2 New Ways We’re Using AI to Streamline Workflows in Canvas

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Together with our customers, we've identified several areas where AI can profoundly enhance our platform. One of these is using AI to build efficiencies and increase capacity for educators and administrators. Specifically, AI can streamline tedious tasks, allowing educators to focus more on engaging directly with students. With this in mind, I'm excited to introduce two new features within Canvas (currently in limited beta) designed to save educators time.

Feature Spotlight: Discussion Summaries

The Discussions feature in Canvas is a powerful tool to facilitate conversation and collaboration between students. But we know it can be challenging for educators to keep up with threaded discussions, especially those with larger classes. That's where discussion summaries can help – they accelerate educators' ability to grasp central themes and questions emerging from discussion threads, understand student engagement, and identify areas that warrant further conversation. This feature is currently available as a limited beta, with plans to release more broadly in 2024. 

Feature Spotlight: Writing and Editing Tools in the Rich Content Editor

Educators and instructional designers spend hours creating course pages and materials that cover their desired learning objectives and meet the unique needs of their students. To speed this process up, we're testing new AI-powered writing tools within the Rich Content Editor. These tools can help summarize text, identify and define key terms & phrases, change tone or text complexity, and more. This feature is currently available as a limited beta, with plans to release more broadly in 2024. 

Stay tuned for another AI update from me next month leading up to some big reveals at InstructureCon 2024 in Las Vegas.