Looking Back: Musings from Instructure's Learning Strategy Team on InstructureCon 2026

I’m still trying to catch my breath from my first InstructureCon. While I imagined what the week might be like, it really took me being there to fully understand the energy that you feel when seeing so many passionate educators convene and share ideas (not to mention Louisville is such a charming city). While it was just a few weeks ago, many of the sessions I attended and conversations I had with educators are still buzzing around in my head. What an amazing experience, and I’m glad I had the foresight to bring a few notebooks, as each of them is completely filled. 

However, I couldn't attend every session and therefore asked our wonderful Learning Strategy Team to share some highlights of their InstructureCon experience and the big topics from their discussions with attendees that educators and learners are facing today.

Melissa Loble: Chief Academic Officer

1. Educators are looking for ways to deliver experiential education at scale in traditional AND non-traditional programs. AI is unlocking content replicability through scenarios and simulations, but doing this meaningfully across various programs is still new and a challenge we need to work together to solve.
2. We cannot discount the social aspect of learning, especially in a world where social capital unlocks pathways for employment, growth, and personal development. Educators can be powerful combaters of isolation as long as we, too, actively and positively engage with one another and our communities. Caring for each other should not go underrated.
3. Change doesn’t just come from reinvention; it comes from our ability as education leaders to build the right amount of resilience and an experiential mindset. Too much resilience can lead to disengagement. Tackling too big a project can cause it to stall. Tiny experiments allow us to engage our human sides in inspiring and impactful change.

Ryan Lufkin: VP, Global Learning Strategy

1. Simply purchasing enterprise-wide AI licenses isn’t enough for universities or school districts. Lack of training for educators in applying AI has led to widely inconsistent adoption and levels of trust in these innovative tools and, hence, wildly inconsistent expectations and experiences for students. Innovation is happening in pockets by educators experimenting on their own.  
2. As we move into the “Agentic AI” phase, moving beyond the simple focus on AI as a threat to academic integrity, educators are hungry for examples of applying AI in the classroom to improve student engagement, evolve the learning experience, and positively impact learning outcomes. 
3. Student data privacy remains a primary concern for educators and administrators in an environment where students may not be as concerned about, or fully understand, the threats to that privacy. 

Jody Sailor: Sr Academic Strategy and Innovation Director

1. Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) drive better outcomes for all learners. Institutions are shifting from compliance-driven accessibility to design-first inclusion while also using UDL principles. They're building predictable, consistent course templates that reduce cognitive load and work better for every student.
2. Assessment systems drive real instructional change. Institutions are moving from data collection to data action. They're using integrated assessment systems and formative data to drive targeted interventions, show student growth, and engage in professional conversations centered on impact rather than activity.
3. Effective technology is about depth, not breadth. Institutions are consolidating tools and maximizing existing platforms. They're auditing for ROI, eliminating redundancy, and going deeper with fewer systems. In K-12, districts are moving away from the quantity of screen time and toward the impact of technology use. Rather than asking "How much time are students spending on devices?" districts are asking "When students are on devices, are they learning better?" Their focus is on the right tool, at the right time, for the right purpose to drive real outcomes. 

Tracy Weeks: Sr Education Policy & Strategy Director

1. Educators aren’t waiting for approval to innovate in their classrooms. Through our Academic Excellence Awards, we celebrated three colleagues who saw the need to evolve learning processes and tools to ensure all learners had the best opportunity to succeed. They identified gaps, built pilot programs, and found success within their institutions; all based on the belief that students learn best when they have the right access to tools and are able to express themselves. 
2. Experimentation isn’t stopping either, but we need better means to implement at scale. Similarly, many educators are experimenting with new methods to better prepare today’s learner for the jobs of tomorrow. What we still fundamentally lack is a means to share successful experiments so more educators become aware. 

Simone Ravaioli: Principal, Global Learning Ecosystem

1. The real issue is trust. It's tempting to think the fix is a better-looking transcript or a richer badge, but the design session with registrars, credentialing leads, and employers pointed somewhere else. Records fail because they're self-asserted, unofficial, or missing the basics that make them believable: a clear issuer, real metadata, and a working link to what the credential actually means. Until a record carries that, it's just a claim. The unit of value is a verified credential that a decision-maker can trust at a glance, and everything else we build has to serve that.
2. Shared language has to come before the technology. When one campus calls a skill "project management" and another calls the same thing "Agile," transferability breaks and trust go with it. Attendees were clear-eyed about AI's role here. Its best job is mapping a described skill to an existing, agreed-upon one, not inventing new skills on the fly. Educators want us to build a foundation that explains to AI why a skill has value, rather than asking AI to decide.
3. The learning and employment record is a process and a digital wallet. A comprehensive learner record has real standards and schemas. The LER is the container that pulls everything into one place. That distinction reframes our role: institutions remain the trusted issuers, and the network's job is to translate value between systems so a record can travel from a campus to an employer's hiring system.

Mary Styers: Director, Evidence & Learning Strategy

1. Evidence increasingly matters in procurement. Accessibility and Data Security agreements are “table stakes” in edtech procurement across K-12 and Higher Ed right now. Administrators won’t support tools that do not meet this basic criterion. Additionally, both requested that companies share usage data and participate in pilot/research programs, showing evidence of both usage and positive impact, to receive continued funding and adoption. For AI tools, they had additional criteria and words of caution. Both sectors desire transparency in how teachers remain in the loop, particularly as it relates to AI grading/feedback. Administrators also cautioned companies about AI fatigue, noting that companies need to name and provide evidence for specific outcomes tied to their solutions, or risk losing educators' interest in trying these new solutions.
2. AI research, in particular, is a popular topic. Given the lack of rigorous AI research studies (Fesler, Martinez Claeys, Agnew, Loeb, 2026) and educator concerns around AI in classrooms, particularly around critical thinking loss, overreliance, and academic integrity issues (Instructure, 2026), it was not surprising to see a packed room eager for the research basis behind Instructure’s AI solutions. Our session on Ignite AI research studies had standing room only. Educators, parents, and communities are increasingly demanding proof that AI positively supports teaching and learning and are eager to use research frameworks (e.g., ESSA tiers) when reviewing and comparing research studies.

If you were at InstructureCon, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you found compelling, surprising, or even controversial. Follow us on social media and share your experiences there. See you in Cleveland in 2027!