July Our Expertise Webinar Recording
Thank you all for taking the time to come and let us share with you some of the work that's being done by the custom development team here at Instructure. The three members that are going to be presenting today are Kellen Hanson, who's going to be taken over in the introduction here. Notin, who's our solutions architect that's going to be talking about the process by which we go about building custom applications and structure. And I'm Jason Rictor. I'll be going through some of the portfolio of projects that we have here. And yeah, thanks for joining, and let's go ahead and get this going, Kelly, I'm going to transition it over to you.
Awesome. Thanks, Jason. Yes, so before we dive into deeply, we do have the Q and A available. So please ask any questions or share any thoughts as we kind of go through this, we don't want to miss any of that, and I will be monitoring that as we get into some of the projects that Jason and Noden are going to highlight in a moment, so I wanted to make that point. For today's agenda, we're just gonna kinda go over kinda an introduction as to why this is kind of a focus for infrastructure doing custom development and you're going to see the word CDB everywhere because that's what we so lovingly call it here.
Is Cdev by instructure. We're going to analyze the Cdev process. That's my nodens here. Really excited to hear what he has to share. And then custom innovation highlights portfolio, so basically going to show some of the innovation that we've done.
So going on today we are here to talk about CEDF, custom development by instructure. As we go through this, I'll describe a little bit about the history of what's gone on, but you can kind of see here some of the renderings. I just like to start off with this because I think this illustrates really quickly that there are things that are being built by institutions. Just living right inside of Canvas, and they're taking full advantage of things like dashboards and just getting a lot of the data or aligning outcomes to badges and different things that we're gonna talk through, and I think this is just a quick snapshot of that. But the history as to why this all exists, obviously, Most people know instructure because of Canvas.
That's our cornerstone product that is kind of what put us on the map and we've grown substantially. And as we've grown, we've also seen a lot of asks from our customer base. And we know that time has gone on and more things are being asked of us, we know that not everything fits into one nice pretty little picture. Sometimes we need to customize a solution to fit an institution's needs. So, that's kind of where Instructure came up with the custom development services portion of things.
So, we like to look at it as we have these SaaS offerings, these existing software as a service solution and then we also have custom development services as a possible solution to close any other gaps that might exist in your technology. And when we say CDA over custom development, that can include a number of things from. You can see here, user interface design, actual software development, custom applications, something that we're really seeing and influx in is also people wanting to look at integrations and custom learning tools. So everything in this kind of realm of what you would typically look to custom development shop in your neighborhood to help you build, whether that's a mobile application or doing some UI design we can help with And the reason we're able to help with that is because we've allocated some resources to that. So this is the grader team, so you'll notice you'll recognize three of the faces from this that are on the call today.
Also have a number of other people to help support us in this endeavor. And really, I'm excited to hear what Noten has to share today because I think this team does an incredible job once we get through kind of the introduction of the project to myself with Jason, what we're able to do is involve the solutions architects and say, hey, let's talk about how this is going to really be implemented on campus. Who else are the stakeholders involved in this decision? And really get into the technical side of the build, so that's kind of what the greater team has been doing for the past little while, especially since August when Jason and I started in this So moving on, one of the things that we have definitely noticed in the higher ed space is a lot of trends, a lot of things happening since twenty twenty. One of those things being a huge influx in the number of available software pieces that we have on campus. So I think this is a really good illustration of what seems to feel like on a lot of campuses as we have these conversations.
And I think Noden could attest to the idea that we get a lot of questions around how can we integrate Canvas or our LMS with our SIS or with Workday or with, you know, any number of tools that might exist, whether that has an out of the box integration through the LTI, you know, library or if it's something we need to customize for the institution. And sometimes those things fit together really nicely, sometimes they can be somewhat frustrating and not fit together so nicely. And that's where team with Noten and Tyler Wade and Jagger can step in and really help solve some of these issues, because as we know one of the things I think at the administration level I think if we were to pull administrators across the map, they would say probably the most frustrating parts of anything in software is software evaluations, going through the process of either writing an RFP or creating an evaluation, rubric or something like that, because software changes, technology changes and we understand that that that has to happen, but that can be a frustrating point at some time. An additional piece that we're seeing a new influx in and I think a resurgence in is around this competency based education. So CPE is another trend that we've seen come up.
And I don't think this is so much as a trend in terms of a flash in the pan, but I think this is actually an evolution in where education has wanted to go for a while, but it's been somewhat of there's no standardized way of approaching this, right? And I think that that's something that we're also seeing in a trend in today's post-twenty twenty market And because of all of these different issues and different things, we've actually been able to build a lot of software for a lot of our partners. So, we've actually done over four hundred projects, or work with over four hundred customers on a number of projects, but been able to really work with them. And because of these distinct needs, we've actually been able to come up with a really robust amount of experience and insight and be able to share that's one thing, again, I know I keep alluding to it and it's because I'm kind of teasing the introduction of no, not a little bit, but it's because when we involve our Solutions architects, it's really incredible to see their experience and their expertise in this area really help institutions vet out the way they're looking and thinking of solving problems with technology, because there are times and this happens frequently where we jump on a call an institution says, hey, we have this budget to do this thing, but then as soon as we start asking the why, there's a few decisions that need to be made internally to really drive change versus just creating excuse me, creating software for the sake of creating software, but actually what are we driving towards and change? And that's where I really appreciate the solutions architects But in addition to that, we also have this plethora of partners that we can leverage in speaking with and connecting you to and talking through how this would work. And I know we have a lot of insight into that. And Jason, you were a partner before you were an employee here, right? I was a very early customer of Instructure and adopting Canvas.
Yeah. And the thing I think as a customer I appreciated the most and that tried to bring with me in my almost nine years here at the company is that I was a director of a distance program. We were migrating off of Angel. We were moving to Canvas brand new LMS that not a whole lot was known about it at the time. It was still very new, but we just saw something special in what Canvas was doing.
But for my ideas for the distance program and especially for the evaluation and accreditation process that was coming up, You know, there were a lot of people that had already invented the wheel, and I didn't need to reinvent it. And thankfully, Instructure acted as the conduit. And from my standpoint, that's one of my favorite things to do in the role that Kellan and I have now, where we can talk to you about a project that you want to do. Odds are, we know somebody who's already done that, and we are very happy to connect you. I've got tons of colleges that I've been getting on the phone with, recently out in California with this competency based education.
Everybody seems to be at a different phase of how this is getting rolled into their institution. And I love getting people on the phone with each other and kind of being that person and just sitting back and listening to conversations about, you know, how to blow away the Carnegie unit, which we'll talk about some of the tools we've built to assist with that later in the presentation. But again, what separates us too, as a development shop, is, yes, there's lots of places to get custom apps built. But Noten, as one who will walk you through the process here and other solutions architects, Kelly and I are just so impressed every time we watch them talk with people because they've done educational apps. And these things with educational institutions, higher eds, universities, so many times that often things that may be missed or not thought about at the institution, these guys have already worked through that.
And so they know how to address it. They know the questions ask, and it can really refine the process for the institution themselves. And so again, just a a example of how this works and then Noten to walk us through the process Something incredibly common for Callan and I is we'll get a very high level ask, because somebody will say, hey, we need a dashboard to help us intervene with at risk students, and of course our first inclination is, what does that mean exactly? What do you consider at risk? What kind of data are you looking for on the dash support, is this exclusively from Canvas, is this from other systems? And Noden's going to walk you through the process by which our solutions architects take a high level ask like that and work through the process to build a custom app. Yeah. Thanks, Jason.
Thanks, Cohen. Yeah. I think it's it's kind of an interesting situation for our team in the custom dev group especially the solutions architects and customer experience because we, as kind of a unit, have a lot of experience in education, I myself, have a history in education as an education technologist, did a PhD at C boulder and while I was there, we were transitioning to Canvas, and so I was tasked with helping faculty make that transition from D2L, And so that was a really great experience, understanding Canvas from a very, you know, from a user centric side. I also taught in the classroom used Canvas, and also was a graduate student, so I used it from the student side as well. And then I was also an academic knowledgeist or educational technologist at the University of California.
And in Santa Cruz and there, I was working heavily with Canvas as well. So coming to this role and structure, we are really focused on the user. We're really focused on user driven design, especially in figuring out knowing that we have really great products as Kellin went over, but there's not gonna be always an out of box solution to solve a specific problem. So this prompt that, you know, Jason put up this idea that we need a data dashboard to help us intervene with at risk students, we might take that if if Jason or Kellan comes to our team and says, hey, we have a customer who has this problem. So we're going to firstly kind of go through and I can go through kind of the high level process and then I'll dig a little deeper into each of those using this prompt as sort of a model.
