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There's nothing quite like trying to effectively address the giant elephant in the room, especially when that elephant is dressed bedazzled in pink sparkles (my ballroom dancing days make me well-versed in sparkles). But here we are, ready to talk about New Quizzes! Along with our new chief product officer, Shiren Vijiasingam, I have spent a lot of time talking to our customers about New Quizzes. I love hearing how educators are using new tools that we’re developing, especially when it comes to quizzing and assessing within Canvas. During those conversations, I have also heard that for many of our customers, they need more resources to be ready to transition to New Quizzes.  So we listened and acted when many of you expressed interest in directly engaging with us on essential product rollouts and decisions—like this transition from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes. We've taken that feedback to heart as we've created this updated/refreshed rollout for New Quizzes.    What’s Our Priority? We aim to ensure every customer has a seamless and successful transition to New Quizzes. If that means you need to keep using Classic Quizzes for a while—that’s just fine. If it means you’re ready to move to New Quizzes right now—that’s great, too!  We want you to move to New Quizzes because you’re ready and see it’s the best solution for you and your students, not because we’ve set an arbitrary deadline. Therefore, you do not need to move to New Quizzes by July 2024. In fact, we're not going to set a deadline as we want you to move when you're ready to experience everything New Quizzes has to offer and do it within a timeline that works for your staff and students. We’ve also prioritized developing the critical features in New Quizzes you’ve told us are needed to transition successfully to the updated product. Our team is adding resources to focus on releasing key features, such as improvements, API access, and accessibility elements, to name a few. We understand that not every institution is the same. So we’ll keep partnering with each of you to make sure we meet your unique needs as you plan your transition to New Quizzes.   What’s Happening with Classic Quizzes? We’ll keep supporting Classic Quizzes. We won’t add any new features, but we’ll keep fixing critical bugs and maintaining the product. We will not set a new end-of-life date for now but will allow for our client adoption to signal when the time is right.    Are There Any Changes to New Quizzes? New Quizzes’ awesomeness is our top quiz priority. We’re focusing more resources on this component of Canvas, which means we’ll have more feature releases than ever before coming up this year.    How Can I Get the Latest Info on New Quizzes? We understand that learning to use a new learning tool can be intimidating and time-consuming. We don’t want that for our customers. So we’ve created a New Quizzes Hub, where you’ll find all the latest info, release notes, product roadmaps, and more so you can plan your successful migration to New Quizzes. The hub is where we show you the path to the New Quizzes experience. We’ve even kicked off a New Quizzes celebration series with planned events and activities focused on New Quizzes features and ongoing development. If you haven’t already, I invite you to join The Community, and connect directly with other peers on what they’ve planned and how they’re deploying (and finding success with New Quizzes)!   As I mentioned in the beginning, keep the feedback coming. I (and everyone I work with here at Instructure) want to hear from you so we continue to ensure you have the best experience possible with all of our products. Openness is a core value we remain committed to, so please keep this dialogue going, especially around such a critical component of Canvas as New Quizzes.  Have you made the transition to New Quizzes yet? Or are you waiting? We’d love to hear what you think, or why you’re sticking with Classic Quizzes for now. Whether it's with me or your CSM or someone else supporting you, we will make sure the feedback you share is leveraged to the fullest extent possible to ensure you love all aspects of Canvas and our full product family.   Keep Learning, Melissa Originally posted on October 26, 2022 at Instructure.com ... View more

  As many of you know, we send a Customer Satisfaction survey to our Admins twice a year asking for feedback on their Customer Success Manager or Customer Success Team. It is a very important time of year because this feedback helps us improve as a Customer Success organization and tailor our work to support the best customer experience possible. This feedback has proven to be so valuable that we found it important to extend the survey to include more of our customer-facing teams within our Customer Experience organization. So what’s changing? While the first survey of the year will remain the same and focus solely on the CSM experience, our second survey of the year will now include opportunities for our admins to provide feedback not just on their CSM, but on their experience with the Instructure Community, Support/Help Center, Implementation and the Renewal process.  We are so excited to better understand your holistic experience with all of the key Customer Experience teams at Instructure. At Instructure we always strive to  continue learning- to never rely on the status quo and to continually improve. One of the most critical ways for us to be able to do this is from your feedback. A huge thank you in advance to all of you who will be filling out the upcoming survey. We are so excited to hear from you and look forward to making meaningful change.  ... View more

