their credentials are more accessible and, of course, empowering learners with that fine tuned security that they need so that they can confidently navigate their learning journey and confidently share their credentials where they need to. And our last parchment update is we are continuing, of course, to review our product accessibility requirements and our ability to meet those requirements. Accessibility has definitely been a repeated theme in today's update. So as we continue to review those things, we've made some continued improvements to Parchment Digital Badges.
We are WCAG two point two double a compliant, and we wanna make sure that we stay there. So, of course, we wanna align with global WCAG standards. We wanna make sure we're providing an accessible experience both to our admins and to our learners to deliver a clearer and more readable interface that benefits everybody regardless of how they are accessing our platform. Okay. So we've covered a lot of the little granular product updates across our products, but I did wanna take some time to review what's still coming this year because there is still a lot going on.
At the end of last year, I shared these details on this slide about what we're actively working on and what we're looking to bring to you throughout this year. We have a number of pieces of work that are currently in our early adopter program, meaning we have something ready. We are validating it with our users. We are hearing feedback and incorporating that feedback to make sure that we are giving you something meaningful and something that will delight you in your workflows and make sure you're getting what you need in your teaching and learning experiences. We also have ideas that we're exploring and validating.
So things that we are thinking could be a good idea, but we really wanna hear more from you. And I'm excited to share some of those things in our upcoming sessions as we meet throughout the year. So just wanted to revisit what you can still expect to come and what we'll be sharing more info on in the coming weeks and months. And on that, I did wanna mention the new and next series. You're here today or watching a recording, on our new and next webinars.
We've made a little a few changes to the way that these are gonna work based on the amazing feedback, based on your amazing attendance. We really wanna make sure that you're getting the most out of these sessions. So what we'll be doing going forward with new and next is, if you recall last year, I was running quarterly webinars. So once every three months, I would run a session. I would tell you all the things that have happened in product land, all of the amazing work that we've done, but it was a lot.
And I heard you. I covered a lot of things in these sessions. And sometimes it wasn't always easy to digest that many updates in one place. So what we're gonna do going forward is we're actually gonna start publishing these quarterly blog posts that have all of the relevant updates, all of the linked resources ahead of time, which will be really nice, I'm sure, for many of you. At the moment, there is a blog post available on our product page with the January updates, many of which I've covered today.
But what we will still continue to do is run these amazing webinars because I'm really grateful to get in front of a number of you, and we don't always have the luxury of meeting face to face. So we wanna make sure that here in APAC, you are still getting all of the value out of these sessions. And so what we're gonna do going forward is continue to run these sessions, but we're also gonna include more targeted product sessions and include things like specific product demos, customer showcases. And I'm really excited to get to work with our customers more closely and really showcase the amazing work that they're doing. So moving forward throughout the year, you will still see our amazing webinars happening.
They're just gonna start to be a little more product focused, and hopefully help you see the value in the things that you're doing and and where we can help you with that. So on that note, I will mention that our next new and next webinar is actually gonna be happening next month. And we're specifically gonna look at Parchment digital badges and just how badging can be done effectively in Australia and New Zealand. We are going to have a chat during this session with our customers and also do a product demo specifically related to an Australian use case that I'm excited to share with you next month. We're also gonna be doing a specific session for Asia, so there'll be more details coming on that soon.
But for now, to sign up to this webinar, you actually need to go to our new and next registration page. At the moment, you're gonna probably see the registration for this session. This is gonna become our one stop shop. So this page is going to evolve and become a more meaningful place for you. So I encourage you to bookmark the new and next registration page because we will continue to update that page with the recordings.
So you'll see the recording from today's session when it's available in the coming days, and you'll see that page update to include the registration link for the next webinar. So you can stay up to date on what's happening in one place, hopefully making your lives a little bit easier. Please bookmark it. It's a great place to go back and look at some of our previous recordings as well because we will start making those available in a central spot. The registration page for the badges webinar will hopefully become available, in the next week or so, so you can certainly register for that one.
And another, announcement towards the end of last year, we shared that we are already thinking about CanvasCon twenty twenty six, and here we are in twenty twenty six. CanvasCon a and zed is happening in August on the twenty fourth and twenty fifth of August. We're heading back to Sydney, and we're so excited to see you all there when we get to that spot and that time, which will probably come very quickly. Now early bird tickets are going on sale next week at ten AM Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time, so I would suggest putting it in your calendar or bookmarking the registration page as well to avoid missing out on those early bird tickets. We are so excited to see you there.
We love these events. I love getting to interact with all of you when you come along and just, again, hearing the amazing things that are happening out there in our institutions. So, hopefully, we'll get to see you at CanvasCon ANZ in Sydney. And, of course, our amazing colleagues and customers in the Philippines, we will have details on CanvasCon Philippines coming soon as well. So stay tuned for that information.
Alright. As always, I wanna thank you for choosing to spend your time with Sarah, Aric, and I today. Thank you for being active in the chats and raising some amazing questions. We did cover a lot. I know it can be a lot to digest, so please reach out if you think of questions after the fact.
And before we wrap up today, as always, I would love your feedback. I really wanna make sure that these sessions are impactful for you and that you're getting what you need when you choose to spend your time with me. So if you can take a moment to complete our little survey, I would be very grateful for any feedback. But thank you again for joining us. It's a busy time of the year as it always is, but grateful that you made the time today.
And thank you to my amazing colleagues, Sarah and Aric, for manning the chats. It's been I see great combo happening, and I'm very grateful. So thanks again, everyone. Have a great afternoon, and I hope to see you all soon. Thanks, everyone.