So we might come with this idea of a process of first, we're gonna understand what the objectives and goals of our customer are. So we might have this prompt that, okay, we need a data dashboard to help us intervene with at risk students, but what does that actually mean? Are we just wanting to get data to report on these at risk students are we wanting our instructors to be able to monitor these students and help them in certain pain points or are we actually wanting to reduce the the number of ask at risk students we have is that based on assessment? Is that based on course completion? Is that based on GPA? So we really want to dig in and define what the objects and the goals of the customer are, and we really want to start with the user first. As an institution as a customer, what is it that you define as that object objective and goal? And from that, we then Don't go and do our developers and figure out, okay, here's a technological solution that'll solve this, here's a dashboard, go for it, we really focus on user personas. So again, that idea of user driven solution design, we want to know how individual users are going to be using this solution. So whether that's an instructor who's going to have a dashboard within their course so they can monitor how students are doing completing assessments, whether that's an administrator who's going to need to be seeing a institution wide dashboard to report on data so that they can use it outside of Canvas, or whether that's a student that potentially is going to be able to monitor their own progress in this particular dashboard.
We want to understand how each user is going to be using a particular solution. And so from user personas were actually then able to create these user stories. So that might be a familiar how a particular user will use something in order to accomplish something creating a user story will give us then the basis for what we need to take to our development team to actually act on this and create a solution that works for everybody. And from that we'll actually then be able to figure out what the requirements to create those user stories in the solution would be. And so this might be actually where those requirements often come the beginning of a technological solution, you might say, hey, we need to do X, Y, and Z, this solution needs to do this.
We actually bring that a little farther down say, hey, let's figure out what our users need to do and then from that we'll create those business requirements and then we'll actually create a document that will list all of those requirements, and then we can actually execute on that solution and bring that to our development team. So it's This is a very dynamic process with how our sort of solution development goes So if we kind of dig into that objectives and goals first, we might say, hey, so there's a dashboard that you want created, but why are we doing this? And we often find that customers have this objective or goal in mind, but they and there's an understanding of why we're doing this, but not always all of the points that lead up to exactly why that is. So we first ask that question why are you doing this? And then we wanna know exactly how we'll know if we're successful. So again, if that's just we can get this data outside of Canvas so we can use so our admins can use it or we have actual metric that shows that students are improving in a course over a particular time frame, then that might be a metric for how we know that this solution is successful. And then we often do ask this we have an idea of a one thing test.
So we might look at a solution, look at the objectives and goals of that solution, say, if there were one thing that we could say is successful for the solution, what would that be? And that really helps us and our customers kind of refine what can potentially be a really broad and far reaching solution down to one thing. We want our students are to be successful and of course, right? So how that metric gets measured by the student, by the instructor, by the admin, we can suss all that out further down the road, but that one thing to us we really drill down on that just to make sure we're not deviating away from that main goal or objective when we start to scope out a solution. And that kind of brings us to a user persona. As I mentioned, we are really focused on bringing the user to the forefront of our solution design. So we want to understand what value does this person seek.
And we look at each user we're focused not only on the end user, but all the middle users as well. So we wanna know how an admin might approach the solution. We want to know how a teacher might approach the solution a student, if it's a k through twelve space, how an observer or parent might as well, what is that job that person's job function? This is gonna change greatly from how a student is interacting with a solution to how an admin is interacting with a solution and those are going to be very different experiences. So we wanna make sure that the user interface, the user experience aligns with that particular user's not only how they're interacting with the solution, but also their job function. And how that person behaves, how an admin is going to behave in a solution is gonna be very than how a student behaves with a solution.
So we might think that an admin might be just pulling data from a dashboard in an admin portal, and they're just a CSV is fine, and they're just taking that information outside of Canvas. To do something else with it. Whereas a student, they might, if we're designing something for a solution that a student is interacting with, they might be accessing it via their mobile device. And so we want to have a very different experience depending on how that user is behaving with a solution. So we take all of that into account when we're thinking about user personas.
And from that, we're then able to create user stories and you might be familiar with agile software development, but this is kind of the bread and butter of our solution development where we think of as a student, I can interact with a solution so that I can see how my performance changes over time. So we'll create user stories for each one of the users and iterate through all of the potential uses that each user may have, and we get those all down on paper, so then we can go back and understand all of the requirements. And when we kind of drill down into figuring out what that looks like, we want to make sure that we've captured all of those user stories so that when we get into the business requirements and say, hey, how does a user navigate the solution and how does the system function? And what is how is that workflow implemented and what limitations exist in that solution? We can go back to the user stories for each of those and say, hey, great. This particular user is going to be mostly, say, interacting with the solution on a mobile device. So, hey, what limitations are we gonna run into there? And we can really outline each of those business requirements and get them really dialed so that we understand how that how the user is gonna be successful when they're interacting with a solution.
We don't wanna just create something that, you know, meets that initial goal without it actually functioning well for each user. So we will work really closely with a customer when we're defining these business requirements and review those with those with the customer before that gets sent over to a project manager and gets put into development to make sure we've thought through each individual user story and gotten each business requirement dialed for each of those users. And so once we are able to do that and we document those requirements, this is something for example what a, this is what a customer would see potentially for a given solution. We wanna understand exactly how that solution is gonna function. We're gonna try and take into consideration every user story that we talked about and then make sure that those requirements map back to that user story.
And then we're gonna talk through these with the customer to make sure we haven't left any gaps. For a particular user and make sure that the customer is getting absolute value out of the solution for every user that's going to be with it. And we also want this solution to be able to be used far into the future as well. So we wanna be able to leave room for future development. We wanna leave room, you know, as Jason and Kellan mentioned for other puzzle pieces to potentially fit into that.
Solution as well. And so we then can when we get these business requirements dialed, documented, we can then send it to our project manager or get it into development and really execute on that. And when it moves into that execution stage, we kind of step back as the solutions architecture team, but we're still working with the project manager and the development team closely as they work to develop that solution. And we are constantly talking with them about how things are going, making sure we're refining any questionable requirements, we may need to find some user stories as we move through that development process, but we're making sure again that we're putting the user first with this solution development and even when that passes back to the customer for user acceptance testing, and even after it has been that solution has been turned on in a production environment and the user is actually an institution is using that solution. We are open to feedback.
We want to hear how things are working and make sure that we can fill any gaps or make any changes to make sure that that solution is gonna work well in going forward into the future. So kind of to reiterate, I went through that process really quickly, but we are really focused on user driven solution design. We, when you first come to Jason and Kellan with project idea and then one of the solution architects from our team gets pulled in, this is really kind of, it's gonna be all about you from the start to the end. And we're going to really work with you to define those objectives and goals, we're going to make sure that every user is accounted for and we understand exactly how they're going to be using that solution. We're gonna create those user stories and this is kind of a spot where you may not even as the customer may think about all of the users that may be interacting with that solution and that's where we come in to kind of help iterate through those ideas.
We're going to define those business requirements and go over them with you in the documentation process to make sure we've captured everything filled in any gaps and then we're going to execute and get that project on the road for development and into your instance quickly as possible to make sure that you're able to use it and then we're gonna be in it for the long haul, right? We're gonna be there to help in terms of support as that process continues as you start to refine use of that solution, and then what we find actually pretty often is that when a customer has a custom solution created that they're coming back to us to enhance that particular solution or add additional components to it because we are trying to create something that fits perfectly into this use case, this niche that you have need for custom development, and what we find is a lot of customers realize hey, wow, this is fantastic, this is doing exactly what we want. Let's make it even better, and we're excited about those kinds of projects that we can iterate on and really refine, enhance, and make, you know, work well for you. So that's what we're all about is making the technology work for you and that's what my team strives to do. So I'll hand it back over to you, Jason. As you jump into some more examples.
That was great note and thank you so much. Yes, so now I get the fun part of actually showing you all some of the projects that have been launched. And again, I want to start them just the way we start. Again, Kalen and I are the first points of contact for any of this. And one of the first things we're going to do is like, what's the problem? What do we need to do to solve? What's the issue here? And here's a very, very common one that comes up.