  As Chief Customer Experience Officer, my focus is on ensuring that our customers are successful and having a good experience with our tools and teams. We tried something new last year by offering free coaching sessions to help you, our incredible educators, leverage Instructure tools like Canvas and Mastery Connect. I am excited to announce the return of Panda Pros, a program to help you ramp up for the new school year. Last year, we had great feedback from the thousands of educators who participated in our Panda Pros coaching sessions. Many loved the opportunity to connect with an expert, one-on-one, who could provide customized help for their burning questions. Due to the great response last year, we wanted to offer it again this year, with even longer sessions! Starting next week (July 18 through September 18), we will be offering free, 45-minute coaching sessions with Instructure experts to educators interested in using any Instructure edtech tools. Experts will be available from 9 AM to 6 PM MDT Monday-Sunday, to help answer your questions. Our weekend slots were the most popular last year, so we’ve added more slots on Saturdays and Sundays during the Panda Pros event this year.  This is a great opportunity to have coaching sessions about a variety of topics, such as getting to know Canvas features like modules and SpeedGrader. You can also chat through the swap to new quizzes, learn strategies for formative assessments, look over your course with accessibility in mind, and tap into a wealth of expert advice. We know the semester-start season can be hectic and even overwhelming, so we are setting time aside for some of our top consultants to help answer any questions you have.  More information about Panda Pros can be found on our website and in this presentation. Good luck with the new school year and have fun with our incredible consultants. Don’t forget to sign up starting July 18th! Keep Learning, Melissa ... View more

Join Melissa Loble as she discusses what Instructure is doing to help its customers better leverage their tools and be even more effective in the classroom. No matter your current relationship with Instructure and/or EesySoft, we welcome you into our education family, and look forward to interacting with, learning from, and helping you. Join me  as I introduce EesySoft as the newest member of our Instructure family. ... View more

Exciting things are happening in the Instructure world! As you have likely seen, today we announced the acquisition of EesySoft, an edtech adoption platform focused on driving engagement with and usage of edtech tools. EesySoft has been our partner for the last four years and shares a similar mission with Instructure: elevate student success, amplify the power of teaching, and drive digital transformation in education.  In light of this exciting news, we have rebranded EesySoft to be named Impact by Instructure to increase awareness about what the product does best: streamline edtech adoption and intensify the impact of digital learning tools.   Read more about the acquisition. ... View more

June 19th, or Juneteenth, is an important day in American history. That day in 1865 commemorated the ending of slavery across the United States. While significant steps forward have been made, this day is also a reminder that we must always be doing more for the cause of equality and inclusion for all. That’s why at Instructure, we want each and every employee to have the opportunity to pause, reflect, and contemplate what this holiday meant then, what it means today, and start to take actions to create a better tomorrow.  As part of our observance of Juneteenth, Instructure is giving all employees a half-day away from work Friday, June 18th, 2021. To make this possible for the entire company, we will be turning off our phone lines to Customer Support on that day from 6am MST to 11:59pm MST. Users who require help on that day will be able to reach support over chat.    We firmly believe that we are each responsible for owning change, and we encourage every one of our employees to use this time to influence the positive change that is needed in our world.  While this is only one small step toward a more racially just and equitable world, we believe it is a step in the right direction.   Keep Learning, Melissa Loble ... View more

Earlier today, one of the subsystems that Canvas relies on for service failed, causing a Canvas outage. The outage could have impacted up to 75% of our customers in North and South America if they were trying to access Canvas between 6:48 am and 8:27 am MT. Additionally, on March 3, Canvas users experienced an outage in the afternoon that lasted for 45 minutes due to a Canvas code update that overwhelmed a shared service. We know you expect more of us; we expect more of ourselves. And so we owe you an apology.  When incidents like this happen, we perform an in depth root cause analysis that targets both the technical failure as well as any process breakdown that occurred. Our goal for this is to prevent similar issues from happening again and to constantly improve our response.  The past year has been challenging and full of ups and downs for educators and students as the world grappled with the effects of the pandemic. Through it, we have been so impressed by your commitment to your students. We want Canvas to be part of the ups...not the downs and that requires us to be consistent with reliable technology. Thank you for letting Instructure be your partner.    We are happy to speak live to discuss this more with you. Best regards, @mloble Melissa Loble, Chief Customer Experience Officer @stownsend1  Steve Townsend, SVP of Engineering ... View more

