Instructure Releases AI Features and Core Platform Enhancements at InstructureCon 2024

July 13, 2024, Salt Lake City

Instructure announced major AI innovations, partnerships and core enhancements to its education platform, Canvas, to increase educator efficiency and improve student success. The company made the announcements at InstructureCon, the company's annual conference that took place last week at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. The conference focused product innovation around AI, insights, edtech effectiveness, and introduced the concept of "the lifelong learning journey." The edtech company also announced the launch of a standalone product, Instructure Intelligent Insights.

At InstructureCon 2024, the company also highlighted new AI products and features developed directly within Instructure products, partner integrations such as Khan Academy’s Khanmigo Teacher Tools, and other updates that enable partners to develop context-aware AI experiences within Canvas.

“We’re excited to announce substantive innovations to the Instructure Learning Ecosystem, with a strong focus on Canvas built in close partnership with our customers,” said Shiren Vijiasingam, Instructure’s Chief Product Officer. “We started with equitability in mind, addressing use cases that would help create a more level playing field for all learners while honoring the expertise of the educator.”

Instructure leverages internally developed tools and those of its network of over 1,000 partners to help educators harness the power of AI. One such area is AI-assisted content generation, with an ever-growing landscape of available tools. One way the company will meet the rapidly growing educator demand for AI-assisted content generation is by announcing the upcoming availability of a Canvas integration with Khanmigo Teacher Tools. 

This integration includes access to over 20 tools in Canvas—helping educators plan lessons, generate questions, draft newsletters, write letters of recommendation, prep substitutes and more. By accessing Khanmigo from Canvas, educators can smoothly transition between planning, grading and student communication all within Canvas.

Beyond content generation, Instructure also announced holistic updates that go even further in supporting institutions by partnering with them to develop their AI policies and plans, accelerate teaching and learning practices and implement their own transformative AI solutions. The company is making its new AI tools freely available for Canvas customers and working with AWS to safely, securely and efficiently scale to its community of tens of millions of educators and learners at more than 7,000 organizations around the world.

“With the LMS at the center of teaching and learning, Instructure is uniquely positioned to support institutions on their full AI journey,” said Vijiasingam. “Not only can we connect our customers with a vast ecosystem of integrated content and efficiency tools, but we can also accelerate key learning experience workflows and help them transform to a future where AI is a core part of everything they do.”

Instructure has published “AI nutrition fact” labels on all first- and third-party AI tools that integrate with its products, providing an unprecedented level of transparency into the LLMs and data policies of the tools in use. Nutrition facts on third-party AI tools are available on the Emerging AI Marketplace, giving institutions greater decision-making capability in service of safe technology use. "There are a lot of calls for AI regulation right now," said Ryan Lufkin, Instructure's VP of Global Academic Strategy. He described Instructure's pro-active, self-regulatory approach of identifying pros and cons of AI tools used in education. "We call it a nutrition facts label,' and we apply it to every AI tool that uses LTI to plug into Canvas." said Lufkin. "We provide users with answers to questions like: What language model are you using? Where is it hosted? What data are you ingesting? If administrators are considering different AI tools for education, they could compare the labels in a similar way that one might at a grocery store, and say, 'Oh, this one has better ingredients; I'll take that one.'"

Supporting the Lifelong Learner Journey: Portfolio and Journey

At InstructureCon 2024, one of the main announcements was Instructure's vision for lifelong learning, which includes providing users with an Integrated LMS, Portfolio, Credentialing and Journey (Learner Record). Instructure has been building this through the additions of Portfolium, Concentric Sky, Parchment and Scribbles. The company is continuing to invest in a new lifelong learning experience by bringing together portfolios and credentials into one learner view. This will enable achievements to be housed and ultimately recognized by institutions and employers. 

Canvas Catalog - Enterprise Storefront

Instructure is investing in Canvas Catalog to make lifelong learning initiatives more scalable and interoperable with customer CRMs, with Salesforce as its premier partner in this space. With user-defined fields designed to help identify monetization opportunities, institutions can better optimize course offerings. 

