The Edtech Collective Newsletter - March 2024
Improving Product-Partner Connections
We have heard from many of you that you would like better insight into our product roadmap and regular opportunities to communicate and connect with our product teams. In response, we are excited to announce the start of Product Office Hours and a special webinar intended to give you insight into our product and services roadmap for partners.
Partner Office Hours
We will begin hosting monthly office hours to give our valued partners regular access to our Product and Partnerships Teams. Beginning on March 13, we will host open office hours to discuss your needs, feedback, and questions. Each monthly session will have a topical focus such as innovation in AI, product roadmap plans, and other topics important to you.
We will also invite one or more product leaders so you have time to ask questions. Help get us started by providing input on what you'd like to hear about. Take Our Short Survey Now!
Partner Product Roadmap
Join us on March 20, 2024, to learn about the latest developments from Instructure to help support our partners across the globe.
We will be hosting a webinar led by Kristie Lindell, VP of Platform Products, as well as our VP of Partnerships, Sidharth Oberoi.
They will discuss the vision for the future of what Instructure plans to do for our partners from a services perspective as well as from a product perspective. We will gather feedback from our partners on what is being done to best serve educators and learners, innovation in AI, and the best ways to expand our reach.
Meet Sidharth Oberoi, Vice President of Partnerships & Business Development - Instructure
I want to take the opportunity of this newsletter to quickly introduce myself to those of you who do not know me as well as share some of my background and experience.
It's a pleasure for me to step into the role of leading our Partnerships organization and spearheading a new Business Development function, which is specifically geared toward fostering Partner Collaboration.
Fortunately, I have worked with and around our partners for the last 7 years during my time at Instructure. I started in the Product organization for my first 5 years, and most recently spent the last two years as our VP of International Strategy, overseeing our global growth as well as understanding the challenges that institutions across the globe face, from educational to pedagogical and financial challenges.
Throughout my journey at Instructure, I have always been fascinated by the incredible ecosystem that comprises our partners. You all fill such fundamental roles in helping extend the value we can provide to educators and learners across the globe. With millions of students utilizing our trusted software on a weekly or daily basis, the tools and value that you all provide amplify their ability to achieve a variety of different educational outcomes.
As a byproduct of the intrinsic benefits that our partners provide to our end users, we at Instructure have been hyper-focused on how we can deliver more meaningful value, insights, and services to all of our partners. You have my commitment that we will be doing much more with our Partner program moving forward with many exciting changes and opportunities to follow (such as our exciting new Product Office Hours!).
InstructureCon - Limited Sponsorships are Still Available
Don’t miss the opportunity to sponsor Instructure’s flagship global event, InstructureCon 2024, July 9-11 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and reach over 3000 decision-makers and influencers in Higher Education and K-12. Designed to bring together our customer and partner communities for networking and learning, at this live, three-day event you’ll experience:
- Keynote speakers
- Customer, industry, and Instructure sessions
- Bustling and fun exhibit hall
- Networking and lead generation opportunities
- Nightly entertainment
Check out the remaining sponsorship packages and confirm your spot today.
Product Updates
Dynamic Registration -
As part of ongoing initiatives to more fully support LTI 1.3 specifications, we’re excited to announce Dynamic Registration will be supported starting this spring! This specification makes it easier than ever for institution end users to find and install your LTI extension in their Canvas LMS instance. With an easier installation experience for Canvas administrators, implementing Dynamic Registration can also significantly reduce the time your team spends creating documentation and coaching customers through the process of installing your LTI tool. And, because Dynamic Registration follows the standard specification, you’ll be able to use this method with any other LMS integrations you’re supporting, streamlining the development, maintenance, and documentation lift for your team
Dynamic Registration is just the first step to improving the LTI installation process in Canvas. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to consider upgrading your LTI tool 1.3 so users can take advantage of these time-saving updates. (P.S. Want to help us build the roadmap for LTI tool installation and management in Canvas? Complete our brief survey!)
Implement the 1EdTech Dynamic Registration Specification
Deep Linking -
Last year we announced that Canvas now fully supports the LTI 1.3 Deep Linking specification, including supporting the editing of assignments by LTI 1.3 tools. With support for assignment editing, tools can now pass back the points possible on an assignment, assignment name, assignment description, and if the tool launches in a new window. Additionally, we are considering in the future allowing tools to edit the due date, unlock date, and lock date of assignments. More details, including the technical field names, are available on our blog. Currently, support for this functionality is gated by a feature flag, but on June 10, 2024, all environments will have this functionality enforced. This means that if a tool is passing back information in those fields, it will be respected, potentially overwriting user-entered information. As such, tool providers must ensure they only pass values to Canvas in those fields when they intend this behavior. If you have any questions about this announcement, please contact Partner Support and they will be happy to assist.
jQuery Upgrades -
We’ve recently engaged in a significant effort to upgrade jQuery in Canvas to mitigate security concerns. We released the first upgrade from jQuery v1.7.2 -> v1.8.3 on February 28, with the next upgrade (v1.8.3 to v2.2.4) planned for release later this month. Our goal for this initiative is to upgrade to at least jQuery v3.5 (hopefully, we’ll get to the latest version v3.7.1) over the next several Canvas release cycles.
While these upgrades will provide important data privacy and security protections, it is likely that they will interrupt some partners’ custom JavaScript code. Please monitor your customizations and validate that they behave as expected in Canvas beta for the next several releases. As a reminder, your organization is responsible for maintaining your customizations. If your organization doesn’t rely on jQuery for custom JavaScript these upgrades will not impact your integration.