We need a way for our teachers to push midterm and final grades, and in this case, they needed last activity dates back to a student information system, and the admins needed a way to be able to see who hadn't published the grades yet. Student information systems, again, I come, I have a background that transcends K12 to higher ed, I've seen a lot of SIS out there. Some of them are nice to plug and play with. Some of them are a little bit proprietary, so it takes a little bit of work to be able to make those integrations happen. In particular, when certain policies and rules require things that go beyond just say a grade publish of a final one that's there.
And so again, what the mock up looks like here, and this is screenshot of what ultimately came to fruition, was that our team was able to document exactly what needed to be done. Thankfully, all of the data was already in Canvas, It was nothing new APIs needed to be created for. And so the grade was able to come up, put inside of an instructor's course, could select there the midterm or the final, had last activity dates, which could be altered if there was something that we wanted to do because, you know, somebody came in person or whatever the case was. The final grade could be checked from inside Canvas and then published to the student information system that was there. I would say a large portion of the calls that Helen and I take involve student information systems, because we need some kind of data exchange, either going, you know, one direction or bidirectionally.
This does make up a lot of what we do, and so we're pretty good at in fact, we've got standard questionnaire at this point. We've seen so many questions about SIS integrations. We kind of know what to ask at this point very rarely do we find things that go outside of that? So another example of things we've done. This came up in chat just a minute ago. So, the question that came up here is we need an easier way to lock blueprint object in courses when content items since locking each item individually can be time consuming.
So, I love blueprint courses. As somebody who, again, my old distance program had a very transient instructor group that came through, And so I could not let people change things. And I had to manage those types of things, and this was before blueprints were a thing. And so when Blueprints came about, I did my little happy dance and was thrilled for the people out there that could do it and leverage this feature, but now we're seeing that a lot of people are trying to use this at scale. And excuse me, it's a challenge sometimes to be able to do that So what we were able to do was develop a bulk lock option, or a bulk unlock option of for the objects that were in a course or administratively for large amounts of courses that were there, because, again, these challenges exist.
This was one of those solutions we were able to deploy, and it's made a difference for those that are out there. Problem statement number three, So, this group needed a way for users to access Canvas training content based on a tier of training that they had subscribed to as well as add on at their institution. So, they needed something, and some of you may know we have a product of Instructure called catalog, catalog didn't fit. For this particular need. It needed to go beyond that.
And so what we did is we helped build a training app location in a portal inside of Canvas. As you can see there, there was a new icon added to the global navigation there. Chourses were there, they were shown and could be auto enrolled for people. In addition to the offerings and what the enrollments were for the training, We also had a live calendar that was added as a part of this, so that they could tab over to and be able to see exactly what courses were available when they could sign up for them, especially if they were in person. And then inside this application, it also gathered their history and their overall transcript could be downloaded in a CSV format to be able to have for these particular purposes.
And again, this is just one other niche option that needed to be created for an organization, and another training or another, not training. This is another one that I thought would be really fun to show. So this was an institution in Spain that runs a trilingual environment inside of their course, and so they needed some sort of option for their instructors to more easily format content for each of the languages that were inside of the course, translate discussion posts for the students, and just make it more simple to manage this trilingual environment. And so as you can see here, what we were able to do was add a multilingual translation page inside of the course that in this case managed English, Spanish, and Kedolin, to help with that environment that was there, and it's proven to be again for this particular group, a great add on. And by the way, as I'm showing these, I want to reiterate one of the things Noten mentioned, which is these aren't exactly things that go out of the box the first time we do a custom development scope and then build it.
These can be iterated on and often are all the time. And so some of these might be years' worth of additions to these projects that are here, And candidly, the best ones that I've seen, the ones that really make me step back and say, wow, are the ones that have been refined over times. So this is our ongoing relationship we have with a lot of our customers. And I know we've been focusing on a lot of things inside of Canvas, Because, as Kellin mentioned at the beginning, you know, our flagship product is, and probably always will be the Canvas learning management system. I started telling people years ago, I work for Instructure.
Everybody in my life says who? And I just started saying, I work for Canvas and everybody then know. Where I work, because nobody seems to know the name and structure. It is our product. Therefore, I get it, most of the custom development is going to be looking at inside Canvas, but it doesn't have to be. We can build applications that are completely external and may not necessarily have anything to do with Canvas, as an application.
So, again, think of things that might be needed. Just a couple of examples of things that I've been working on recently, There's a project I'm working on that is actually an employer portal that is looking at qualified applicants coming out of institutions, in this case, we're looking at the digital credentialing space. So, for students who have earned their credentials from their institution, they can opt into a portal and then be able to have employers search by the skill sets that they're looking for for their particular disciplines and their jobs that they're looking for, and then have a pool of applicants to be able to recruit from that. Based on those credentials that have been given. This is a project I get to work on.
I'm almost on it every day right now and love where this is moving at the present. Another one I'm getting asked about quite a bit is advising or athlete eligibility. Athlet eligibility seems to to be on people's minds right now. And this is one of those where again, maybe we're looking at data from Canvas about what's coming up inside of course because we don't want to let students. We're going to be very proactive with our student athletes to not let them fall behind and keep up with things, Canvas now has the ability to do calendars for subaccount calendars in Canvas, so if you wanted to put things in and leverage, you know, travel schedules, game days, things like that, and overlay that on their calendar with everything from their course, that's Canvas core fun but now we can pull that into eligibility dashboards or reporting if we wanted to.
Most NCAAA athlete eligibility is coming from the SIS. It's looking at credits earned. Overall, cumulative GPA, you know, last quarter's -- last semester's GPA, credits being taken toward degree programs. This is not stuff that lives inside a learning management system. And again, if we want to get proactive, we certainly can pull Canvas data, but this is something that goes beyond that, and we certainly are answering questions and scoping projects that have to do with this at present.
And speaking of data, data data data, there's so many data visualizations that people want to be able to create, take advantage of, use to be able to refine and truly become, it's cliche to say a data driven organization, but truth of it is we're all sitting on mountains of data these days, and there's the ability to be able to take something from that and be able to make something to help with those decisions. And those data points can come from all sorts of places. They don't have to necessarily come Canvas. These are just a couple of the visualizations that our team has been able to create over the years. Some of it did come from Canvas, some of it had nothing to do with Canvas, some of it could be a hybrid of multiple places that we're pulling data into.
So again, the way that this is being taken place right now is a variety of different opportunities to visualize data, I'd basically tell people, we almost do dashboards as a service these days, because we've got data consultants, data analysts, If you're using, say, for instance, Tableau, Power BI, and you've got data analysts that are just, as we often see, are asked so much of them to be able to do a lot of work. We have people that could build visualizations for you for Tableau or for snowflake or for Power BI, and that way you don't have to hire another headcount and have somebody there, we would be able to do that and something I'm recommending to a lot of people, and there's been a lot of positive response to this, is that we keep a retainer with people so that our data analysts or just kind of, you know, at your will to be able to leverage them. And as you think of new visualizations over time, you already have a retainer with our group, and you can just use from those hours that are purchased for their time and services, and just have them work with you to be able to create the next iteration of data visualization that you're looking for. And from that I'll go into this, so I was that person too that was the gatekeeper at my institution that was looking for the software to implement. And I was somebody that was in my masters and in my doctorate program as I'm looking at software.
And so I'm thinking, you know, What's the future? What's the cutting edge? What's all this stuff that we're gonna need to transition and evolve into? Where's the software that can get us ahead of the curve? And you know, Canvas was a part of that for us, but we were still looking for applications that had more to do with our institution than just the learning in the classroom. And frankly, some of those things just didn't exist. We're seeing that quite a bit as Kellin mentioned beginning with competency based education, and so I'm going to show you a tool that we developed in this sense, but I always feel like I need to make a disclaimer here. Competency based education means many things to many people. And so when I show you this tool, I am not in any way prescribing this as the end all be all of competency based education, this was a vision that was made by an institution that had already done their outcomes and canvas alignment to the skills in the workforce, aligned it to a larger set of skills that were there, they had the vision that credentials were gonna be a part of this.
So they aligned it to the credentials that were there and we built them a tool that streamlined this as we went. And so we'll be showing kind of what that is. But here's another opportunity in another CBE program that we had done some visualization for. This is actually a medical program where the EPA is the untrustable professional activities. This institution thought that it would be great for students to be able to actually visualize how they're doing on their EPA's over time within their courses.
