Driving AI-powered, human-led support at scale

Bifröst University is Iceland’s only fully online higher education institution. In 2024, this already pioneering institution widened its appeal even further, by becoming publicly funded and thereby reducing its annual costs to roughly $600 USD per student. This policy shift, coupled with the university’s flexible learning model, led to a near tripling of applications in just one year.

While this surge in student enrollment was embraced by the teams at Bifröst, they were faced with the challenge of how to continue delivering personalised, high-quality learner support on a larger scale. The solution? Intelligent Insights by Instructure.

María Berndsen, an educator and administrator at Bifröst, first encountered Intelligent Insights at CanvasCon Europe in Barcelona. Having been a Canvas LMS user at multiple institutions, she recognised the untapped potential of the platform at Bifröst, where Canvas was primarily used to power better remote learning. At the conference, she stumbled into a session on Intelligent Insights “by accident” , a moment that would prove transformative for the institution.

Inspired by what she’d heard, María arranged for a demo at Bifröst  through her Customer Success Manager at Instructure. The platform's ability to provide real-time, actionable data on student engagement, course readiness, and feedback patterns immediately impressed faculty and leadership.

Although María led the implementation largely on her own, she was able to kickstart usage by working with the Instructure Services team and training four key users: two student counsellors, one teaching advisor, and herself. The team focused first on student performance monitoring and course readiness, using tools such as:

Intelligent Insights has helped improve the student experience in two ways. Firstly, student support teams can now identify disengaged students by Day 9 of each 6-week module - without waiting on IT to extract and consolidate data manually. This means swift and tailored support for each student, to help get them back on track.

"With Intelligent Insights, our student support teams can spot disengaged learners by Day 9 of each 6-week module - no more waiting on manual data pulls from IT."

Secondly, Intelligent Insights enables the team to monitor faculty issues, such as missing or misconfigured assignments, delayed feedback, or grading inconsistencies. This means better quality assessment for the student, while also keeping an eye on faculty wellbeing. One example involved a faculty member falling behind on grading due to a personal emergency. The system flagged the issue, enabling administrators to step in and communicate with students proactively.

Despite it being early days, Bifröst is already seeing measurable benefits.

María’s focus for the next term is on scaling course readiness monitoring and expanding usage across more staff, and continuing collaboration with Instructure Services Team to improve Icelandic language support and fine-tune prompt usage.