To Our Amazing Educators Everywhere,
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!
On March 26th, we held another customer discovery session. This workshop is a part of our Customer Connectivity Program, which empowers us to work together with you, our customers, to co-create solutions. While we’ve partnered with over 100 customers for the Feature Preview of Canvas Apps (an enhanced admin experience for discovering, installing, and managing LTI apps), we wanted to more deeply explore these use cases, and better define how we’ll support edtech management for institutions in the future. While Canvas Apps streamlines these processes for admins and developers we know we can do more to support the vetting, usage, and adoption of edtech.
Members from the Internet2 consortium, representing higher education research and education leaders from around the US, participated in the workshop, conducted at Instructure headquarters.
We used a variety of activities throughout the day to broadly capture and share ideas – which ranged from sketching, to reviewing prototypes, for hands-on collaboration and prioritization of product development for third-party integrations, management of edtech, and core functionality within Canvas. We then deeply explored possibilities for the group’s top priorities, which included messaging for upgrades and replacements, transparency into usage data, streamlined approval workflows, and vetting for accessibility, security and privacy.
Sticky notes of ideas being organized and grouped by vote
Instructure employee organizes votes from ideation exercise
Attendees stressed the importance of streamlining LTI tool vetting and connecting groups across their organizations. They identified several key categories: the cost of apps, visibility of risk (privacy, accessibility, security) and documentation of conformance, notifications (especially regarding AI and updates to terms of service), and ensuring a consistent and informative experience for faculty. It was clear they need more visibility into usage, adoption, and practices to scale across their Canvas environment and integration with existing workflows. Any combination of features needs to remain highly configurable to match our customers’ varied needs.
Instructure employee leads an activity called crazy fours
💬 “One of the main issues right now is that everything is so spread out. The idea of it being embeddable is great because although you can place it wherever it may be needed, it lives centrally in Canvas.”
Several discussions focused on collaboration, connection, and community. There was interest in institutions sharing information about the tools they use, how they vet them, and their experiences. We know how critical it is for administrators to thoroughly vet tools for compliance around data privacy and security, accessibility, and pedagogical fit, and brainstored ways admins and Instructure can work together to make this process more efficient and streamlined.
💬 “We’re all doing so much of this work on our own, over and over again. Would be incredibly helpful to have a way to share with each other.”
Some of the more popular ideas included:
Discussions centered on supporting teaching and faculty with vetted educational tools, and ensuring strong adoption of these tools. The true measure of return on investment comes in the form of student outcomes.Our discussion covered ideas like:
With these insights and validations, we’ve created a path to empower administrators with more LTI usage reporting, and will be adding in a new Monitor Tab for Canvas Apps. This tab, coming to Feature Preview next week, gives that first insight into how integrated LTI tools are being used by your account, subaccount, and courses. More information will be coming soon regarding the Monitor tab.
As a next step, we will continue exploring how Canvas Apps offers new features, and leverages features from our portfolio products Impact and LearnPlatform, to offer a holistic edtech effectiveness solution for Canvas Administrators. This Customer Connectivity Discovery day gave us much to consider regarding LTI reporting and institutional use cases to best support administrators and faculty, but we’d love to hear from more of you! Please consider completing this survey to join in the conversation. Our designers and engineers are exploring creative solutions, and we will continue to engage with you to co-create and refine the features that are most meaningful to you.
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I'm a Director of Product Marketing at Instructure. I joined in May of 2017 and am passionate about impacting education and partnering with our institutions to improve their experiences.
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