Opening Keynote: Together We Thrive- Welcome to the Ed-cosystem

Welcome. I'm doctor Kavitha Dharmaraju, founder of the brand new Ecological Exploration Society, a club for like minded educators and academics who've pledged themselves to the pursuit of lifelong teaching and learning. You see, ever since I was a child, I've been fascinated by the mythological concept of the perfect teaching method. One approach that could reach and shape the minds of all. This quest took me to the far reaches of the world, interacting with all walks of life from the most passionate of instructors to the most docile of students. And after many grueling years, many sleepless nights, many chalkboards stained with the white dust of conclusions written and erased a thousand times over, I finally arrived at the solution I was searching for.

There is no perfect way to teach. Every student is different. And in my desire to reach the many, I lost sight of what was most important, the one. And so my goals changed. If there couldn't be a perfect method, perhaps there could be a perfect place, league for teachers, a club where they could gather, share their knowledge, empower each other with the strategies and ideas needed to reach any individual who stepped into their class.

And so on May eight eighteen eighty seven, the Ecological Exploration Society was formed. But if you're watching this, you already know all that considering you're our newest recruits. You've made it through a rigorous screening process, numerous background checks, and have arrived here at initiation week, a final opportunity to interact with current members, mingle with peers, and prove you are ecological Exploration Society material. Now you may be asking yourself, what can I do to prove I'm an EES material? To which I say, explore the ecosystem. All around this vicinity, you'll find experiences ranging from demos at our expo hall, keynotes on the main stage, and breakout sessions led by your peers and colleagues.

And for those more adventurous, perhaps you'll find yourself treasure hunting for the coveted panda idol of knowledge. The point is, there's no shortage of things to do during initiation week, so let your hearts and minds lead the way. Just be considerate of both yourself and your fellow explorers as the EES is not liable for any damage you may cause. But before I let you go, there is one last piece of information you need to know, the Ecological Exploration Society's secret handshake. If at any time a fellow recruit initiates the salute, it is an ecological explorer's responsibility to complete it.

The initiator beginning 'voye scientiam' to which the responder replies 'communica scientiam' and then they finish it up with the shake. And remember, if at any time you forget the club motto, it's located on the hard side strap of your explorer's backpack. So once again, welcome to what I very much hope is the first of many visits Ecological Exploration Society. It is my honor to shake your hand and send you on your way. You're going to fit in great.

Please welcome to the stage the CEO of Instructure, Steve Daley. Welcome. Welcome to initiation week for the ecological oh, I can't even say it. Exploration Society. I practiced that so many times in my room.

Can you believe that my great grandfather was one of the founding members? Handsome guy, wasn't he, with that big old mustache? I still got glue stuck right here for that one. We're we're really excited to have you, and thank you for coming and spending this week with us. Each of you brings a light with you. Each of you brings a, an understanding of education and and a desire to learn and become better, and to work together with us. The lights that you bring as educators, however, only reach as far as you reach.

But when we can come together, like we are here today, then we can do many things together. And this is where the lights come on on your little badges, if you didn't notice that. There we go. Yeah. We'll talk a little bit about that in a little in a minute.

One of the really cool things is, first of all, there are over three thousand people here today for InstructureCon. This is the largest InstructureCon that we've ever held. Super exciting. And what's even more impressive to me is that there are a hundred thirty eight institutions here that sent five or more of your colleagues here. Awesome.

An investment. And we take that investment, very seriously that that we can we will provide, value this week. What's even more you know? Well, first of all, let's give a shout out to Arizona State University. They had the most attendees. That's all the ASU people, as well as Florida International who who came in close second.

What's what's even more impressive to me is that there are three hundred and eighty nine speaker sessions, and this is three hundred and eighty nine non Instructure speakers. Your peers, your colleagues, your friends that have taken the time and the effort to share with you their best practices, the things that they've learned, and the successes that they've had using our technology. And hopefully, you'll be able to take from that as you get some inspiration, as you think about ways that you can use technology, in your own environments. Thank you. First of all, let's have all the presenters stand, if you don't mind.

Here we go. Yes. Let's give them a hand. Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you for helping make this such a great event. And I love our community. This year, we passed over two million, members of our community. That's massive. Massive community of people that's really that are dedicated and committed to using technology to help improve teaching and learning.

Truly, when you join the Instructure community, you're not just joining a company that makes great products, but you're joining a whole family of people, not just fifteen hundred employees at Instructure, but two million in our family that's there to help help you be successful, in your implementation of technology. And this family reunion that we call InstructureCon would not be possible if it weren't for the great partners that we have. And in fact, if if, if they weren't here with us today, we wouldn't be able to put on such a fantastic week together. We have almost actually, we have just over a thousand partners now in the EdTech Collective. Sixty five of them are here.

And if you haven't been down on the floor, I was down there just a little while ago. It's amazing, and I always love walking around and looking at all the booths and all the innovation that's happening within our ecosystem here. I particularly wanna call out our diamond sponsors, which is k sixteen solutions, Lincoln Learning, and AWS for their help. Truly, without these partners, we couldn't do the and have the event that we're gonna have this week. So let's give them a hand too.