So, we built them dashboards so that students themselves had the idea that they could look at their own data and understand what was happening with their learning and where things were going with this. Again, ways to empower the students. I mentioned I'm working with CBE and workforce initiatives right now. And again, I'll just say this. I've been at an institution that tried to advance CBE and align outcomes and the best image that came to mind when I tried to scribe that institution was pushing the boulder uphill.
It's a highly difficult, highly democratic process that involves a lot of voices, but once an organization gets to where they've got their outcomes aligned. They got their faculty thinking about skills as opposed to just your assignments and an a through f grading scale. Then you can start moving towards these workforce initiatives, because you're focused on those skills that students are going to pull out, And I will be honest, as somebody who went through a college of education, years ago, too many years ago at Arizona State, I heard about CBE, went into a classroom, did my outcome alignment, and our solutions to track a lot of our competencies were shared Google sheets and lots of manual data entry, and all it did candidly was incentivize us to do the bare minimum, we really didn't get to spend a lot of time making the decisions we needed to make for a formative environment, because all of our efforts were done into just collecting the data, not necessarily having the time to sit, analyze, and then act upon it. And so when I became that person with that background, that looked at the software, I was like, where is the best software that's out there? Where is it? And we didn't find a lot of it, so we still stuck with our manual processes. Then I come to Instructure.
And I supported for many years just the Canvas learning management system. And one of the common questions I got in evaluations was, does Canvas do CBE? And one of the things I learned over the years that I did when I would get that question in an evaluation is I would ask the person asking me, do you do CBE? And if so, what does that look like? More often than not, the conversation completely changed and shifted. And what I realized is from the academic standpoint, they're waiting for the software companies to make it easy for a lot of institutions to get their faculty truly adopt a competency based environment. And from the software company side of things, we're waiting for academia to kind of come up with what does CBE mean to many people, especially since we have to scale that across thousands of customers, before we're going to build something that's out there, and there's this dance that's been happening for decades that's been taking place. What I'm happy to say is that some are stepping forward and making this a reality now.
And one of the tools I really want to highlight, and in fact, and Kevin and I and a member from this group are going to be able to present at the CBE Exchange Conference later this year in Florida about this tool and about how this came to fruition is that Chaffey College out of California has built a tool where they had already done all of their work on credentials, aligned all of their workforce skills, built out all of their pathways, had done all of this stuff, and even taken the skills and then linked them out to Indeed dot com so that we had instant ability for students to look for the jobs that use the skills that they're getting at college in the institution, but they still needed to do something at scale that was going to refine their process a bit more And so what we built for them was this right here. This is one of the first custom projects I got to work on in this role. Where we scoped out what would ultimately be a badge to outcome alignment, so that the outcomes in Canvas are directly connected to Canvas credentials and badges. And in their version of CBE and what they did is they said for every out come that is mastered, based on their scales, and mastered twice. Once all of these have been mastered twice for whatever course they are in for the particular student.
Without any human intervention, the badge is going to be issued over to that student so that they can instantly share it on LinkedIn, show their boss and say, hey, I'm working on this new skill set. Here's what I've learned and gotten from this course that I'm taking right now, along with reporting for progress so that students can see their own progress so that faculty can see the progress that's there. And this was one of the most exciting things I've been able to work on that, again, when I mentioned taking aim at the Carnegie unit and trying to blow it away, this organization because of this tool has really changed the conversation with their faculty that they support because it is now completely focused on these skill sets and these badges that are not Nice to have add on thing that you kind of get everyone snoiled during a class, or maybe just at the end of the course, this is part of the daily discussion. Of what is taking place in the learning process in that course. And that to me is somebody who was a huge skeptic of CBE when I went through my college of education experience and thought there's no way this is ever gonna scale, it is.
And I'm proud to say that our team has been able to do that. So we are happily sharing these projects. And every time we do one of these, we have more projects to share from what's taking place. We're gonna be doing more webinars throughout the year to share more of this. If you are interested, our next webinar is August 30th, and then again November eighth, we will have again more projects to show to kind of give some ideas.
We're going to be on the road. Helen and I have been road warriors this year, out at lots of conferences. I will be at UC Tech So if anybody hears from California that'll be at that, I'll be at Berkeley next week. Instructure Con is just a couple of weeks away in Denver, and both Kell and I will be there. As mentioned, we're going to be presenting on that chaffey tool out at the CBE Exchange Conference in Florida in October.
And then, Kellen is going to be at educause, also meeting up with people there and being able to talk about the other projects that we've done. And If you are interested in checking out what it would take to be able to do a project or coming up with a scope of a multi year project again, maybe the budget for this fiscal has already been allocated and we can't quite figure out what kind of investment we want now. It's going to be minimal, but we can plan for the future. You can email us, our entire team gets emails from the seed evidence and structure email. We also have a webpage where we're highlighting of projects.
If you wanna scan that QR code, that will take you to our webpage that we're currently updating with some other projects that'll be there. And wanna thank you all for the time today. If there are any questions, we can hang out for the next ten minutes, twelve minutes, I think we've got left. Otherwise, we can just go ahead and adjourn. But if you've got any questions, would love to be able to answer them at this point.
We did have a few, Jason, and I answered a few in the chat. And I didn't want to reiterate our email. So obviously, please email us, that goes to both Jason and I and a few other people here at instructure so we can get you in touch with the right people, but we love having these conversations, so please don't hesitate to email, see that about instructure. We love hearing from you. Thanks for the great comment there.
Yes, yeah, I think we've had some great features and again trying to show where we've come from from this. Dan question, do we work with customers to resell the custom w done for them to other institutions? Are they allowed to do this on their own? Not sure if there are any NDA type restrictions? It depends on what the project is. There's lots of different legal things we've gone through for these different projects. There certainly are NDAs for some of them, so it just depends. With respect to reselling it or what's done there, The one way I always try to explain this is that every project we build is essentially a six fingered glove.
And so if you need a six fingered glove, we might have a project that's great for you. But very often what happens is we'll show a project in something here Kelly and I will get on a phone and a phone call with somebody, and they'll say, I need that but. And that but could be, you know, an entirely different avenue of things that might require an entirely different rebuild that's there we never quite know how it's gonna go. And again, one of our first webinars this year highlighted that safety tool, and immediately somebody said I need that, but And that spot is what's turned into that workforce portal, which again, a part of it is that tool, very small part of it, but it's turning into a much larger project that goes far beyond that. So it just depends.
Dan, if you've got things you want to chat about, email me, I know I'm in your region, and so I'd be happy to talk with you about whatever the projects that are going on there. Next question from Sean, would Z Wave be the group to go to figure out more about integrating LTI one point three and API components into custom web applications. Noted, Well, I've been working on something for this. It kind of depends on Sean on, is this from an institution or a partnered company that works with us standpoint and what kinds of things are you hoping to get done through the API because it could definitely come to us. It could come to technical consulting if it's just API questions.
There's a number of things, but we are definitely a great spot to start with because I have been working with some of the tools that plug in directly into Canvas are wanting to get set up on LTI one point three, so we've been scoping that kind of thing. So that's definitely a great starting point would be to come to us then we can obviously get Noden and whomever else involved if it turns into that. Noden, do you have any other thoughts on that? Is that a pretty good step for them if they wanted to look into that? I think we have a bunch of different avenues to go in terms of that. So just, yeah, I think start with us and then whether that's technical consulting, whether that's custom development, we can kind of figure that out, but we are doing a lot of work in that realm currently. Depends on if it's stuff we can do, sometimes for some development we have to kind of get core approval to change things.
But we can walk you through that process and get that discussion started. I'll reiterate too, we have a lot of in institutions that do build their own LTI tools, we've got experts that know how to build LTIs. And so if there's roadblocks that people run into, there's definitely consulting that we can offer for things like that. A lot of institutions that I bump into, they have developers in house, but they may not have the experience building the applications like our solutions architect do. And so if you just needed to get, you know, a requirements analysis and a UI design, done, we can do that and then hand it off to your developers.
And so the cost goes internal for the people that are already having their salaries paid for that's there. So lots of ways we can assist in these things. Just wanted to make sure to point that out. And yeah, as you mentioned about exploring options there, the feature could be added. If you want to email us and kind of start looking into it, we can create what we do is our process that hasn't gone over is that we do a pre sales project before anything goes.
It goes to our solutions architect team, Noden and his team and Kellin and I have a standing meeting every week on Tuesdays. We go over projects, answer questions, there's estimates meetings that take place where they look into the developer hours that it would take to do it, and then we can come back with whatever the it would be to make something happen. Any other questions? Got about five minutes left. And well if not going once going twice Thank you all again for taking the time to listen to us talk about the work that we've been doing. We love sharing all the work that's taking place. And again, if you have something that you want to check out, what it might take to make it happen, email calendar myself at c debited instructor dot com, and we are happy to get back to you. Thank you all very much.
