Instructure to Use Microsoft Teams as a Default Conferencing Tool in Canvas

SALT LAKE CITY — October 14, 2020 — At its CanvasCon Online ed tech conference today, Instructure will announce that it is expanding a longtime collaboration with Microsoft with new integrated solutions including offering Microsoft Teams meetings as one of the default conferencing tools in Canvas. An improved and fully immersive Teams meetings experience in Canvas will be offered through a Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) app, allowing educators to create meetings, change meeting settings, and easily access meeting recordings from within Canvas. The integration will be offered to Canvas users free, with unlimited usage.

“This collaboration is going to be focused on creating more elegant, better integrated ways for students to learn, collaborate, and stay engaged,” said Mitch Benson, Chief Product Officer at Instructure. “We have an opportunity to enrich remote and hybrid learning not just in response to the challenges presented by the pandemic, but for the long-long-term.”

While Teams will become a default conferencing tool option inside Canvas, educators can conversely expect to see expansion of the social learning and collaboration workflows with an integration of Canvas back into Teams. Instructure and Microsoft are working together to bring Canvas assignments and quizzes directly into Teams meetings. When an educator wants their students to work on assignments together during class time, students are interacting with the Canvas content while the educator is controlling instruction and the flow of the meeting. Before, during, and after class, educators and students will be able to seamlessly use Canvas tools within their flow of work and collaboration in Teams.

Educators will see the flow of group and team information between Canvas and Teams for easier team creation and management. The solution will pair Teams with Canvas Courses and Sections.

“Working together, we can continue to develop equitable and powerful tools that help every learner reach their potential,” said Eran Megiddo, Corporate Vice President of Education and Modern Life Experiences at Microsoft. “These solutions are designed to support diverse learning styles and bring together everything teachers and students need for full classroom collaboration in remote, hybrid, and in-person learning environments.”

The two companies are working on additional integration projects that will more closely link Canvas to Teams and Microsoft 365 during the coming months, including:

• Automatic Teams + Canvas class pairing: This new Teams LTI solution allows educators to easily create class teams from within Canvas, enabling educators and students to efficiently use both solutions in the classroom.  
• Reimagining OneDrive and Teams for Canvas: Microsoft is working on a more easily accessible integration of OneDrive and Teams files within Canvas. This will enable educators and students to easily create, share, co-author, and collaborate on lessons, assignments, and other instructional materials – all without leaving Canvas.

In addition to these integration projects, Immersive Reader integration will continue in Canvas with Instructure supporting the beta implementation and, working with Microsoft, exploring ways to more broadly enable it across Canvas over the coming year. The Immersive Reader is a tool that implements proven techniques to improve reading and writing for people regardless of their age or ability. Through it students can have text read aloud -- sped up or slowed down to their preference -- and played back in more than 40 languages. A picture dictionary is available to help recognize words, get help with pronunciation through syllabified words, and identify parts of speech including verbs, nouns. Students can also translate text in over 70 languages.