We brought back the educational moments of the future exhibit this year, and we have some new demos in there. So if you're interested in in, you know, our take on where we see some of the technology going into the future, please come and visit the, the exhibit. There's some really cool things happening in there. But over the next few days, we're gonna talk about some of the areas that we're investing in and some of the things that we care about. One of the areas that we're gonna focus on is this idea of lifelong learning.

And in fact, we're gonna talk a little bit about how it's evolving and how we can help in that process of lifelong learning. We're gonna have time with, Mitch Benson, our chief strategy office officer today, as well as a fan, which is his wife, as well as Matt Patinsky, who's the CEO of Parchment, are gonna be on here in just a just a few minutes to talk about, talk about lifelong learning. Tomorrow, we'll have our product leaders up here. They'll talk a little bit about the roadmap, about the innovation that we're doing inside of the core, as well as talking about how a thoughtful and, responsible approach to implementing AI can actually help, improve personal connection and help in the teaching and learning process and connect teachers with with learners. So you hear a lot about AI, during this conference as well.

But ultimately, what we wanna share with you is why we see Instructure as the ecosystem that powers learning for a lifetime and ultimately that connects those learners with, opportunities. Now, my you know, four years ago, I took the role here as CEO of Instructure. And for my journey, it's, you know, it's been fantastic. So I spent a lot of time, I met with a lot of you as part of my onboarding, process, and, I felt a tremendous responsibility after talking with you to help shepherd the company through some some really interesting times. So when we started, you know, the first couple years I was here, we were all just hunkering down, trying to figure out how do we, you know, in the face of a of a huge load on our platform, on our people, on our systems, our processes.

How could we be there for you as you're dealing with these incredibly complex challenges that we were all facing during the global pandemic. The last couple of years, we've been really focused on how do we make investments in the core technology, but also how do we bring more technology to bear on some of the problems and some of the challenges and opportunities that we see in an in an ever evolving educational landscape. But for me, the the most exciting part of this last four year journey for me has been, some of the stories that I've heard as I've spent time with with all of y'all. So whether it's a teacher that I, I was talking to, it was last summer. She was she'd been a teacher for about twenty eight, twenty five years, and she explained to me that she was not really excited about technology in the classroom, but how happy and how grateful she was to the administrators who really forced all the teachers to start to adopt Canvas and gave her the resources to learn how to use it and implement it, because now she feels like she can reach so many more students with her mindfulness class that, you know, in the face of really real challenges within her district, for mental health, she feels like she can have much more of an impact.

Or the student athlete that I just met, just a few weeks ago who was just just over the moon excited because the the her district had adopted, adopted technology in the learning in the learning environment and how she was so glad that she could stay up with her her schoolwork while she was really challenged with her travel schedule for her soccer club. Or one that's really close and personal to me is, my niece. My niece grew up in a in a family that really did not value education and really did not have an expectation of her to continue education after she graduated from high school, didn't give her any of the tools to be successful, but she unexpectedly had an opportunity to go to to college. And as I talked to her about that experience, she was so grateful. This was at Utah Valley University.

She was so grateful that the professors that she that that she took classes from had fully utilized technology in the process of learning and and really, really embraced it. So things that were as simple to her as the to do list in Canvas, right, for her was a a lifesaver in helping her. She was learning study skills. She was learning how to prioritize her work and how to how to be a student and giving her at least a fighting chance to be successful in a very unexpected and, unprepared learning journey for her. So, you know, the common thread through all of these stories, the one that matters the most, though, is you.

So within each of these stories are our educators, our, administrators, our partners, our friends, you are the one that makes a difference in the Instructure ecological fuck it. Fuck me. Never gonna get it. Instructure, edcological, whatever or anything. Ed ecosystem, whatever that is.

So you are the ones that are impacting student lives, you are the ones that are helping to shape the future, and you are the ones that are change you know, really passionate about changing the world, And you're the reason why we have this conference every year. You're the reason why, frankly, Instructure is here, and we are a company. So with that, I'd really love to give yourself applause for the work that you're doing, and thank you for inviting us on this journey with you. And speaking of educators that are making an impact, it's my great pleasure now to welcome onto the stage the superintendent Ebert, who's the Nevada superintendent of public instruction. Please join me in welcoming superintendent Ebert.

Yeah. Great. Good afternoon. Oh, come on. This is the hottest conference in the nation.

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Yes. Here we go. I am so excited to be here with you.

And as Steve said, a huge thank you to coming to the great state of Nevada. I do have the honor of serving as the state superintendent in public instruction for p k twelve. My colleague, interim chancellor, Patty, Patty Charlton was not able to be here, but we were both going to come out together because what is so beautiful about our partnership is that we have a partnership p k twenty with Instructure. It is a lovely partnership, and we're very, very thankful. And to give you a little taste of Nevada while you're here, our system, we have five hundred thousand p k twelve students in our state.

We have seventeen school districts. I know some of you come from North Carolina, Florida, all sorts of other parts of our great nation, and there are so many more school districts in other states. In Nevada, we are county school districts. And so we have here Clark County. It is the fifth yes, you can whoot.

