Instructure Product Updates at EDUCAUSE

We are excited to see you at EDUCAUSE this year! Now more than ever, educators and administrators are eager for insights on what’s next for higher education. As usual, Instructure will be there, so be sure to stop by our booth (#12085). We’re excited to connect with customers and show the progress we’ve made since our big announcements at InstructureCon earlier this year. Our updates span across Instructure’s entire product portfolio and are focused on the following areas: 

• Elevating Daily Educator Workflows: These enhancements, based on your feedback, are designed to optimize your core Canvas experience.
• Revolutionizing Teaching and Learning: Our updates in this area introduce exciting innovations, such as AI integration, strategic partnerships, and more captivating teaching and learning experiences.
• Maximizing Edtech Effectiveness: These updates are tailored to assist you in optimizing edtech efficiency and adoption within your institution.
• Fostering Lifelong Learning: Our updates in this category are dedicated to supporting today's learners in their educational journeys and career readiness.

As many of you saw in our first Instructure New and Next webinar last month, there are too many things to include in one post, so below is a sample of the exciting features we have been working on:

Khan Academy Teacher Tools

We recently announced that Khanmigo Teacher Tools is now available in Canvas for US K-12 and higher education institutions. As a planning ally and instructional collaborator, Khanmigo leverages Khan Academy content to simplify AI for educators and generate high-quality, trustworthy outputs. This integration includes access to 20+ tools in Canvas, which help you plan lessons, generate questions, draft newsletters, write IEPs, and more. Common uses include brainstorming engaging lessons, differentiating instruction for all learners, and prepping substitutes with ready-to-go materials. By accessing Khanmigo from Canvas, you can smoothly transition between planning, grading, and student communication without switching tabs, all within the platform you know and love. Elevate your teaching with the combined power of Canvas and Khanmigo Teacher Tools. Here are some of the features available: 

• Letters of Recommendation: Quickly generate personalized letters of recommendation to support your students’ goals.
• Discussion Prompts: Craft engaging prompts to stimulate meaningful discussions, on or off Canvas.
• Rubric Generator: Design clear, detailed grading rubrics to set expectations and simplify scoring. 
• Make it Relevant: Link lesson content to students’ lives and interests to boost engagement. 
• Exit Ticket: Create quick end-of-class activities to check for student understanding. 

Enhancements to SpeedGrader:

Enhancements to SpeedGrader will allow educators to give more personalized, concrete feedback to their learners and more seamlessly include supplementary resources to further learning. This will bolster the ability to provide accessible, impactful interactions between educators and students. No steps are needed to begin using SpeedGrader features. 

Assigning Modules

Educators can now assign entire modules, pages, quizzes, assignments, graded and ungraded discussions to individual students and sections. Granting educators additional control over course object availability can lead to more effective differentiated instruction and personalized learning experiences for every student. 

New Quiz Updates

With recent improvements to New Quizzes, we are making progress on content sharing and outcome alignment, which provides better scalability for New Quizzes use and practices across an institution. We’ve already gotten positive feedback from users.

Enhanced Rubrics (Phase 1)

The redesign of Canvas Rubric contains a cleaner interface and improved functionality, including drag-and-drop for rating order or criterion arrangement, copying or duplicating criteria, and “low to high” or “high to low” ordering. Users are excited to enable easier workflows for creation and marking, facilitating consistency and fair evaluation.

The initial phase of Enhanced Rubrics not only allows for a cleaner educator experience in designing and organizing rubrics in Canvas, but it allows for easier evaluation, and more intuitive marking, and will help educator efforts in equitable evaluation. It also sets up subsequent phases of Rubric Enhancements, so that these user experience changes will allow for self-assessment and other improvements to make it easier for learners to evaluate their own learning.

Discussion Checkpoints

Multiple due dates (or checkpoints) in Discussions can foster better collaboration, accountability, and more critical thinking among students. It also supports common educator workflows and needs to differentiate evaluation across initial responses and replies. We’re excited to announce we are in the final stages of the development for this feature! You can learn more in our recent blog post, and be sure to follow the Release Notes for updates.

AI Update: Smart Search

Smart Search allows users to search Canvas course content using semantic algorithms and AI embeddings. This feature makes searching Canvas course content more efficient for students and teachers and is available now. Root Account Administrators can enable “Smart Search” as a feature preview, and it can be set to enabled/disabled and locked/unlocked, depending on your preference.

AI Update: Discussion Summaries

Discussion Summaries provide educator-facing summaries of key points and questions in their discussions. They accelerate educators' ability to grasp central themes and questions emerging from discussion threads. Root Account Administrators can enable “Discussion Summary” as a feature preview. It can be set to enable/disable and locked/unlocked, depending on your preference.

Lucid Integration with Canvas

This exclusive partnership allows for more collaborative and engaging learning opportunities within Canvas. It can better facilitate personalized learning while saving teachers time, all while giving students a deeper understanding of key concepts. This free integration with Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite is available in the Rich Content Editor, external tool assignments, and the Course Navigation. If the Lucid integration is not already enabled for your institution by default, it can be added just as any LTI 1.3 via Developer Keys. Find more information about Lucid through this resource hub. Also, be sure to check out Lucid’s EDUCAUSE presentation on Wednesday at noon. 

Analytics Hub

Analytics Hub is a new, one-stop-shop UI for Admins to access all of the reporting available to them across Instructure products. This includes both standard and advanced offerings. Administrators now have a consolidated place to view their reporting features, increasing educational impact through access to a range of Insights. Analytics Hub is now live, and no steps are needed to begin using this new feature.

Intelligent Insights

This new offering contains robust, actionable dashboards, including Course Readiness, Students in Need of Attention, LTI Usage, and Ask Your Data. Administrators can make data-informed decisions that can significantly improve course effectiveness, academic performance, and retention rates. A new query tool powered by conversational AI enables administrators to ask and answer questions about data in natural language. Intelligent Insights is available now. To explore this paid offering further, please reach out to your CSM or account executive for more information. Also, if you’re at EDUCAUSE, be sure to come to our booth sessions that are happening throughout the conference. We’ll hold a session on Intelligent Insights at our booth on Tuesday at 12:30 pm. 

We hope to see you at EDUCAUSE! As always, please reach out to us with any questions or feedback.