Credentials - Industry Standards Alignment

Instructure also reinforced its continued investment in standards alignment as it creates digital credentials. In the digital credentialing world, interoperability and compliance with industry standards will bolster scalability, security, privacy and validity. Instructure products will adhere to OB 3.0 and CLR 2.0 industry standards. 

Scaling Credentials Programs

Institutions need to scale credentialing programs across a wide range of courses and programs to better meet emerging learner needs. Instructure announced features to deliver more flexible, personalized lifelong learning experiences, including accessible pathways, removed badge requirements and removed course copy and blueprint. 

Mastery View College Prep Assessments
Institutions will save time and money otherwise spent on scanning, grading and printing by administering Mastery View College Prep Assessments online. Assessment item banks are immediately available for purchase separately as add-ons to Mastery Connect. Digital college readiness assessments are also now available, helping students prepare for high-stakes tests, such as the ACT, as they move to an online format.

The company also announced additional enhancements specifically connected to its Canvas product, including:

Discussion Summaries 

Educators can create customizable summaries of long and complex discussion threads, a feature especially useful for large-format classrooms.

Translation of Inbox Messages and Discussions 

Educators can leverage real-time, context-sensitive translation of content across 100 languages, an ideal feature for students who may not speak the language of instruction or for students who aren’t fluent in the course language.

Smart Search 

Smart Search allows users to search across Canvas course content while returning results that recognize the relationship between concepts—for example, searching for “guitar” will return results about violins because they’re both stringed instruments.

Smart Search API 

The Smart Search API vectorizes Canvas course content so that LLMs or third-party AI tools have the context they need to produce more relevant results. This API, the first of its kind in an LMS, is now available to customers and partners.

Institutional LLM-powered Features 

Instructors should have the flexibility to select the best tools for their instructional needs, so Instructure supports a seamless and safe experience as institutions integrate Canvas with their own LLMs. Instructure already enables several institution-driven self-hosted AI deployments, extending deeply embedded AI experiences within Canvas.

Intelligent Insights Product Launch

Instructure announced the launch of Intelligent Insights, which leverages AI and analytics to help educators make data-informed decisions that improve teaching and learning outcomes. With this new product, educators get insights about students in need of attention, course readiness, LTI usage and more. They can also use Ask Your Data, a conversational AI feature, to ask and answer questions in natural language.

Core Teaching & Learning Innovation

Instructure has developed a customer innovation program to drive a series of improvements to the Canvas experience. Over 60 product enhancements resulted, including improvements to everyday educator workflows, an optimized feedback loop, increased personalization and streamlined communication within Canvas LMS. In addition, new features will be available throughout the year including: 

EdTech Collective Marketplace

This public-facing Instructure EdTech Collective partner product directory will allow users to search for Canvas-integrated tools by relevant criteria including grade levels, subject and more. Listings for each product will include basic overviews plus important information about LTI configuration.

Canvas Apps Page

This central hub for LTI tool discovery and management will increase administrator efficiency and power informed edtech decision-making inside of Canvas. It includes comprehensive partner listings, recommendations and LTI configuration resources to help elevate the most effective tools as well as a streamlined LTI installation and management experience.

Expanded LTI Tool Usage Data and Analytics for Impact Customers 

By bringing LTI usage data into Impact, administrators will have access to actionable insights that help them drive engagement and best practices based on an understanding of how LTI tools are being used. Administrators can seamlessly launch campaigns within Impact to better support educators and students and get the most out of their edtech tools. 

InstructureCon 2024 took place last week in Las Vegas. It featured over 260 sessions and keynotes from Jimmy Chin, Mary Murphy and Dr. Jordan Nguyen who addressed some of the most impactful edtech trends and how to adapt to the modern learner journey.

For more information about last week's InstructureCon 2024, see the Frequently Asked Questions page and the event agenda.