You absolutely can whoot. Clark County School District, it is the fifth largest school district in the nation. It covers eight thousand square miles. I know. So you think about it most people think of Las Vegas as being Southern Nevada and the school district, but it goes all the way down to Laughlin.

It actually has a two room schoolhouse. And how do you serve students over eight thousand square miles? You do it with great educators. And so, I want to take a moment and thank where are our k twelve folks? There we go. Yes. Thank you for turning up the lights.

Thank you for what you do for children each and every day. Our higher education, where are you? There we go. Thank you for building great humans, which will come and make a better universe for all of us. And then our other partners, where's our other everyone else that didn't get to Woot earlier. If you want to Woot with them, where are you? There we go.

Thank you. Nonprofit, corporate. All of us coming together is what's going to move this entire nation forward. So thank you for being here. Our higher education system, we have eight institutions.

We're very, very proud of the work that they all do and very thankful. In closing and welcoming you here today to our great state of Nevada, there is a way to say the state's name. Those are the view from Nevada, it is called? Nevada. We don't even say that other word. So we're gonna practice.

One, two, three. Nevada. Yay. Welcome to our great state. Home needs Nevada to all of us.

I wanna thank the Clark County School District volunteers that are here, that are making the conference for all of you. There are teachers that are on their break that are here volunteering. So thank you for what you do each and every day. Hell means Nevada. Thank you for bringing the conference here.

I hope to spend time with all of you. Enjoy your time. Thank you. Well, thank you, superintendent Ebert. This is, this has been this is awesome.

And, you know, last year we ran out of space, and and we couldn't, we had to kinda cap our attendance. So the fact that we can bring everybody here. Also, you know, I've always wondered what it's like to live on the surface of the sun. So thank you for that experience. I now know.

But as we, as we move forward and we and I think about my learning journey here at Instructure, it's my distinct pleasure to offer, to, to bring on to stage a person that had a huge impact on my, on my personal journey here at Instructure, our chief strategy officer, Mitch Benson. I've got one. You have one? Oh, you got one. I do give you that. K.

Perfect. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. We'll talk more about these in a few minutes. This is like my favorite time of year, and not because it's a hundred and twenty eight degrees outside.

That joke's not gonna get old, I'm sure, by the time this is over. All of us talking about the heat. As Steve said, my name is Mitch and I'm the Chief Strategy Officer here at Instructure. Welcome. It is very, very hard to see all of you.

But this is a big crowd with standing room only in the back. So, for those of you that are standing up, thanks for, thanks for making the effort. I've had a number of roles, over the years in Instructure. I've met a lot of people, had a lot of conversations about what this company means, to you, to us. It may sound a little goofy, but I I really believe, that companies have souls.

A lot of it contributed to and built by the people that are here, the people that are here in this room and the now more than forty million users that show up every month on the platform. The more than by some unofficial account, so nobody quote me, probably more than two hundred million people that have used Canvas in particular over the years. Over the last fifteen years, this has turned into something, pretty special. In my role as the chief strategy officer, it's sort of it's a lot of things, but it's a couple of things, really. One, it's historian, so I get to tell a few of the stories and the lore having been here now for, a little over ten years.

And also, again, thinking about the future. Thinking about where we're headed and where we're going. And all of that conversation stays grounded in our values. Thus, the cookies, the values of openness. You all appreciate that? You believe that to be true that this company started with an open ethos, one that welcomed everybody in, all of the partners, all of the tools, all of the people, all of the capabilities that allowed you to construct, an environment that was useful for the one, for those people, for those students that show up in the classroom.

It was founded on relationships. I count many, many, many of you friends and for those that I don't know yet, welcome. We'll be friends soon. On equality, giving everybody as, superintendent Ebert talked about, the ability across eight thousand square miles to deliver an education, and to deliver it at scale. Ownership.

And I don't think you'll meet a person that works for this company, never mind all of you who are users of the software who don't express some level of ownership over who we are, what we've built, where it's going. And finally, simplicity. And that means a lot of things to a lot of people, but the foundation of this company was on taking all of the things that were wildly complex and making them much, much, much easier for you to do. You know, I've learned a lot, over the course of my life, and certainly during my middle school and high school years, about living a principled life, one grounded in values. And that really started during those, those middle years, when I was a student in the great state of Iowa.

Where are my Iowans? Hands in the air, please, all of you who are from Iowa, because we have some gifts, by the way. Some golden Oreos that will be making their way out to you. One is a reminder, of those principles and values. Again, where are you all at? Hands in the air. There's some Oreos that are gonna be making their way out to you.

Really? We're bringing you cookies. But also because as you saw in the opening video, right, the treasure hunt for the golden panda, not everybody's going to get one, but a lot of you can have golden Oreos. So there's a lot to be learned about succeeding or failing, when you're a middle schooler and a high schooler in the great state of Iowa, which might rival in a much different way, the weather in Las Vegas today. Because when it's a hundred degrees with a hundred percent humidity and you're standing in a bucket in the middle of a cornfield picking tassels off of corn hour after hour after hour for a dollar fifty an hour, you learn a few things, Right? About what it takes to live, that life. Last year, we talked a lot a lot a lot about openness, and maybe not in ways that make, are immediately, obvious to everybody.