Awesome. Thanks, Jason. Yes, so before we dive into deeply, we do have the Q and A available. So please ask any questions or share any thoughts as we kind of go through this, we don't want to miss any of that, and I will be monitoring that as we get into some of the projects that Jason and Noden are going to highlight in a moment, so I wanted to make that point. For today's agenda, we're just gonna kinda go over kinda an introduction as to why this is kind of a focus for infrastructure doing custom development and you're going to see the word CDB everywhere because that's what we so lovingly call it here.
Is Cdev by instructure. We're going to analyze the Cdev process. That's my nodens here. Really excited to hear what he has to share. And then custom innovation highlights portfolio, so basically going to show some of the innovation that we've done.
So going on today we are here to talk about CEDF, custom development by instructure. As we go through this, I'll describe a little bit about the history of what's gone on, but you can kind of see here some of the renderings. I just like to start off with this because I think this illustrates really quickly that there are things that are being built by institutions. Just living right inside of Canvas, and they're taking full advantage of things like dashboards and just getting a lot of the data or aligning outcomes to badges and different things that we're gonna talk through, and I think this is just a quick snapshot of that. But the history as to why this all exists, obviously, Most people know instructure because of Canvas.
That's our cornerstone product that is kind of what put us on the map and we've grown substantially. And as we've grown, we've also seen a lot of asks from our customer base. And we know that time has gone on and more things are being asked of us, we know that not everything fits into one nice pretty little picture. Sometimes we need to customize a solution to fit an institution's needs. So, that's kind of where Instructure came up with the custom development services portion of things.
So, we like to look at it as we have these SaaS offerings, these existing software as a service solution and then we also have custom development services as a possible solution to close any other gaps that might exist in your technology. And when we say CDA over custom development, that can include a number of things from. You can see here, user interface design, actual software development, custom applications, something that we're really seeing and influx in is also people wanting to look at integrations and custom learning tools. So everything in this kind of realm of what you would typically look to custom development shop in your neighborhood to help you build, whether that's a mobile application or doing some UI design we can help with And the reason we're able to help with that is because we've allocated some resources to that. So this is the grader team, so you'll notice you'll recognize three of the faces from this that are on the call today.
Also have a number of other people to help support us in this endeavor. And really, I'm excited to hear what Noten has to share today because I think this team does an incredible job once we get through kind of the introduction of the project to myself with Jason, what we're able to do is involve the solutions architects and say, hey, let's talk about how this is going to really be implemented on campus. Who else are the stakeholders involved in this decision? And really get into the technical side of the build, so that's kind of what the greater team has been doing for the past little while, especially since August when Jason and I started in this So moving on, one of the things that we have definitely noticed in the higher ed space is a lot of trends, a lot of things happening since twenty twenty. One of those things being a huge influx in the number of available software pieces that we have on campus. So I think this is a really good illustration of what seems to feel like on a lot of campuses as we have these conversations.
And I think Noden could attest to the idea that we get a lot of questions around how can we integrate Canvas or our LMS with our SIS or with Workday or with, you know, any number of tools that might exist, whether that has an out of the box integration through the LTI, you know, library or if it's something we need to customize for the institution. And sometimes those things fit together really nicely, sometimes they can be somewhat frustrating and not fit together so nicely. And that's where team with Noten and Tyler Wade and Jagger can step in and really help solve some of these issues, because as we know one of the things I think at the administration level I think if we were to pull administrators across the map, they would say probably the most frustrating parts of anything in software is software evaluations, going through the process of either writing an RFP or creating an evaluation, rubric or something like that, because software changes, technology changes and we understand that that that has to happen, but that can be a frustrating point at some time. An additional piece that we're seeing a new influx in and I think a resurgence in is around this competency based education. So CPE is another trend that we've seen come up.
And I don't think this is so much as a trend in terms of a flash in the pan, but I think this is actually an evolution in where education has wanted to go for a while, but it's been somewhat of there's no standardized way of approaching this, right? And I think that that's something that we're also seeing in a trend in today's post-twenty twenty market And because of all of these different issues and different things, we've actually been able to build a lot of software for a lot of our partners. So, we've actually done over four hundred projects, or work with over four hundred customers on a number of projects, but been able to really work with them. And because of these distinct needs, we've actually been able to come up with a really robust amount of experience and insight and be able to share that's one thing, again, I know I keep alluding to it and it's because I'm kind of teasing the introduction of no, not a little bit, but it's because when we involve our Solutions architects, it's really incredible to see their experience and their expertise in this area really help institutions vet out the way they're looking and thinking of solving problems with technology, because there are times and this happens frequently where we jump on a call an institution says, hey, we have this budget to do this thing, but then as soon as we start asking the why, there's a few decisions that need to be made internally to really drive change versus just creating excuse me, creating software for the sake of creating software, but actually what are we driving towards and change? And that's where I really appreciate the solutions architects But in addition to that, we also have this plethora of partners that we can leverage in speaking with and connecting you to and talking through how this would work. And I know we have a lot of insight into that. And Jason, you were a partner before you were an employee here, right? I was a very early customer of Instructure and adopting Canvas.
Yeah. And the thing I think as a customer I appreciated the most and that tried to bring with me in my almost nine years here at the company is that I was a director of a distance program. We were migrating off of Angel. We were moving to Canvas brand new LMS that not a whole lot was known about it at the time. It was still very new, but we just saw something special in what Canvas was doing.
But for my ideas for the distance program and especially for the evaluation and accreditation process that was coming up, You know, there were a lot of people that had already invented the wheel, and I didn't need to reinvent it. And thankfully, Instructure acted as the conduit. And from my standpoint, that's one of my favorite things to do in the role that Kellan and I have now, where we can talk to you about a project that you want to do. Odds are, we know somebody who's already done that, and we are very happy to connect you. I've got tons of colleges that I've been getting on the phone with, recently out in California with this competency based education.
Everybody seems to be at a different phase of how this is getting rolled into their institution. And I love getting people on the phone with each other and kind of being that person and just sitting back and listening to conversations about, you know, how to blow away the Carnegie unit, which we'll talk about some of the tools we've built to assist with that later in the presentation. But again, what separates us too, as a development shop, is, yes, there's lots of places to get custom apps built. But Noten, as one who will walk you through the process here and other solutions architects, Kelly and I are just so impressed every time we watch them talk with people because they've done educational apps. And these things with educational institutions, higher eds, universities, so many times that often things that may be missed or not thought about at the institution, these guys have already worked through that.
And so they know how to address it. They know the questions ask, and it can really refine the process for the institution themselves. And so again, just a a example of how this works and then Noten to walk us through the process Something incredibly common for Callan and I is we'll get a very high level ask, because somebody will say, hey, we need a dashboard to help us intervene with at risk students, and of course our first inclination is, what does that mean exactly? What do you consider at risk? What kind of data are you looking for on the dash support, is this exclusively from Canvas, is this from other systems? And Noden's going to walk you through the process by which our solutions architects take a high level ask like that and work through the process to build a custom app. Yeah. Thanks, Jason.
Thanks, Cohen. Yeah. I think it's it's kind of an interesting situation for our team in the custom dev group especially the solutions architects and customer experience because we, as kind of a unit, have a lot of experience in education, I myself, have a history in education as an education technologist, did a PhD at C boulder and while I was there, we were transitioning to Canvas, and so I was tasked with helping faculty make that transition from D2L, And so that was a really great experience, understanding Canvas from a very, you know, from a user centric side. I also taught in the classroom used Canvas, and also was a graduate student, so I used it from the student side as well. And then I was also an academic knowledgeist or educational technologist at the University of California.
And in Santa Cruz and there, I was working heavily with Canvas as well. So coming to this role and structure, we are really focused on the user. We're really focused on user driven design, especially in figuring out knowing that we have really great products as Kellin went over, but there's not gonna be always an out of box solution to solve a specific problem. So this prompt that, you know, Jason put up this idea that we need a data dashboard to help us intervene with at risk students, we might take that if if Jason or Kellan comes to our team and says, hey, we have a customer who has this problem. So we're going to firstly kind of go through and I can go through kind of the high level process and then I'll dig a little deeper into each of those using this prompt as sort of a model.
