Committed to excellence in teaching, research, and service, San Diego State University was one of the first institutions to implement Intelligent Insights by Instructure, an AI-driven tool for Canvas Admins that turns raw data into actionable insights to enhance teaching and learning outcomes.
As a university that serves over 37,000 students and recently celebrated the milestone of reaching 500,000 alumni, we wanted to hear why SDSU decided to take the leap with Intelligent Insights. Watch the full video or read on to hear from SDSU’s Senior Director of Instructional Technology, Sean Hauze.
Tell us about San Diego State University.
“We're a comprehensive research institution, and what makes us special is we are the premier HSI (Hispanic Serving Institution) in the border region with California and Mexico. So we have a real opportunity to meet our students where they are and to leverage tools like learning analytics to ensure that every student gets the attention they deserve.”
What piqued your interest in Intelligent Insights?
“Since pivoting to the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS), we have attempted to query our data for all kinds of different use cases, including through the COVID-19 pandemic, wondering which students were potentially not accessing their coursework in a timely manner.”
What data challenges did you face before adopting Intelligent Insights?
“There were a lot of barriers, both systemic in terms of the infrastructure we had set up around our Canvas LMS and other systems, as well as the skills and knowledge of our leaders, both technical and non-technical, to get at that data inside of the LMS. We were kind of at a loss for how to do that with limited resources and limited expertise on the team.”
How has the use of Intelligent Insights made a difference for SDSU?
“Canvas Intelligent Insights has really opened up a broad array of tools that we can use, democratizing access to the data, not just for the technical team members that know how to write SQL and other technical languages for looking at data, but actually just asking in natural language: Which students are at risk? Which students haven't logged in or accessed their course in the last couple of weeks? Ask your Data includes all of the data within Canvas, the student activity data, the student performance data, [and] the course content data.”
Leaders on our campus can just ask a natural language, a question that they want to know. For example, which students have not logged in the last two weeks, and they're able to see a list of students, perform the outreach, share that with their advisors, and give those students just in time attention that they need to be successful.
Learn how Intelligent Insights by Instructure can enable Canvas Admins to make data-informed decisions that improve teaching and learning outcomes.
