In mid-August, members of the Instructure Product leadership team, including Kristie Lindell, Ruth Thornton, Farrah King, Walt Peters, and Shiren Vijiasingam, had the joy of spending a week connecting with our amazing community across Australia at an inspiring Customer Discovery Session (CDS) hosted at Flinders University in Adelaide. It was a wonderful reminder of the incredible creativity, commitment, and vision of our customers in the APAC region.
These sessions are part of our Customer Connectivity Program, which is designed to create open forums for listening, learning, and co-creating alongside instructors, administrators, and learners. A CDS brings customers and Instructure team members together to share experiences, explore challenges, and imagine future possibilities. During our recent session at Flinders University, we facilitated conversations with administrators and students, gathered insights from 11 institutions across sectors, and exchanged ideas about how Canvas and the wider Instructure ecosystem can best support the region.
What We Heard
Big Challenges Require Big Thinking
In Australia, institutions are working at incredible scale across multiple courses and modalities - we’re talking a single course with thousands of learners. Their successes and challenges hold valuable lessons for our global community, including large U.S. states and systems.
The Power of Localisation
Regional nuances matter. From aligning with semester schedules to communicating in ways that feel globally inclusive, local details make a big difference in building trust and adoption in the APAC region.
Shared Global Conversations
Our APAC customers are grappling with many of the same questions as institutions elsewhere: How do we thoughtfully adopt AI? How do we avoid tool fatigue? When do we build in-house and when do we buy? These shared themes highlight how deeply interconnected the future of education has become.
Accessibility as a Cultural Value
We were struck by how central accessibility is to the work being done across institutions in the region. Beyond compliance mandates, APAC institutions see accessibility as a commitment to their communities and a grassroots effort to ensure every learner has an equitable education experience.
Doing More, Delivering Value
We started the day with encouraging feedback that customers see us delivering more, and that what we are delivering is providing greater value to them. They told us they value the partnership with Instructure and appreciate that we take their unique needs and interests into account. Seeing that our efforts are working further motivates us to keep building, listening, and building with and for our community.
Opportunities to Grow Together
Our time in Adelaide reinforced some exciting opportunities:
- Further exploration of program-level capabilities that simplify learning and show real-time impact.
- Reimagine some of the student and teacher Canvas workflows, via the dashboard experiences, surfacing what users need more seamlessly.
- Bringing APAC insights on scale, localisation, and AI back to our global teams, so we can improve not only our product but also how we communicate. Imagine release notes, blog posts, and resources tailored to highlight use cases, best practices, and role-specific guidance for diverse contexts.
Looking Ahead
The week in Australia was a powerful reminder of why we do what we do: to listen, learn, and co-create with our customers. The APAC region is full of innovation and commitment to students, and the lessons we’re learning here will shape the future of teaching and learning around the world.
We’re grateful to our customers for opening their doors and sharing their journeys with us. Together, we’re building the future of education - one conversation, one partnership, and one student experience at a time.
Stay Connected
If you are interested in learning more about the latest Early Adopter Programs, we encourage you to reach out to your Customer Success Manager. You can also join us for our upcoming APAC New & Next Webinar to hear about what is on the horizon and connect with peers across the region.