So we might come with this idea of a process of first, we're gonna understand what the objectives and goals of our customer are. So we might have this prompt that, okay, we need a data dashboard to help us intervene with at risk students, but what does that actually mean? Are we just wanting to get data to report on these at risk students are we wanting our instructors to be able to monitor these students and help them in certain pain points or are we actually wanting to reduce the the number of ask at risk students we have is that based on assessment? Is that based on course completion? Is that based on GPA? So we really want to dig in and define what the objects and the goals of the customer are, and we really want to start with the user first. As an institution as a customer, what is it that you define as that object objective and goal? And from that, we then Don't go and do our developers and figure out, okay, here's a technological solution that'll solve this, here's a dashboard, go for it, we really focus on user personas. So again, that idea of user driven solution design, we want to know how individual users are going to be using this solution. So whether that's an instructor who's going to have a dashboard within their course so they can monitor how students are doing completing assessments, whether that's an administrator who's going to need to be seeing a institution wide dashboard to report on data so that they can use it outside of Canvas, or whether that's a student that potentially is going to be able to monitor their own progress in this particular dashboard.
We want to understand how each user is going to be using a particular solution. And so from user personas were actually then able to create these user stories. So that might be a familiar how a particular user will use something in order to accomplish something creating a user story will give us then the basis for what we need to take to our development team to actually act on this and create a solution that works for everybody. And from that we'll actually then be able to figure out what the requirements to create those user stories in the solution would be. And so this might be actually where those requirements often come the beginning of a technological solution, you might say, hey, we need to do X, Y, and Z, this solution needs to do this.
We actually bring that a little farther down say, hey, let's figure out what our users need to do and then from that we'll create those business requirements and then we'll actually create a document that will list all of those requirements, and then we can actually execute on that solution and bring that to our development team. So it's This is a very dynamic process with how our sort of solution development goes So if we kind of dig into that objectives and goals first, we might say, hey, so there's a dashboard that you want created, but why are we doing this? And we often find that customers have this objective or goal in mind, but they and there's an understanding of why we're doing this, but not always all of the points that lead up to exactly why that is. So we first ask that question why are you doing this? And then we wanna know exactly how we'll know if we're successful. So again, if that's just we can get this data outside of Canvas so we can use so our admins can use it or we have actual metric that shows that students are improving in a course over a particular time frame, then that might be a metric for how we know that this solution is successful. And then we often do ask this we have an idea of a one thing test.
So we might look at a solution, look at the objectives and goals of that solution, say, if there were one thing that we could say is successful for the solution, what would that be? And that really helps us and our customers kind of refine what can potentially be a really broad and far reaching solution down to one thing. We want our students are to be successful and of course, right? So how that metric gets measured by the student, by the instructor, by the admin, we can suss all that out further down the road, but that one thing to us we really drill down on that just to make sure we're not deviating away from that main goal or objective when we start to scope out a solution. And that kind of brings us to a user persona. As I mentioned, we are really focused on bringing the user to the forefront of our solution design. So we want to understand what value does this person seek.
And we look at each user we're focused not only on the end user, but all the middle users as well. So we wanna know how an admin might approach the solution. We want to know how a teacher might approach the solution a student, if it's a k through twelve space, how an observer or parent might as well, what is that job that person's job function? This is gonna change greatly from how a student is interacting with a solution to how an admin is interacting with a solution and those are going to be very different experiences. So we wanna make sure that the user interface, the user experience aligns with that particular user's not only how they're interacting with the solution, but also their job function. And how that person behaves, how an admin is going to behave in a solution is gonna be very than how a student behaves with a solution.
So we might think that an admin might be just pulling data from a dashboard in an admin portal, and they're just a CSV is fine, and they're just taking that information outside of Canvas. To do something else with it. Whereas a student, they might, if we're designing something for a solution that a student is interacting with, they might be accessing it via their mobile device. And so we want to have a very different experience depending on how that user is behaving with a solution. So we take all of that into account when we're thinking about user personas.
And from that, we're then able to create user stories and you might be familiar with agile software development, but this is kind of the bread and butter of our solution development where we think of as a student, I can interact with a solution so that I can see how my performance changes over time. So we'll create user stories for each one of the users and iterate through all of the potential uses that each user may have, and we get those all down on paper, so then we can go back and understand all of the requirements. And when we kind of drill down into figuring out what that looks like, we want to make sure that we've captured all of those user stories so that when we get into the business requirements and say, hey, how does a user navigate the solution and how does the system function? And what is how is that workflow implemented and what limitations exist in that solution? We can go back to the user stories for each of those and say, hey, great. This particular user is going to be mostly, say, interacting with the solution on a mobile device. So, hey, what limitations are we gonna run into there? And we can really outline each of those business requirements and get them really dialed so that we understand how that how the user is gonna be successful when they're interacting with a solution.
We don't wanna just create something that, you know, meets that initial goal without it actually functioning well for each user. So we will work really closely with a customer when we're defining these business requirements and review those with those with the customer before that gets sent over to a project manager and gets put into development to make sure we've thought through each individual user story and gotten each business requirement dialed for each of those users. And so once we are able to do that and we document those requirements, this is something for example what a, this is what a customer would see potentially for a given solution. We wanna understand exactly how that solution is gonna function. We're gonna try and take into consideration every user story that we talked about and then make sure that those requirements map back to that user story.
And then we're gonna talk through these with the customer to make sure we haven't left any gaps. For a particular user and make sure that the customer is getting absolute value out of the solution for every user that's going to be with it. And we also want this solution to be able to be used far into the future as well. So we wanna be able to leave room for future development. We wanna leave room, you know, as Jason and Kellan mentioned for other puzzle pieces to potentially fit into that.
Solution as well. And so we then can when we get these business requirements dialed, documented, we can then send it to our project manager or get it into development and really execute on that. And when it moves into that execution stage, we kind of step back as the solutions architecture team, but we're still working with the project manager and the development team closely as they work to develop that solution. And we are constantly talking with them about how things are going, making sure we're refining any questionable requirements, we may need to find some user stories as we move through that development process, but we're making sure again that we're putting the user first with this solution development and even when that passes back to the customer for user acceptance testing, and even after it has been that solution has been turned on in a production environment and the user is actually an institution is using that solution. We are open to feedback.
We want to hear how things are working and make sure that we can fill any gaps or make any changes to make sure that that solution is gonna work well in going forward into the future. So kind of to reiterate, I went through that process really quickly, but we are really focused on user driven solution design. We, when you first come to Jason and Kellan with project idea and then one of the solution architects from our team gets pulled in, this is really kind of, it's gonna be all about you from the start to the end. And we're going to really work with you to define those objectives and goals, we're going to make sure that every user is accounted for and we understand exactly how they're going to be using that solution. We're gonna create those user stories and this is kind of a spot where you may not even as the customer may think about all of the users that may be interacting with that solution and that's where we come in to kind of help iterate through those ideas.
We're going to define those business requirements and go over them with you in the documentation process to make sure we've captured everything filled in any gaps and then we're going to execute and get that project on the road for development and into your instance quickly as possible to make sure that you're able to use it and then we're gonna be in it for the long haul, right? We're gonna be there to help in terms of support as that process continues as you start to refine use of that solution, and then what we find actually pretty often is that when a customer has a custom solution created that they're coming back to us to enhance that particular solution or add additional components to it because we are trying to create something that fits perfectly into this use case, this niche that you have need for custom development, and what we find is a lot of customers realize hey, wow, this is fantastic, this is doing exactly what we want. Let's make it even better, and we're excited about those kinds of projects that we can iterate on and really refine, enhance, and make, you know, work well for you. So that's what we're all about is making the technology work for you and that's what my team strives to do. So I'll hand it back over to you, Jason. As you jump into some more examples.
That was great note and thank you so much. Yes, so now I get the fun part of actually showing you all some of the projects that have been launched. And again, I want to start them just the way we start. Again, Kalen and I are the first points of contact for any of this. And one of the first things we're going to do is like, what's the problem? What do we need to do to solve? What's the issue here? And here's a very, very common one that comes up.
We need a way for our teachers to push midterm and final grades, and in this case, they needed last activity dates back to a student information system, and the admins needed a way to be able to see who hadn't published the grades yet. Student information systems, again, I come, I have a background that transcends K12 to higher ed, I've seen a lot of SIS out there. Some of them are nice to plug and play with. Some of them are a little bit proprietary, so it takes a little bit of work to be able to make those integrations happen. In particular, when certain policies and rules require things that go beyond just say a grade publish of a final one that's there.
