The Instructure Community is Writing the IgniteAI Playbook, One Prompt Party at a Time
The best ideas about how to use the Instructure IgniteAI Agent during the last few months haven't come from a product team or a webinar. They came from a Thursday call where 19 educators showed up, opened their real courses, and started building on each other's prompts in the chat. Someone tried a course review. Someone else asked whether the same prompt could find at-risk students. By the end, the room had done what Community does best; they showed up curious and left inspired.
What a Prompt Party actually is
A Prompt Party is a live, low-key session inside the Instructure Community where educators open their real Canvas by Instructure courses and show the prompts they're using with the IgniteAI agent. We skip slides and scripts and focus on two or three demos and a lot of questions. It's a standing invitation for educators to bring their own prompt and test it in front of people who are figuring it out right alongside them.
The premise is simple: hand the mic to the people doing the work, and see what happens.
The room keeps showing up
In practice, a Prompt Party looks like a string of demos worth stealing. Some weeks the crowd is bigger and the demos run long. Some weeks it's smaller and the conversation goes deeper.
As such, the Community Prompt Library has filled up just as fast. Rick Upchurch from Belhaven University challenged all 10 instructional designers on his team to post a prompt, and most already have. May's top-voted prompt went to Christopher Gaudreau from Bay Path University for a one-sentence fix that adds proper headers to layout tables, clearing an accessibility issue that used to eat whole afternoons.
What presenters said about the prompts they built
Brandon Mitchell, Director of Instructional Design and Technology at Hinds Community College, handed the agent an entire course and asked it to review the whole thing the way an experienced instructor would mentor a first-timer. The report came back long and specific: missing rubrics, unclear submission guidelines, and places to strengthen discussion.
"The amount of time that a designer would have to go through with a checklist to go through this course line by line, page by page. Saves an amazing amount of time."
Brandon Mitchell, Hinds Community College
Kyle Cole, a senior solutions engineer at Instructure who also teaches as an adjunct, built a prompt he runs every semester: find students scoring below 70 percent, identify the concepts they're struggling with, and draft personalized outreach to each group. What he took from it wasn't only about the students.
"It's a great way to call yourself out and give yourself a pulse check. Sometimes it's not a student problem, it's a Kyle problem."
Kyle Cole, Instructure
Paula Eure, a Canvas admin at Belhaven University, shared the smallest change with the biggest payoff. She'd been starting prompts with "can you," and the agent kept handing the work back to her. So she switched it up.
"Things have been working a lot better since I'm now saying 'help me' instead of asking it if it can do something."
Paula Eure, Belhaven University
Try the IgniteAI Agent free through June 30
The free period for the IgniteAI agent ends June 30, 2026 for customers in the US and September 30, 2026 for customers outside the US. Until then, you can open your own course and run the kinds of prompts these educators demoed, including:
- the full course reviews
- study guides
- differentiated reading passages
- outreach to students who are falling behind
You can check out our prompt library here to get started. Everything you create with the Agent before the free trial ends stays yours.
You can also join us and get in on the action live; we’ve got sessions scheduled on June 11 and June 18, with more sessions on the books through July. Bring a prompt you're proud of, or one that flopped and you can't figure out why; both are welcome.
Come curious, and leave with something you'll use in your own classroom.
See you in the Community!