You heard a lot about people's whys, why they're here, a lot of your whys, a lot of our whys, why we do the work that we do, why we've built what we built. And those whys we talked about self care. Right? There was time on stage with some noted presenters talking about how to take care of yourselves because it's critically important. We talked about boundaries. We talked about ways that we can keep our buckets filled.

You heard Steve make a joke a few minutes ago. This company has given me a lot of things. It's allowed me to fill my bucket over and over and over again. If you don't have the book, you should go find it. A quick Amazon search will reveal for you a book called Have You Filled a Bucket Today? It's a children's book, that talks about all the ways that we can keep our buckets full because those of us with full buckets have the ability to fill everybody else's.

Perhaps the most important thing that it's given me, as Steve mentioned earlier, my lovely wife and two children. Of the four that I have, two that I never expected to have, I love you guys dearly. Thank you. But this year, we get to talk a lot about relationships. That second in that set of values in the Oreos.

We're gonna have a lot of conversations about relationships, and we're gonna ground those conversations, not only in those values that guide our behavior, our Oreos, but in a vision for this company moving forward. This company has stood for a lot of things over the years. I'm sure it has a great deal of meaning to you, but as we talk about the things that we have working for us. Right? We have, in all our own ways, been educators, been driven by a mission. We're educators, we're learners, we're leaders, we're supporters, along these educational journeys for every student that we come into contact with.

We're also, all of us, right, a large and growing community of very passionate users of the software that we've built. Right? We're also a very solid and stable business. I can't count over my thirty years of doing this, the number of lovely companies with beautiful human beings who've showed up with brilliant solutions and convinced me when I was a public servant that this was going to solve problems only for a year later for that company to be gone. This is a company that's built for the long haul, right, that is durable and financially sound that you can count on as a partner in accomplishing those mission, and those objectives that are that are critically important to you. We're also a group of nearly now a thousand strong partners who are here to support you in accomplishing those same missions and objectives equally compelled and of similar mind, right, to solve the problems that you need to have, solved.

So, what I'd like to do is introduce you to what we believe to be the compelling new vision for this company moving forward, to foster an ecosystem that powers learning for a lifetime and turns that learning into opportunities. How do we feel about that? Yes? Look, it should be clear that there are three big ideas in that vision, and and we're going to talk about each of those three, in in in due course here. The first is, fostering that ecosystem. And that ecosystem is open. It's flexible.

It's safe and secure. It's modern, it's simple. You hear some of those values reflected in the way that we think about the products and the solutions that this company's built. You know, we took Canvas, the first product that we built. We took it to higher ed.

We took it to K-twelve. We took it around the globe, many non US locations to, again, by unofficial estimates, nearly two hundred million learners, including now, not a term that we coined, but something that I actually enjoy saying, Canvas natives. Folks who started early in their school career as Canvas users, who went to college, right, and took their college studies, as Canvas users, who probably earned their teaching degree using Canvas and built some of their very first lessons using Canvas, who returned to the classroom and are teaching using Canvas. And we hear all the time from people who say, this piece of software, and more importantly, your team, this company, and my colleagues, all three thousand of you and the other forty million that show up every month, are the people that build, my confidence as a teacher, right, in using those tools that I've used across my entire lifespan. Along the way, we've added things like studio.

Right? Management and video management capability, making it interactive for lessons. We added compelling assessment capabilities for k twelve. We delivered scale and new capabilities that kept you all alive and functional during those, in some cases, more than two years of remote learning. I heard a lot from many of you about the importance of Canvas, and how important it was to your success during and after the pandemic. I consider that personally, to be one of the proudest moments for me and for the company that we kept you all learning during that period of time.

We provided increasingly intelligent access to data and analytics. There are more and more institutions and more and more learners who were joining this family, every single day. We've added badging and credentialing, portfolios. Right? A universe of applications that help us, solve more and more and more of your problems and meet learners wherever they are across the journey that they're having. And all of this helps us say we're going to do number two, right, which is powering learning for a lifetime.

I'm gonna move quickly, but I wanted to to share sort of my personal journey as it relates to this educational, experience that I've had over the course of the last, you know, fifty one years. I went to seven different schools in five different states before I hit that, eighth grade year of middle school in Iowa. It's a lot of places to, to be a learner and to be a little one. I graduated high school. I went to college.

I knocked on the front door. I applied. I got accepted. I got a scholarship. I went to college for two years before I dropped out of college because that experience wasn't for me and, because I didn't have any money.

So, I went to work for, well, the rest of my life, it would seem. I reentered college as a full time student, but I didn't do it during the day. I did it at night so that I could complete that baccalaureate degree, that bachelor's degree. Where are my friends from Washington? The university thereof to start with. We got some cookies for you too.

My alma mater for my undergraduate degree at the University Washington. And how about the rest of you who are from the great state of Washington, where I spent the first half of my career as a public servant? We'll get some cookies over there too here in a few minutes. And where, I spent the first half of my career in, in public service in the state of Washington, before I moved, to Utah. And during that period of time, I decided that some executive education was important. There are a few of you here from Stanford in the Graduate School of Business.

