Shiren Vijiasingam, Chief Product Officer, InstructureCon 2025 Keynote

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? Good morning, everyone. Man, I need that hype guy all the time. Just have him follow me around. I hype everybody out. Hello, everyone. What a fantastic first day we had.

It was so exciting. Was one of my favorite events because it's a chance to meet so many of you in such a short window of time. So great conversations at the hack nights, at the receptions at the various places. Thank you all. We obviously talked about a couple of interesting, exciting things yesterday, and we've got so much more to tell you about today.

So I wanted to first start by regrounding ourselves in the mission that Steve laid out yesterday. Our mission is to help learners thrive in tomorrow's landscape by delivering an open, adaptable, and future ready ecosystem. Now yesterday, you heard about some of those realities Steve kind of outlined that are facing all of us. Right? So what does it really mean to be future ready? Being future ready means being ready to adapt to emerging technologies. We talked about the disruption from technologies like AI yesterday, and I'm gonna spend a little bit more time just to build on this a little bit.

But being future ready also means responding to the evolving needs of our learners. You heard Steve share, right, the half life of skills and how short that is. We're experiencing this accelerating shift for learners who are looking to leverage microlearning and continuously upscale upscale themselves to be able to showcase their abilities. We must enable those learners to respond to community, workforce, and societal changes around them in near real time. With the exponential pace of change, hitting that target is really hard to do with our existing structures.

And so the institutions and the businesses that can adapt quickly are the ones that are gonna thrive. We're not blind to the realities of your current climate. So being future ready also means acknowledging that the uncertainty of the macro trends puts this incredible pressure on all of you to balance this tension between increased expectations and scarcer resources. More than ever, how can technology bolster your team, not add to your plate? And how do we keep making each person's experience just a little bit better? So this year, InstructureCon is all about cutting through the legends and the hype to get to the brass tacks of what it will take for us to collectively set potential in motion. Let's start with AI.

I mentioned complexity and overwhelm yesterday, and let's take a look at the landscape to understand why that is. So first, you've got the large language, general purpose AI models, tools like ChatGPT. Now these models are incredibly powerful, incredibly versatile, but their focus tends to be broad. And so it is vital that they work closely with pedagogic experts to design for the specific needs of educators and students in mind. It can certainly feel like AI tools for education are emerging almost daily, and many of them offer really exciting targeted solutions.

Some of them we saw in the startup pitch competition that Kevin talked about, and exciting things for students and faculty. And these innovations can be genuinely useful. And at the same time, they may come with some trade offs. Another login to manage, another interface to learn, questions about accuracy, about long term support, about alignment with your institutional goals. And we know many of you are starting to explore building your own AI tools.

And for those of you with the resources, this approach is going to give you the highest degree of control and customization, aligning to your specific individual institutional values and priorities. And it is also a significant undertaking, as I'm sure you're encountering. It's gonna require substantial time, specialized expertise, and an ongoing investment to keep maintaining all of this. So with all of these AI technologies emerging, what you will ultimately need is that conductor, something to bring together the power of all of this AI and solve for the unique challenges of AI in the education space. First and foremost, you will need to feel confident in the AI tools you bring into your institution.

That means meeting the rigorous compliance standards of COPPA and FERPA and GDPR and all of the other acronyms that uphold your expectations for privacy, security, and the protection of intellectual property. You're gonna want facts about what models are being used. Where is your data going? How is it all being stored and maintained. The user experience needs to be very, very clear in indicating any place AI is being used or if something has been modified by AI. Transparency matters, And only with that confidence can you begin to advocate for responsible and widespread use of AI.

Now, itself, as you all, I'm sure, are familiar with intimately, is no small feat. Right? With so many tools available, often scattered and disconnected from your core systems, it can be hard to create consistency and even harder for your learners to know which tool do I use, when, where, how. And so to drive meaningful usage of the tools, your community is going to need more than just access. They're going to need awareness, they're going to need guidance, and they're going to need alignment. And more importantly, AI needs to be embedded directly into the workflows of you educators and of your learners because that is not the way other than to have it all be seamless.

And that is how adoption will become sustainable, which ultimately is what we're hoping is gonna get accomplished, which to set it on a path of educational value. Because when implemented thoughtfully, AI has the power to enhance those learning outcomes, to reduce all of those barriers to engagement, and to support all of you and your staff with greater efficiency. With a clear strategy, all of you can start to unlock transformative benefits that advance teaching, learning, and equity at scale. Ignite AI is going to be that conductor that brings all of this together to provide the structure, the alignment, and the purpose to the entire AI ecosystem. Now, Ignite AI is built on Bedrock, because I got a couple of questions about this yesterday.

So you'll benefit from secure enterprise gate AI foundation that ensures transparency, scalability, flexibility, all the things you need to meet your diverse institutional needs. And Ignite AI is designed to bring AI directly into the flow of teaching and learning. So no extra tabs, no separate logins, no fragmentation, just smart accessible tools embedded directly into the systems your institution already uses and trusts. And then I'm gonna talk about what this brings me to next, which is a critical point. Right? Undeniably, AI is impacting how we learn, its impact on the world.

However, it's also going to change the approach to education overall. Not just how we deliver the evaluation of learning, but how that learning is structured over a lifetime. This isn't new. It's been something that we've talked about a little bit. But by and large, we've continued to sort of get away with this episodic journey of learning.