And so again, what the mock up looks like here, and this is screenshot of what ultimately came to fruition, was that our team was able to document exactly what needed to be done. Thankfully, all of the data was already in Canvas, It was nothing new APIs needed to be created for. And so the grade was able to come up, put inside of an instructor's course, could select there the midterm or the final, had last activity dates, which could be altered if there was something that we wanted to do because, you know, somebody came in person or whatever the case was. The final grade could be checked from inside Canvas and then published to the student information system that was there. I would say a large portion of the calls that Helen and I take involve student information systems, because we need some kind of data exchange, either going, you know, one direction or bidirectionally.
This does make up a lot of what we do, and so we're pretty good at in fact, we've got standard questionnaire at this point. We've seen so many questions about SIS integrations. We kind of know what to ask at this point very rarely do we find things that go outside of that? So another example of things we've done. This came up in chat just a minute ago. So, the question that came up here is we need an easier way to lock blueprint object in courses when content items since locking each item individually can be time consuming.
So, I love blueprint courses. As somebody who, again, my old distance program had a very transient instructor group that came through, And so I could not let people change things. And I had to manage those types of things, and this was before blueprints were a thing. And so when Blueprints came about, I did my little happy dance and was thrilled for the people out there that could do it and leverage this feature, but now we're seeing that a lot of people are trying to use this at scale. And excuse me, it's a challenge sometimes to be able to do that So what we were able to do was develop a bulk lock option, or a bulk unlock option of for the objects that were in a course or administratively for large amounts of courses that were there, because, again, these challenges exist.
This was one of those solutions we were able to deploy, and it's made a difference for those that are out there. Problem statement number three, So, this group needed a way for users to access Canvas training content based on a tier of training that they had subscribed to as well as add on at their institution. So, they needed something, and some of you may know we have a product of Instructure called catalog, catalog didn't fit. For this particular need. It needed to go beyond that.
And so what we did is we helped build a training app location in a portal inside of Canvas. As you can see there, there was a new icon added to the global navigation there. Chourses were there, they were shown and could be auto enrolled for people. In addition to the offerings and what the enrollments were for the training, We also had a live calendar that was added as a part of this, so that they could tab over to and be able to see exactly what courses were available when they could sign up for them, especially if they were in person. And then inside this application, it also gathered their history and their overall transcript could be downloaded in a CSV format to be able to have for these particular purposes.
And again, this is just one other niche option that needed to be created for an organization, and another training or another, not training. This is another one that I thought would be really fun to show. So this was an institution in Spain that runs a trilingual environment inside of their course, and so they needed some sort of option for their instructors to more easily format content for each of the languages that were inside of the course, translate discussion posts for the students, and just make it more simple to manage this trilingual environment. And so as you can see here, what we were able to do was add a multilingual translation page inside of the course that in this case managed English, Spanish, and Kedolin, to help with that environment that was there, and it's proven to be again for this particular group, a great add on. And by the way, as I'm showing these, I want to reiterate one of the things Noten mentioned, which is these aren't exactly things that go out of the box the first time we do a custom development scope and then build it.
These can be iterated on and often are all the time. And so some of these might be years' worth of additions to these projects that are here, And candidly, the best ones that I've seen, the ones that really make me step back and say, wow, are the ones that have been refined over times. So this is our ongoing relationship we have with a lot of our customers. And I know we've been focusing on a lot of things inside of Canvas, Because, as Kellin mentioned at the beginning, you know, our flagship product is, and probably always will be the Canvas learning management system. I started telling people years ago, I work for Instructure.
Everybody in my life says who? And I just started saying, I work for Canvas and everybody then know. Where I work, because nobody seems to know the name and structure. It is our product. Therefore, I get it, most of the custom development is going to be looking at inside Canvas, but it doesn't have to be. We can build applications that are completely external and may not necessarily have anything to do with Canvas, as an application.
So, again, think of things that might be needed. Just a couple of examples of things that I've been working on recently, There's a project I'm working on that is actually an employer portal that is looking at qualified applicants coming out of institutions, in this case, we're looking at the digital credentialing space. So, for students who have earned their credentials from their institution, they can opt into a portal and then be able to have employers search by the skill sets that they're looking for for their particular disciplines and their jobs that they're looking for, and then have a pool of applicants to be able to recruit from that. Based on those credentials that have been given. This is a project I get to work on.
I'm almost on it every day right now and love where this is moving at the present. Another one I'm getting asked about quite a bit is advising or athlete eligibility. Athlet eligibility seems to to be on people's minds right now. And this is one of those where again, maybe we're looking at data from Canvas about what's coming up inside of course because we don't want to let students. We're going to be very proactive with our student athletes to not let them fall behind and keep up with things, Canvas now has the ability to do calendars for subaccount calendars in Canvas, so if you wanted to put things in and leverage, you know, travel schedules, game days, things like that, and overlay that on their calendar with everything from their course, that's Canvas core fun but now we can pull that into eligibility dashboards or reporting if we wanted to.
Most NCAAA athlete eligibility is coming from the SIS. It's looking at credits earned. Overall, cumulative GPA, you know, last quarter's -- last semester's GPA, credits being taken toward degree programs. This is not stuff that lives inside a learning management system. And again, if we want to get proactive, we certainly can pull Canvas data, but this is something that goes beyond that, and we certainly are answering questions and scoping projects that have to do with this at present.
And speaking of data, data data data, there's so many data visualizations that people want to be able to create, take advantage of, use to be able to refine and truly become, it's cliche to say a data driven organization, but truth of it is we're all sitting on mountains of data these days, and there's the ability to be able to take something from that and be able to make something to help with those decisions. And those data points can come from all sorts of places. They don't have to necessarily come Canvas. These are just a couple of the visualizations that our team has been able to create over the years. Some of it did come from Canvas, some of it had nothing to do with Canvas, some of it could be a hybrid of multiple places that we're pulling data into.
So again, the way that this is being taken place right now is a variety of different opportunities to visualize data, I'd basically tell people, we almost do dashboards as a service these days, because we've got data consultants, data analysts, If you're using, say, for instance, Tableau, Power BI, and you've got data analysts that are just, as we often see, are asked so much of them to be able to do a lot of work. We have people that could build visualizations for you for Tableau or for snowflake or for Power BI, and that way you don't have to hire another headcount and have somebody there, we would be able to do that and something I'm recommending to a lot of people, and there's been a lot of positive response to this, is that we keep a retainer with people so that our data analysts or just kind of, you know, at your will to be able to leverage them. And as you think of new visualizations over time, you already have a retainer with our group, and you can just use from those hours that are purchased for their time and services, and just have them work with you to be able to create the next iteration of data visualization that you're looking for. And from that I'll go into this, so I was that person too that was the gatekeeper at my institution that was looking for the software to implement. And I was somebody that was in my masters and in my doctorate program as I'm looking at software.
And so I'm thinking, you know, What's the future? What's the cutting edge? What's all this stuff that we're gonna need to transition and evolve into? Where's the software that can get us ahead of the curve? And you know, Canvas was a part of that for us, but we were still looking for applications that had more to do with our institution than just the learning in the classroom. And frankly, some of those things just didn't exist. We're seeing that quite a bit as Kellin mentioned beginning with competency based education, and so I'm going to show you a tool that we developed in this sense, but I always feel like I need to make a disclaimer here. Competency based education means many things to many people. And so when I show you this tool, I am not in any way prescribing this as the end all be all of competency based education, this was a vision that was made by an institution that had already done their outcomes and canvas alignment to the skills in the workforce, aligned it to a larger set of skills that were there, they had the vision that credentials were gonna be a part of this.
So they aligned it to the credentials that were there and we built them a tool that streamlined this as we went. And so we'll be showing kind of what that is. But here's another opportunity in another CBE program that we had done some visualization for. This is actually a medical program where the EPA is the untrustable professional activities. This institution thought that it would be great for students to be able to actually visualize how they're doing on their EPA's over time within their courses.
So, we built them dashboards so that students themselves had the idea that they could look at their own data and understand what was happening with their learning and where things were going with this. Again, ways to empower the students. I mentioned I'm working with CBE and workforce initiatives right now. And again, I'll just say this. I've been at an institution that tried to advance CBE and align outcomes and the best image that came to mind when I tried to scribe that institution was pushing the boulder uphill.