Thank you very much for, the summer I spent there as a fellow at the Center for Social Innovation learning how to run not for profit businesses. Not an objective today, by the way. But it was a pretty powerful experience, also nontraditional in the sense, but this circuitous path that I seem to follow didn't stop there. I also wanted to get an advanced degree, but I also didn't wanna do it working in this domain in the way that everybody might expect, which was to go back to the great state of Washington and the University of Washington and get an MBA. But I got a technical degree from there should be one attendee in the audience from my alma mater, which is Capella, where I earned a master of science at night while I was also raising a family.

So thank you very much for that opportunity as well. So look, what if in that entire process there was consistency of experience, right, between all the institutions and during all of the transitions? When I had to move those schools as a young kid, when I graduated high school and went to a traditional college, when I dropped out of college and decided I needed to go back, or as a professional looking to expand my skills or to get an advanced degree. Each part of this ecosystem that we've built together can and should support that agenda. And so over the course of the next few days, we're gonna talk about how that hard to navigate system can be made easier, how we can reduce the friction, how we can put all parts of these networks and these systems together in service of the learner. You're going to hear about what we're doing with our solutions to power, learning across a lifetime.

Some nascent, some more mature, and many that are involving our partners. And perhaps more importantly, you're going to hear from each other, right, about how you're solving those particular problems. We'll share our progress and capabilities across the core LMS, across the other products that we've built, assessment management, data and insights, many again directly from you and some from us. Broader for support for accessibility. As many of you know, one of those capabilities that's, again based in that equality that's near and dear to my heart.

We're gonna talk a lot about AI, the sea change that it represents, and how it is that we can do that responsibly. How we can use it to further those values, accelerate our objectives, and how how we can have a greater impact, with the work that we do. So I'd encourage each of you to pay close attention to the main stage and to pay close attention to, the things that, that happen in our super sessions and those three hundred and eighty some odd sessions that that Steve talked about. Let's turn our attention quickly to the final piece of our, vision, and that is turning learning into opportunities. When I think along, back along my path where I've come, again, that very sort of circuitous route, And I think what I have to show for it today, and my apologies to my Microsoft friends in the audience who've sponsored this conference my friends and family, is a poorly documented record of my accomplishments as in job titles on the world's largest business and employment focused social network.

That's it. We can do better. And I think in many ways, my personal history in these, little anecdotes set us up for, a really solid conversation about where we want to head. Whether it's from k twelve to higher ed, k twelve to k twelve, out of higher ed, back into higher ed, the professional learning opportunities that might exist. Each transition requires some sort of record, some documentation.

Right? Some support. The world in which we live and the people that we serve deserve a connected ecosystem to solve those particular problems, to decrease the friction. Right? That knows about me personally, what I've accomplished, what I've done, has a record not only of it as simple text, but as a portfolio, a representation of the good work that I can bring along. It's verifiable for folks who need to understand that that was actually work that was done. It's portable.

And most importantly, it's mine. That is the power of the network that we've built. Right? And it gives us a much more complete view of the learner, gives the learner a much more complete view of themselves, and is at the very underlying, sort of floor of why it is that, we've added parchment to our family of products. So rather than me telling you about that, the combination of these businesses and sort of the opportunity in front of us, I'd like to take, a seat backstage, probably get out of these very hot waiters, and invite onto the stage the CEO of Parchment to tell you all about that, Matt Patinsky. Ready? Our secret handshake.

Indeed. This and that. Perfect. Thank you. Thanks, Matt.

Thank you, Mitch. Thank you everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I must say seeing, Steve's costume and Mitch's costume makes me feel profound relief because when they told me you're gonna give the keynote in a boy scout outfit, I thought it was like a fifty percent chance it was a hazing ritual for the newbie. So I'm feeling a lot more comfortable in my skin.

I I live in Arizona. Where are the folks from Arizona? Alright. I have nothing to give you except continued continued access to air conditioning, which is kind of our love language, like with water and scorpion repellent. That's pretty pretty much Arizona. But it is a it is an absolute pleasure to be here.

I I'm also feeling a little bit awkward. I have to be honest. It's weird that I'm giving this keynote. Like I in particular am giving a keynote at InstructureCon. And so what I want to do is explain why it is weird because in addition to it being weird, it is also why I think it is super, super exciting that Parchment is part of Instructure and why these two organizations make sense together.

So in the theme of journeys and edco systems and I said it, edco system. And and and all of that great imagination that the amazing Instructure marketing team put together, I want to take you through a little bit of a journey which starts in nineteen ninety seven. In nineteen ninety seven, actually in April of nineteen ninety seven, I had the incredible fortune of spending four weeks at Sonoma State University participating, Sonoma State, participating in the founding workshop of what was then called the Instructional Management Systems Project. And you might recognize that because then it became known as IMS and then it became known as One EdTech. And those four weeks were incredible.

In many ways, it was sort of the beginning of the learning management system market because, of course, instructional management systems then became course management systems then became learning management systems. IMS was run by the, National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, which was part of Educom. So this is before Educom and COS merged to to create Educaus. And really, the founding figure is a woman named Carol Twigg who and I don't know if anyone sort of remembers Carol, works with Carol, but I really think of her as the founding figure of our entire field. And there were four big ideas at the time that IMS got founded.

