Driving Efficiency and Enabling Deeper Insights with AI in Instructure Products

[zachp]

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education is no longer a distant prospect – it's our present reality. At Instructure, we believe that this technology offers immense potential to revolutionize teaching and learning when it is implemented with thoughtful care and understanding. When used safely, generative AI has the potential to save educators time and engage students like never before, and we are working hard to embed intuitive AI flows into our platform and enable third-party tools that integrate with our ecosystem. To get started, we have focused on deeply understanding the needs of institutions and focusing first on the solutions that will help most.

Over the past school year, we've been working closely with our customers to ensure we implement AI in the most impactful, appropriate ways possible. Based on feedback from our user base, we're honing in on these key areas for AI applications:

• Efficiency and time-saving: By using AI, educators can bypass tedious tasks and focus more on engaging directly with students. Shortcuts across search, discussions, course creation, and more will enable teachers to save valuable time and energy otherwise spent on repetitive tasks.
• Educational efficacy: We see the potential for AI to make education more effective – by equipping educators and administrators with the insights they need to make more informed decisions, by personalizing learning experiences for students, and by making it possible to implement best practices that were previously too expensive, challenging, and time-consuming.
• Edtech ecosystem: There is already a vast ecosystem of edtech tools applying AI in cutting-edge ways. We are working to support our partners using AI, expanding their capabilities with new LTI launch points and APIs, and ensuring transparency and safety.

We're excited about the responsible introduction of AI within Instructure products, where it can positively impact the teaching and learning happening there every day. I'm excited to share two new limited beta features in service of the above goals, with plans for a broader release in late 2024 through early 2025.

Feature Spotlight: Smart Search for Efficiency & Timesaving

We've heard from educators and students alike that finding the content you're looking for in Canvas can be challenging – especially if you don't remember the exact keywords or phrases in the content you're trying to find. That's where Smart Search comes in – it taps into AI's ability to understand query context, thus providing more accurate and relevant search results. This feature facilitates faster content discovery for both teachers and students by finding content from course pages, discussion prompts, and assignments. Currently in limited beta for higher education institutions in North America, we plan to make this available more broadly in Canvas LMS later this year. Ask your Customer Success Manager if you'd like to join the beta. 

Feature Spotlight: Ask Your Data for Deeper Insights

For many administrators, building reports and insights can be time-consuming, confusing, and challenging. Now, administrators can more easily make data-informed decisions with the new “Ask Your Data” feature, which allows them to query data using natural language and questions. Currently in limited beta with a small group of customers, this feature will be available as part of a new enhanced analytics solution that will be offered as an add-on to Canvas customers in the coming months.

As we continue this exciting chapter of the evolution of educational technology, we're dedicated to maintaining the trust our users have placed in us. We’ll continually be learning, iterating, and improving along the way, ensuring that our AI initiatives remain aligned with the needs of learners, educators, and institutions and continue to offer the same protections for student and institution data that our customers expect. In that spirit, we plan to evolve our AI marketplace to a more robust product library that includes the “nutrition facts” on any AI tool accessible via Canvas LMS.

The future of edtech is not just about technology—it's about deploying that technology ethically, responsibly, and strategically in ways that truly enhance the learning journey. We’re thrilled to play a part in shaping that future and can’t wait to continue doing so—together with you—through Canvas LMS and beyond.

Stay tuned for monthly AI updates from us leading up to some big reveals at InstructureCon 2024 in Las Vegas. 

Originally posted in the Study Hall at Instructure.com

[Charles_Barbour]

Both images in this post are about "Ask Your Data". Is one of them supposed to be about Smart Search?

[JamesSekcienski]

@zachp Can you update the image for the Smart Search?

@Charles_Barbour In the meantime, you can look at the article on Study Hall to see what the Smart Search feature looks like.

[JamesSekcienski]

@zachp 

Thank you for sharing these new features!

Will the Smart Search work across courses or will it only search within one course at a time?

[KristinL]

Hi @Charles_Barbour - The image has been updated. Thank you for point this out so we could make the change.

[jperkins]

@JamesSekcienski At this time, Smart Search is scoped to the Canvas course in which it is launched.

[vanzandt]

Hi @zachp , These are exciting new features.  When you say "enhanced analytics solution that will be offered as an add-on to Canvas customers", I assume that means that this will not be included in the core Canvas product that we are licensed for, and will require an additional cost to our institutions in order to have access to use the feature. Is that corrrect?  If it is, I didn't see the same add-on language for the Smart Search feature, just that you all "plan to make this available more broadly in Canvas LMS later this year".  Does that mean that the Smart Search will be an update to core Canvas and not require an additional expense?  Thank you for any clarifications you can provide.