But AI is shifting the landscape in a way that makes the one and done learning untenable. Because tomorrow's world is going to demand new skills at an increasing rate. We have been serving organizations across higher ed, across government, across corporate who are already embracing this trend. But we've hit this inflection point. Increasingly, learners are looking for an education that fits their needs based on their roles, based on their departments, based on the skill gaps that they have, and they are looking for assurances that it is tied to real world in demand competencies that are going to fuel their growth.

You all will need a way to consistently map training and learning to skills and outcomes so that collectively we can stay ahead of the evolving job demands and close all of those capability gaps. In this fast paced economy, you're going to need to deliver a much higher volume of learning programs, much, much faster. That means a lot more creating, a lot more updating of courses, often across teams, across roles, across locations. And so to keep up, you're going to need a scalable content system and smart automation so that you're not constantly starting from scratch. And many organizations still rely on a patchwork of solutions.

Right? Manual processes, spreadsheets anyone? Siloed tools, outdated systems to track and manage things? So essential insights like program progress and student engagement that create these administrative headaches are are challenging, and at scale, it makes it impossible to answer questions like, is this working? We are now ready to introduce to you Canvas Career. Canvas Career is an all new Canvas experience. It's designed for career learners like those at Intellvio or for continuing education programs in higher ed institutions. It's skills based. It's AI powered.

It's learner led. And because it is built on the exact same Canvas foundation, it is seamless and trivial to move from one to the other. And you will have the flexibility at any point in time choose the experience that fits your needs as an institution, and you can go back and forth. Canvas Career is going to enable you to do things like assigning learning based on roles, departments, skill gaps, to ensure it's really tied to these real world in demand competencies, just like Shauna described. And learners don't just complete modules.

They actually build skills that they can carry into their current or into their future roles. And smart automation built throughout will help you quickly and easily build modular courses and programs that will constantly adapt to the shifting needs so that administrators don't have to spend a lot of their time reinventing the wheel every single time. Delivery of these programs is automated, self paced, consistent, and always aligned to your institutional needs. Now, in order for you to do effective learning, you have to understand impact. And so Canvas Careers is also going to provide you with some real time dashboards that are going to surface progress, engagement, and skill growth.

Okay. So as we talk about all of those exciting things in AI and in Canvas Career, we know that the foundation is in education. And all of the great exciting things that you saw in Canvas Career are things that we could pull from to drive improvements in the core Canvas experience. So we would like to first talk about how you can get involved in Canvas Career. Right? So if you are thinking about participating in an early adopter, here's another QR code for you to stay connected to it.

You can think about how you want to use this for the realities of today's workforce. I'll give it a second. And we'll talk about how we've pulled from Canvas Career and driven what is improving in core Canvas. So as I said in the beginning, we know there continues to be a lot of work on your plate with the day to day that we can improve. And so we've continued to invest in major improvements in Canvas and Mastery and in Parchment.

And things like that improved learner experience you saw in Canvas Career, we can bring that and are bringing it into Canvas with a modernized and simplified interface, with a refreshed landing space and simplified content navigation, with course level content and learning progression. And because every learner is unique, you heard us talk about this idea of differentiation tags, we wanna be able to create a way to differentiate learning at scale, whether it's cohort based learning or asynchronous learning. So each of these unique differentiation tags can be manually assigned by you or done by AI, and it will allow you to create as many private visible only to the instructor views of students that you can use to do things like customizing instruction for a specific group of learners or creating specific management workflows for just those groups for whatever educational use cases you can come up with. We also know that it's important to connect skills and competencies into continuing ed. And so we're bringing in the integrated portfolio that builds on all of the great work that we've done across all of our previous portfolio products.

And it's going to create the ability for educators to assign portfolios at a course level or even multi course for a multi course evaluation. And it's going to enable learners to be able to build their own learning stories, whether that's an academic learning story or a career oriented one. And all of that will be exportable evidence of their accomplishments. And it's not just the shiny stuff, because we know accessibility is a top concern for you. So I'm happy to share that as of this month, all of the Canvas products now globally meet a WCAG two point two AA standard.

So that's one level up. It's exciting. It's super exciting, and it's it's one level up from the two point one minuteimum standard because we wanna push the bar on that. And by this time next year, all of our other products globally will also be conformant to that standard. And we realize that accessibility of your software, which is solely our responsibility, is only half of the equation.

Right? The other half of the equation is all those courses that have been copied every year for the last four, five, six years. And so we're also gonna be introducing course level content accessibility remediation tools for you, which will soon include AI suggested remediation which will include AI suggested remediation in all text. So stay tuned for more on content remediation for you. So that's the stuff that we've done. For a sense of where we're going to go from here, I invite you to come find us at our educational moments of the future experience, where you can see some of the future things that we're thinking about.

And if you're craving more info, because I know we threw a lot at you, there are so many great opportunities for you to dig in even further. So for all of you nerds who want to get under the hood, you can come to the platform session with our CTO. You can get hands on with Canvas Career in a workshop. You can go deep on all of the product changes and updates in new and next, and you can get inspired on the future of AI in our super session. So everyone, together, let's set potential in motion. Thank you, and enjoy the rest of the day.