The first big idea is that the internet would be a incredible transformational medium for teaching and learning. The second big idea is that for schools and universities and professional organizations to deliver education, they would need a new category of software. They would need kind of an orchestration layer that would give instructors an interface to be able to assemble the discipline specific tools and the pedagogically specific tools and then just the generic tools like a grade book or an assessment engine that they need to deliver great learning. A whole new software category was going to be born. The third big idea and Mitch touched on this is that it had to from the beginning be open and it had to be standards based.

Because if you think about an instructor bringing all of these tools together, instructors are not systems integrators. Teachers are not system integrators. Faculty are not systems integrators. These things have to be interoperable. They just have to work seamlessly for the instructor and for the learner.

Hence, what IMS evolved into as one ed tech, a standards organization. And then lots of woots. And then the last big idea, which I actually credit Carol to in particular, is that the measuring stick of e learning should not be is it as good as a traditional classroom, it should be is it ten x better? Is it ten x more accessible? Is it ten x higher quality? Is it ten x more efficient? Is the cost model transformed? That was the vision of IMS. Now, a couple of months later, in June of nineteen ninety seven, off that experience, I cofounded a software company called Blackboard. Do you now understand why it's a little weird that I'm standing up on this stage? I was, joking earlier that it's kind of like you walk into a Jersey Mike and there's Jimmy John making the sandwiches.

I'm here every Tuesday. I always wanted to play Vegas, so I can't go over my time though. Like, the skills are transferrable, but it's kind of awkward. It's unexpected. So, co founded Blackboard and we're in that black and white photo.

But of course, we weren't the only learning management system in nineteen ninety seven. Murray Goldberg had created WebCT. There was Learning Space on Lotus, Real Education, Web Course in a Box. There were many kind of moving along, the journey at the beginning of our category. Also in nineteen ninety seven, ACRA, which is the Association of Admissions released the first white paper about electronic student records, not just about the efficiency of moving, credentials to digital and data, but also the opportunity to enrich those credentials and connect them to learner pathways.

And then finally, in nineteen ninety seven, I also met my wife, which has nothing to do with this talk, except it would feel weird to talk about the most important thing that happened in nineteen ninety seven, and not have it. And that's my mom in between. She's a retired public school teacher. I will pick up the pace. Over the next couple of years, I had the opportunity to sit in the front row as the e learning world, developed.

And I noticed four things that kind of bothered me, excited me but bothered me, and kind of had me thinking a little bit. The first one was we could see that learning management systems were being adopted by k twelve and higher ed and workforce and professional learning, so students were progressing and using LMSs across each of those stages, but there was no persistence layer. They didn't exist. They had no agency. There was no account that stayed with them.

They just became new users every time they interacted with the LMS. And we know learning is social, but it's also cumulative. It's progressive. And that just seemed weird that it was so disconnected for the learner. Second, that with the growth of a category like the LMS, the aperture broadened and deepened.

The student information system only knows courses and credits and grades, but the LMS knows competencies and skills and artifacts. And yet that richer set of data wasn't necessarily feeding the academic record, wasn't feeding the credentials that learners use to turn their education into opportunity. A reason for that, third, was that credentials were still analog. Transcripts, for example, were still paper. Envelopes inside of envelopes inside of envelopes and if Oxygen touched the innermost layer, they're somehow unofficial.

That is the worst thing you could call a transcript is unofficial. And last but not least, as Mitch talked about, they were like disconnected from opportunities. Students are transferring, they're trying to get their transcripts, their credit, They need to get their degree verified. All these pathways that we take, the credentialing function was disconnected. Fast forward a few more years.

I left Blackboard in two thousand and five and I got my PhD and I became a tenure track assistant professor at ASU at Arizona, teaching sociology, sociology of education and research methods and these same ideas oh, do we have a sociological woot? Like everybody who's into Marx and Durkheim and Weber. Alright. We're talking about the classics. I, I would teach sociology of education, but I knew that they weren't going to become professional sociologists of education. So what I really was teaching them is how to write well, speak well, think analytically and be comfortable with numbers.

Write well, speak well, think analytically and be comfortable with numbers because to me, those are liberal art skills, some liberal art skills that they could take with them. And when I taught research methods, I made a point of exposing them to Stata and R and SPSS so they had some data science skills, but I could not communicate that to the registrar. There's no place in the student information system for write well, speak well, think analytically, be comfortable with numbers, I know how to use data r and so on. The transcript is a sad transcript. And we wanted to make the transcript happy.

And so that's what left me to leave academe, go back into ed tech and co found, not co found, but get involved in, Parchment and help build Parchment. Our mission is to help turn credentials into opportunities and you can see that now connected to Instructure's new vision statement. And there's two sides of that. There's credentials and opportunities. So on one side, we are a platform that allows schools and universities to issue all of their degree and non degree credentials through one interface.

Transcripts, certificates, diplomas, yes, badges. I love badges. All through one interface so that a learner earning different credentials from the same education provider has one credential profile to assemble them and then as well as you attend multiple institutions that use Parchment, you can assemble them at each stage, that persistence layer. And then on the other side, we have a set of solutions for opportunities, helping students apply to college, credit transfer and credit equivalency off of the transcript data, course sharing, dual enrollment and so on. And you can see why that mission statement sort of connects so naturally to Instructure as a vision statement.

