How Impact by Instructure drives adoption and increases student engagement

Institutions put a lot of effort into training, communication, instructional design, and support, but are often challenged to quantitatively understand their effect on technology usage and student engagement. Impact by Instructure’s insightful dashboards and dynamic reporting provide a bird’s eye view of how well students and faculty are engaging with available edtech tools. As the education sector becomes more reliant on technology and we see a shift toward blended and online learning, it is crucial that institutions are choosing technology that keeps students engaged and positively impacts student success.

The first step to increasing student engagement with a platform is to understand platform utilisation. The second, and often more difficult to navigate step, is finding a way to address underutilisation. Most tools will be able to provide data on how users are engaging with the tool, but often institutions are provided with more data than they need and are left wondering how to use this data effectively. Impact by Instructure empowers administrators to drive adoption by providing data in an easy-to-read dashboard and offering a solution to addressing underutilisation. With Impact, institutions are not just armed with the facts but have a way to make positive change. 

Understanding utilisation

Impact by Instructure provides Insights into the usage of your Canvas LMS by tracking over 300 different monitors within the platform. Administrators have access to a real-time view of the adoption of Canvas and the LTIs that they have integrated into the platform to see what is being used and what is being ignored. By using Impact’s adoption dashboard, administrators can even calculate the cost of each platform per user and have a good understanding of each platform’s Return on Investment (ROI.) 

Once administrators have a clear picture of areas of low adoption within the platform, they can work on increasing usage and re-evaluating which tools are a necessary part of their technology ecosystem.

The outcome of these reports can be used by upper management to offer a guide for the direction that Saxion should take, allowing us to use existing and new functionalities better.
Ruud Koopmans & Chrissy Holthausen - Functional Application Manager and ICT & Education team members at Saxion University of Applied Sciences

Targeted Communication

Armed with all the data, the next step is taking action. With Impact, all data is fully actionable so admins can place messages inside of Canvas and drive the adoption of underutilised areas of Canvas. Hint messages are connected to specific buttons or pages within Canvas, promoting the tool and letting them know why it’s important. 

We often hear how easy it is to find out exactly how to do something using the Canvas Guides but Impact by Instructure brings the guides and tutorials directly into the user’s reach. For example, they can learn how to use Canvas Studio as soon as they click the Studio icon. 

Impact saves students and educators time and helps avoid the frustration that can come with not finding the information they are looking for. These targeted messages also serve to proactively provide the first level of support for people using the platform. One key benefit is the personalised user experience Impact provides as support tabs are contextual and role sensitive, meaning the help items that are suggested are specific to the tools that the user is clicking into. This allows both educators and students to get the most out of the platform as they are offered helpful suggestions that are relevant to the kind of activities they will be performing in the platform. 

Impact is the tool every institution needs to maximise the adoption of Canvas for both students and staff and to reduce the number of support queries for administrators to deal with. Find out more about how Impact can help your institution by reading our Guide.