It's a highly difficult, highly democratic process that involves a lot of voices, but once an organization gets to where they've got their outcomes aligned. They got their faculty thinking about skills as opposed to just your assignments and an a through f grading scale. Then you can start moving towards these workforce initiatives, because you're focused on those skills that students are going to pull out, And I will be honest, as somebody who went through a college of education, years ago, too many years ago at Arizona State, I heard about CBE, went into a classroom, did my outcome alignment, and our solutions to track a lot of our competencies were shared Google sheets and lots of manual data entry, and all it did candidly was incentivize us to do the bare minimum, we really didn't get to spend a lot of time making the decisions we needed to make for a formative environment, because all of our efforts were done into just collecting the data, not necessarily having the time to sit, analyze, and then act upon it. And so when I became that person with that background, that looked at the software, I was like, where is the best software that's out there? Where is it? And we didn't find a lot of it, so we still stuck with our manual processes. Then I come to Instructure.
And I supported for many years just the Canvas learning management system. And one of the common questions I got in evaluations was, does Canvas do CBE? And one of the things I learned over the years that I did when I would get that question in an evaluation is I would ask the person asking me, do you do CBE? And if so, what does that look like? More often than not, the conversation completely changed and shifted. And what I realized is from the academic standpoint, they're waiting for the software companies to make it easy for a lot of institutions to get their faculty truly adopt a competency based environment. And from the software company side of things, we're waiting for academia to kind of come up with what does CBE mean to many people, especially since we have to scale that across thousands of customers, before we're going to build something that's out there, and there's this dance that's been happening for decades that's been taking place. What I'm happy to say is that some are stepping forward and making this a reality now.
And one of the tools I really want to highlight, and in fact, and Kevin and I and a member from this group are going to be able to present at the CBE Exchange Conference later this year in Florida about this tool and about how this came to fruition is that Chaffey College out of California has built a tool where they had already done all of their work on credentials, aligned all of their workforce skills, built out all of their pathways, had done all of this stuff, and even taken the skills and then linked them out to Indeed dot com so that we had instant ability for students to look for the jobs that use the skills that they're getting at college in the institution, but they still needed to do something at scale that was going to refine their process a bit more And so what we built for them was this right here. This is one of the first custom projects I got to work on in this role. Where we scoped out what would ultimately be a badge to outcome alignment, so that the outcomes in Canvas are directly connected to Canvas credentials and badges. And in their version of CBE and what they did is they said for every out come that is mastered, based on their scales, and mastered twice. Once all of these have been mastered twice for whatever course they are in for the particular student.
Without any human intervention, the badge is going to be issued over to that student so that they can instantly share it on LinkedIn, show their boss and say, hey, I'm working on this new skill set. Here's what I've learned and gotten from this course that I'm taking right now, along with reporting for progress so that students can see their own progress so that faculty can see the progress that's there. And this was one of the most exciting things I've been able to work on that, again, when I mentioned taking aim at the Carnegie unit and trying to blow it away, this organization because of this tool has really changed the conversation with their faculty that they support because it is now completely focused on these skill sets and these badges that are not Nice to have add on thing that you kind of get everyone snoiled during a class, or maybe just at the end of the course, this is part of the daily discussion. Of what is taking place in the learning process in that course. And that to me is somebody who was a huge skeptic of CBE when I went through my college of education experience and thought there's no way this is ever gonna scale, it is.
And I'm proud to say that our team has been able to do that. So we are happily sharing these projects. And every time we do one of these, we have more projects to share from what's taking place. We're gonna be doing more webinars throughout the year to share more of this. If you are interested, our next webinar is August 30th, and then again November eighth, we will have again more projects to show to kind of give some ideas.
We're going to be on the road. Helen and I have been road warriors this year, out at lots of conferences. I will be at UC Tech So if anybody hears from California that'll be at that, I'll be at Berkeley next week. Instructure Con is just a couple of weeks away in Denver, and both Kell and I will be there. As mentioned, we're going to be presenting on that chaffey tool out at the CBE Exchange Conference in Florida in October.
And then, Kellen is going to be at educause, also meeting up with people there and being able to talk about the other projects that we've done. And If you are interested in checking out what it would take to be able to do a project or coming up with a scope of a multi year project again, maybe the budget for this fiscal has already been allocated and we can't quite figure out what kind of investment we want now. It's going to be minimal, but we can plan for the future. You can email us, our entire team gets emails from the seed evidence and structure email. We also have a webpage where we're highlighting of projects.
If you wanna scan that QR code, that will take you to our webpage that we're currently updating with some other projects that'll be there. And wanna thank you all for the time today. If there are any questions, we can hang out for the next ten minutes, twelve minutes, I think we've got left. Otherwise, we can just go ahead and adjourn. But if you've got any questions, would love to be able to answer them at this point.
We did have a few, Jason, and I answered a few in the chat. And I didn't want to reiterate our email. So obviously, please email us, that goes to both Jason and I and a few other people here at instructure so we can get you in touch with the right people, but we love having these conversations, so please don't hesitate to email, see that about instructure. We love hearing from you. Thanks for the great comment there.
Yes, yeah, I think we've had some great features and again trying to show where we've come from from this. Dan question, do we work with customers to resell the custom w done for them to other institutions? Are they allowed to do this on their own? Not sure if there are any NDA type restrictions? It depends on what the project is. There's lots of different legal things we've gone through for these different projects. There certainly are NDAs for some of them, so it just depends. With respect to reselling it or what's done there, The one way I always try to explain this is that every project we build is essentially a six fingered glove.
And so if you need a six fingered glove, we might have a project that's great for you. But very often what happens is we'll show a project in something here Kelly and I will get on a phone and a phone call with somebody, and they'll say, I need that but. And that but could be, you know, an entirely different avenue of things that might require an entirely different rebuild that's there we never quite know how it's gonna go. And again, one of our first webinars this year highlighted that safety tool, and immediately somebody said I need that, but And that spot is what's turned into that workforce portal, which again, a part of it is that tool, very small part of it, but it's turning into a much larger project that goes far beyond that. So it just depends.
Dan, if you've got things you want to chat about, email me, I know I'm in your region, and so I'd be happy to talk with you about whatever the projects that are going on there. Next question from Sean, would Z Wave be the group to go to figure out more about integrating LTI one point three and API components into custom web applications. Noted, Well, I've been working on something for this. It kind of depends on Sean on, is this from an institution or a partnered company that works with us standpoint and what kinds of things are you hoping to get done through the API because it could definitely come to us. It could come to technical consulting if it's just API questions.
There's a number of things, but we are definitely a great spot to start with because I have been working with some of the tools that plug in directly into Canvas are wanting to get set up on LTI one point three, so we've been scoping that kind of thing. So that's definitely a great starting point would be to come to us then we can obviously get Noden and whomever else involved if it turns into that. Noden, do you have any other thoughts on that? Is that a pretty good step for them if they wanted to look into that? I think we have a bunch of different avenues to go in terms of that. So just, yeah, I think start with us and then whether that's technical consulting, whether that's custom development, we can kind of figure that out, but we are doing a lot of work in that realm currently. Depends on if it's stuff we can do, sometimes for some development we have to kind of get core approval to change things.
But we can walk you through that process and get that discussion started. I'll reiterate too, we have a lot of in institutions that do build their own LTI tools, we've got experts that know how to build LTIs. And so if there's roadblocks that people run into, there's definitely consulting that we can offer for things like that. A lot of institutions that I bump into, they have developers in house, but they may not have the experience building the applications like our solutions architect do. And so if you just needed to get, you know, a requirements analysis and a UI design, done, we can do that and then hand it off to your developers.
And so the cost goes internal for the people that are already having their salaries paid for that's there. So lots of ways we can assist in these things. Just wanted to make sure to point that out. And yeah, as you mentioned about exploring options there, the feature could be added. If you want to email us and kind of start looking into it, we can create what we do is our process that hasn't gone over is that we do a pre sales project before anything goes.
It goes to our solutions architect team, Noden and his team and Kellin and I have a standing meeting every week on Tuesdays. We go over projects, answer questions, there's estimates meetings that take place where they look into the developer hours that it would take to do it, and then we can come back with whatever the it would be to make something happen. Any other questions? Got about five minutes left. And well if not going once going twice Thank you all again for taking the time to listen to us talk about the work that we've been doing. We love sharing all the work that's taking place. And again, if you have something that you want to check out, what it might take to make it happen, email calendar myself at c debited instructor dot com, and we are happy to get back to you. Thank you all very much.