We work with many of your institutions, but we work probably with like your registrar, your admissions office, your school district registrar, your high school counselor. But we work with a lot of the higher ed and k twelve institutions throughout the US and a number of countries. And what's important is they don't adopt Parchment simply to give them a software solution to solve a problem at your institution. But in many ways it's a network. We call our customers members because they're members of a network, a network that allows you to move within and across K twelve and higher education as a learner and for the two sides organizationally of that to have a common system.

So much of education technology is about within an institution. How do we make a school work better or a university work better? So much of the magic is between institutions and that's where learners sit unsupported often. And so our goal with these tools and with the Parchment Network and now networking the canvas LMS into that network is to kind of cover the spaces between. Mitch, I think, described this fantastically well when he talked about his own personal journey. It is true there is such a thing as a traditional student.

A student who may go from K-twelve right into the workforce or go, you know, from K-twelve into higher ed and into the workforce. They are not the typical student, but there are many traditional students. And they are moving from an LMS environment to an LMS environment to an LMS environment. And even the high school student into the workforce, particularly the high school student into the workforce, is probably earning an industry certification or credential that they need to assemble and kind of organize and they need their high school degree verified. And the students moving across the traditional enrollment pathways, they're reusing their transcripts, they're earning credentials along the way.

But we also know that that is not the typical student. The typical student will attend multiple K-twelve schools, even in high school, especially with school choice and vouchers and charter schools. Intra k twelve mobility is just increasing year on year on year. Higher ed, the typical student attends more than one college and brings credit from multiple providers as they make that transition into the workforce. We also know that it's not as simple as moving institutions because we're assembling learning.

We are a community college student who's also taking a professional learning experience. We're a high school student who's participating in dual enrollment. We're a college student who is engaged in course sharing at other institutions in a system or consortium and all of that learning is getting assembled. And we know that the story on the workforce side is not just get a job and you're done and it's not graduate out of higher ed, go to the work force and never come back to higher ed because you're going to come back in to get continuing education to earn additional credentials and you're going to access professional learning. It's an incredibly dynamic education system that we live in today And that is what makes me so excited about Parchment being inside of Instructure.

There may be some obvious connections, like we can take the LMS Data Model and we can feed the credential and create a more comprehensive learner record, But then there are a little bit of the less obvious ways where a student, for example, engaged in dual enrollment can now have a seamless LMS experience from the providing institution and the home institution. As they're earning credit in multiple places, they can have a single transcript. They don't have to go to ten different places to assemble that credit. There are so many ways in which and we have a credential profile, that persistence layer that allows a learner to be able to move throughout that progression. And both K-twelve and Parchment and Instructure are unique in that we are one of the very few ed tech companies that are in K-twelve and higher ed and in workforce to be able to connect those different pieces together.

Now, we've got work to do. I've had a lot of conversations and the first thing people ask me is, what is your plan for this And what is your plan for that? And where are you going with this? Those are super important questions. To be honest, this just completed at the end of January. We are like metaphorically looking for the bathroom, although we generally work from home, so that's like a strange analogy to use. The job number one, as important as customers are, as our members are, are our employees and our talent, at least for me personally, making sure everybody feels secure and engaged, feels part of Instructure.

And so we're taking our time to kind of crawl, walk, and then run. And we also want to engage in dialogue with our members, in a conversation with our members to make sure that as we bring together these amazing Assets, we can do it in the best possible way. But we have some amazing assets. We have some incredible Lego blocks to assemble. Think about degree and non degree where Canvas credentials is best in class and non degree and Parchment Award is best in class and degree.

We have the LMS data model and through Parchment's expertise, the SAS data model to enrich the credential. We have the connection to the learner across the different stages of their journey and we have these amazing enrollment solutions from catalog to course sharing to dual enrollment to connect the dots as students make that progression. So let me close with the adventure theme. What do you get when you combine a panda, which I still have no idea why that is Instructure's like, it's a panda. What does that have to do with Instructure? There is a reason.

It's actually an amazing story. But the panda with what our mascot is, which is Parche. ACRO. You would not believe how excited registrars get to take a picture with a transcript. It's just I don't mean to stereotype.

I I'm sorry, Bob and and, Barry and all my registrar friends who are here, but it's true. What happens when you put these two companies together? We're just at the beginning. I don't know, but it's gonna be cute. So I'm gonna end on an ah and I'm gonna invite, Mitch back up. I think this is my last slide.

Let's see what happens when I click. Yep. Invite Mitch back up. Let's say, ah. Ah.

You're out of your See, this is a punk. It's not. You can take you can take this off if you'd like. No. I like badges.

I'm in the credentialing world. Do you? I'm gonna give this back to you. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry.

Thank you. Thank you. When you and I met a couple of years ago, I knew that there was gonna be some magic that would happen. I'm so glad that you and the team and all the parties are here. So welcome again.

I know it's only been a few months, but it's, it's gonna be awesome what we get to do in this ecosystem. Thank you. It means a lot on behalf of all the Parchees here. Perfect. Hey.