[nuscitpkg]

The Smart Search results (based on the screen recording gif) don't appear to paraphrase nor summarise the content.

So, it looks like a normal search result.

I think having the ability search for content within a course is useful, but I don't see the AI part of this, if the screen recording is representative of the feature.

[JamesSekcienski]

@nuscitpkg

The AI part of this Smart Search is that it can determine related keywords/phrases based on the search query to find other potentially relevant results rather than only exact matches.  It also includes a confidence rating for each of the search results. 

The search query that is shown with the search results was "How AI can assist with learning."  When you look at the search results you can see it highlight some related phrases that aren't exact matches to the search query like the following: "learning and teaching", "opportunities", and "personalized learning paths."  It also shows an 81% confidence rating that that page is relevant to the search query.

[JamesSekcienski]

@jperkins and @zachp,

Will there be an option to do an exact search too?  If you know the exact keyword/phrase you are looking for, it would be nice to find only those results and not need to worry about filtering through potentially related content.  It looks like this might be hidden within the Filter options.

[brian_mullins]

Please do not go down this road without a plan for granular security on the data accessible. Many of the reporting features in Canvas (namely Admin Analytics) cannot be used in ours and many other institutions by the folks that would be the best target audience because the security can't be defined at a granular level. For example, we can't allow our preferred target audience to see grading data, and since Admin Analytics does not obey the permission definitions it shows grading data, and therefore cannot be used. 

The promise of this kind of technology is huge. Please build it on a foundation that does not hinder it's use.

[BethCrook]

Will there be an option to turn AI off?  On the account level?  On the user level?

[zachpendleton]

@vanzandt— that's right. These analytics features will be available at additional cost, and Smart Search is included in your existing Canvas license. AI that no one can afford isn't very interesting, so we're always working on ways to provide new AI-powered features inside your existing license. Unfortunately, some of these features are still prohibitively expensive for us inside the current subscription model and so we've got to bill them separately.

[zachpendleton]

@JamesSekcienski— thanks for all of the comments / questions / answers on this thread! The option of an exact search is a great idea; we aren't including that in the current set of filters right now but I'll speak with the team to make sure they're aware of the interest and consider it in future planning.

[zachpendleton]

@brian_mullins— thanks for the feedback. I agree 100% that ensuring access and adoptability is key to any of our AI initiatives making a difference. Smart Search does respect user permissions and access rules, so results are filtered to what the searcher is able to see.

The first release of Ask Your Data is targeted to admins with existing permissions to use/see the data available in Canvas Data, so it doesn't have the granular control that you'd need to introduce it to audiences with more limited permissions. We know that there's power in wider release, though, and the team is actively thinking about how to implement a finer-grained permissions model to accommodate that kind of release. Stay tuned!

[zachpendleton]

@BethCrook— yes, but it's actually a bit of the opposite: when we use AI to power a Canvas feature we're going to be asking institutions to actively turn the feature on. We want to make sure that every school knows the full data and technology story of each AI feature we release so that they can decide if it's a good fit for them. We're taking that approach because we're not sure there's a single AI story in education; each school has its own mission, comfort with technology, and ability to adopt rapidly changing tools like LLMs and we want to be responsive to that.

Specifically, these features and the others we're working on now are configurable at the account and course level, but not the user level. Great question, and I hope that answers it for you.

[Hildi_Pardo]

I'm excited to see the "Smart Search."   I know this has been a request of many in the community for quite a long time, so it's exciting to see a solution coming soon.

As I think about how this might be used, here are some questions/ideas that initially come to mind:

• will it be limited to a course?  I think limiting it by course would be very helpful for Students.  For teachers, I wonder if there could be an option to Search in current course and an option to search "all my courses" or "all my Spanish 1 courses" (maybe even a checkbox: "Select courses to Search") -- this might be helpful fo teachers who have taught using Canvas for many years and perhaps don't want to import all content, but might want to search for that one awesome assignment, but don't remember what year they did it.
• when students search, I would want to make sure their search is limited to content that is published or available to them
• would teachers be able to do a search for a student's submission?  For example:  I remember someone submitted something spectacular in a previous school year, but I can't remember who it was. I just remember it was something about "yada yada yada."

I have a Canvas Resources course and the Smart Search will be amazing for those enrolled to quickly search a topic.   For myself, as I update my course, I will go back to see how external documents are linked, and be more intentional with naming my links (or adding introductory text on a page) so the AI will find it more easily.  (For example:  The AI will be limited to searching text in Canvas and won't be able to search text in a Google doc.)

This will be a great feature and I'm excited to see it in action soon!