It was energizing to stand before the always-awesome #InstCon crowd this morning and talk about the multiplier effect of moments, and the communities that surround us and make them possible, especially this Canvas Community. But, I don’t want you to have to wait for the published recording to access your “Awesome to the power of C" (Canvas/Community, both, or you choose), so here’s a bit of a teaser (can’t give it all away) and call to action! Our lifelong learning path is not something we do alone. It’s a meandering journey full of people and moments—moments that shape who we are. They bend us, break us, build us up, and prepare us for the next moments to come. I’m confident you’re already thinking of a few of those right now. Hold on to them; we’ll come back to that! We spent a bit of time today honoring educators in the field who exemplify the art of making moments in their students' lives, and we also spent a few minutes honoring some of your very own Canvas Community members, including:  @James : Canvancements - Canvas Enhancements  @shea_silverman : Hurricane Michael + Due Date Changer  @jonesn16 : Preparing Your Canvas: Tying it all up [transition from Blackboard] j1201982‌: Powering Up Your Canvas Course: Canvas Beginner Essentials [Infographics]  @bcrook ‌: #stepsforbeth   James, Nicholas, Stephanie, Beth, and all the others we honored today are just like you. They’re a part of your community. The only difference is we’ve had the opportunity to hear or read pieces of their moments! So, now we want to hear yours. Take at least one literal minute and reflect on something for me, please. Think about a moment in your life as a student that has had an impact on you. What events or actions happened before? What events or actions happened after? How has that moment shaped you? (I told you we’d come back to these!) Now, take one more minute and reflect on another moment. Think of a moment in your life as a teacher or designer of learning that has had an impact on you. What events or actions happened before? What events or actions happened after? How has that moment shaped you? When you’re ready, help us continue to build upon the momentum we’ve started, and tweet your stories. Don't forget to include #canvascommunity and #canvasconvo. There are some beautiful moments shared with that hashtag. I’ve shared a few of my own, @melissajoell. :smileyinfo: Spoiler alert: Our team was creating a video for this very keynote with one of the featured educators in our stories—and the team had no idea that this educator was one of my past Masters students. Talk about moments and multipliers: amirite? InstructureCon 2019 Read More Reflection Blogs ... View more

Tap/click map to enlarge Melissa Loble (Instructure) Instructure - HigherEd & K12 In this session, experts from the higher education and open education communities will sit down to discuss the benefits and challenges of adopting open educational resources. The open education movement has had pockets of supporters and champions for years now, but, despite well-understood benefits of using OER and open pedagogical practices, adoption rates have been very low, and very few institutions have adopted a broad OER policy. Our panelists will discuss strategies to help increase adoption and how that will benefit your institution, as well as hot topics such as open badges, MOOCs, the #GoOpen initiative, and open textbooks. Panelists: Wayne Skipper, Founder and CEO, Badgr Syed Munib Hadi, Head of Academic Innovation Hub, University of Derby: Future Edtech 2016 | Syed Munib Stephen Vickers, Project Manager, IMS Global: Stephen P. Vickers | IMS Global Learning Consortium Jim Federico, Princiapal Product Manager, Microsoft: Jim Federico | Microsoft Education​ Annie Chechitilli, Senior Manager, Enterprise Education Products, Amazon: Annie Chechitilli | Amazon Education​ ... View more

With our new hosted data solution, Canvas clients will be able to utilize the provided data to conduct research, assessment, and identify opportunities for continuous improvement. Are you looking to explore how you might work with Canvas partner companies to frame and conduct this analysis? If so, come to this session to learn more about our partnership approach and an initial case study for defying gravity with Canvas Data. Presenter: Melissa Loble & Linda Feng - Instructure PowerPoint Slides from Session: Dropbox - DefyingGravityWithData_InstCon15_EscalaA.pptx   Location Map & Room: ESCALA A   Login to "Add a comment" below!                 ... View more

Canvas has recently opened a program in which partners who do instructional design, professional development, and application development can be referred to you and your team to augment those services you can receive through Instructure Professional Services. Presenter: James Doug Minnick​ - Instructure   Location Map & Room: ESCALANTE   Login to "Add a comment" below!                 ... View more