You know, we could take some time here and try and regale everybody in the audience with, our brilliance as it relates to this platform and that platform and ecosystems and how these things come together. You did a very nice job, by the way. But I thought maybe we would, bring a guest out to sort of tell that story for us. Is that alright? Let's do it. Alright.

We'd like to introduce you to doctor, Amini, who, comes to us from the California, virtual campus, and she's gonna talk to us a little bit about, the work that they're doing there and how bringing these things together is super meaningful for them. So, Marina, please join us on stage. Are you ready? Hello. Matt, you wanna start? Yes. Well, you had the great vision of, assembling a lot of these LEGO blocks even before we came together.

So you saw a connectivity between the learning management system, the eTranscript Exchange and the enrollment workflow solutions for things like core sharing and how they kind of fit together, before even it occurred to us that it would make sense to to potentially marry. So I'm curious, what drove that vision and and maybe you could use that to also just enlighten everyone about the nature of the work that you're doing. Alright. Well, hi, everyone. First of all, it's really weird not to show up in a Girl Scouts outfit.

Never thought I'd say that, but I feel weirdly out of place. So my name is Marina Amini. I'm from the California Virtual Campus, which represents the one hundred and sixteen California Community Colleges. Could I get a shout out from the California Community Colleges? Yes. They deserve Oreos as well, Mitch.

And we have about one point eight million students that we serve annually. So it is truly a large operation with a hundred and sixteen colleges and the vision that, you know, Matt is alluding to is around kind of about ten years ago we started talking about how can we wield the collective power of a system rather than making every college go at it alone and try to be everything for every student. How do we leverage the power of this big system that we have and we started by putting everybody on a collective LMS and we had a formal RFP and selection process. Every college opted into Canvas as our our selection. And that sort of was the the footprint for where things were going.

Then we moved toward course sharing, which is now a Parchment product, and that allowed students to seamlessly access the course schedule of each other's, a student to to access the schedules of other colleges outside of their home college. So imagine how hard it is right now for your student to leave your college if they can't find a class they need. We make it really hard. Right? We make them apply, get an email, get provisioned, wait for an orientation. Imagine cutting out all of that and making that a two minute process.

That's what the Parchment platform does for our students in the California Community Colleges. And I know we have a hundred and fifteen colleges or more, and you may have four in your system or consortia or you may have twenty, even that is a powerful place to begin. Leveraging the portfolio of your systems through a course sharing platform is a big deal. So when we have students using multiple colleges, we leverage the Canvas trust to then have this unified platform so the student doesn't have to leave one college's Canvas to go to another one. That allows this unified student experience.

So I'm sort of like the friend that had two friends that'd be great together, and then I, like, they they found each other and got married, you know? I feel like that friend, the guest at the wedding. So I, it's it's great. I, you know, I think it really fits that you all came together for this partnership. Well, the reaction when I think Matt and I both had conversations with you about these companies just, you know, minutes in advance of making this public announcement. The smile on your face, I think, said it all that maybe Yes.

Might get a little bit more than you expected, right, out of this relationship if the companies were actually doing the same things together. Right? So, look, I love the fact that sort of amplifies the message from earlier about the ecosystem. Right? The power of networks, the power of being in a network where all of that sharing can happen. There's, there's a lot of magic that will unfold in the ensuing years, right, as we, bring these things together. At the risk of doing this in front of three thousand people though, I wonder, you know, if I were to ask you the question, what is it that you really want from us now that you know that the, you know, the company is the same company.

We're working together. We've got the power of one roadmap, one development organization, brilliant product managers, marketers, sales folks, like all of the power, right, focused on driving these two things together in a way that's gonna amplify the vision that we shared earlier. What is it that you want from us? Oh. And they want me to answer that publicly. You know, I it's all about removing the barriers for the students.

So if I could say it in three words, it would be free the transcript. How can institutions how can institutions change this model where students are being charged for their transcripts and absorb the cost in a different way and offer access to students for their own records. It's their records. So how do we give students unfettered access at the point of need in the way that they need it, whether it's for employment, whether it's for academic transfer, how do we give access and ownership back to students and stop holding their own records hostage, which a lot of our institutions are currently doing? Preach. Yes.

That's what I want. Well, look, Matt, thanks for sharing with everybody sort of the the future vision and where we're headed. Thank you for making it real for us. Thank you. I appreciate your guys' time, and we'll, meet backstage.

Sounds good. Awesome. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

Everybody's getting up and going. What is this? Because we are late. We're running way over. So thank you. The, we we have a treasure map.

So go look for your treasure maps. There'll be golden idols that will be given out as you get your tokens. There's only a few of them each day, so be sure to, be sure to, as quickly as you can get it and and turn it in for a golden idol. We are gonna have the educational moments of the future. Please take time to get in to go visit that.

As the lights flashed, when we did that earlier today, that will indicate that we're ready to start a keynote. So if you see that start to happen, know that there's a keynote. And then if you're interested in what California virtual campus has done, Marina will be in a session just after this one, with, with Matt Patinsky. That's it. Enjoy the day. Sorry to keep you late. Let's go have some fun together.