The Community Team organizes and maintains over 4,200 guides. It also moderates product-specific question forums, many user and special interest groups, blogs, Instructure Live, and Canvas Network. 

While we often don’t pause to shine a spotlight on ourselves, we’d like to introduce you to our team – the incredible group of individuals who work behind the scenes to make the Instructure Community the awesome place it is, somewhere where we hope you feel welcomed and supported.

As we step into 2025 with excitement and optimism, we want to reflect on the journey we shared throughout 2024. The Instructure Community is a place where collaboration flourishes, stories are shared, and continuous innovation in teaching and learning is celebrated. 

I thought it might be fun to share some Community "Tips & Tricks" with all of you based on my own experiences using the Community site over the past several years.  Some of these you might already be familiar with, but in other cases, you might be saying, "Wait...what?"

We have updated the Canvas LMS Release Notes Page to provide better sorting for Releases and Deploys. Releases and Deploys each display in their own tab on the page and are divided into their own sections in the Release Archives sidebar. We have also updated the Partner Page feed to reflect updates made to the sorting and filtering UI in other areas of the Instructure Community.

As the Instructure Community continues to grow and evolve, understanding what you value and need in the Community is essential. The 2024 Community Health Survey is an opportunity for you to share your experiences, ideas, and feedback to help us create a space that serves everyone better.

We provided a feedback opportunity for you to share how your institution is addressing key issues like media literacy and misinformation, screen time reduction, student mental health, and more. Participation was low, but the findings and insights thus far are worth deeper discussion.

Our review of your insights reveals a strong alignment with our goals for improvement, particularly in leveraging automation to enhance your Support experience. We’re excited to implement initiatives that focus on optimizing automation to streamline processes, improve response times, and ensure consistent quality in our interactions.Thank you for your invaluable contributions.

Your feedback is not just heard—it drives our commitment to delivering exceptional service.

The Office of Academic Strategy, the Instructure Community Team, and the Instructure Events Team are excited to announce a special read-along event featuring Cultures of Growth by Mary C. Murphy. The Book Club course, offered through Canvas Network, will extend the InstructureCon '24 experience and encourage participants to participate in collaborative dialogue and open-minded exploration.

To better help you and your fellow Community members find relevant and current content, we used feedback from our 2023 Health Survey and 2024 InstructureCon survey to develop a biannual archival process which will begin on Tuesday, September 3, 2024.

Questions at least three years old and have not had a new comment or like added in the last twelve months will be marked as Archived and moved out of the main question forums.

We’re thrilled to share some exciting updates about our user guides and the enhancements we're bringing to improve your experience. Here’s what you need to know:

Let’s boost the percentage of Community members who have subscribed to the Instructure Community Weekly Highlights Blog! After signing into your Community account, visit the Weekly Highlights Blog and verify that you’re subscribed to the page. We’ll get those updates to you each Monday.

As technologies continue to evolve and shape our futures, it’s crucial that both students and faculty are equipped with the necessary enablement to navigate these changes effectively. Whether it’s supporting students’ mental health and overall well-being, promoting the ethical use of AI, or effectively assessing the skills of students—your insights are indispensable.

We’ve designed this survey to gather your feedback on some key topics that matter most to you/your institution. 

Today is the start of Instructure's next chapter. This morning, we announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by investment funds managed by KKR, a leading global investment firm.

At Instructure, we’re committed to understanding the diverse experiences of educators, from K-12 and higher education institutions to professional learning organizations, nonprofits, and government agencies. 

We’d love to hear your thoughts on current priorities, challenges, and trends in education. Topics include the use of edtech, effective assessments, supporting lifelong learners, and the future of teaching and learning.

The Instructure Community is excited to introduce Community Pros, a new series of meetups exclusively for Instructure Community members! These sessions are designed to foster learning, collaboration, and networking in an informal and customer-led environment.

Today’s update focuses on our Canvas User Role Group pages and our product question forums.

We’re introducing a new way to subscribe and stay up-to-date with the latest posts from the Product Blog and only see the topics you care about: label subscriptions. With label subscriptions, you can easily manage which products or topics you get updates for from the Product Blog.

We reached out to get your views  on Open Educational Resources (OER), your experience with their usability, and what you feel is essential to its future. As a token of our appreciation for everyone’s time and contribution, we are sharing this preliminary report of findings.  

Instructure’s Discovery Sessions provide Canvas users with a direct line to Instructure’s software engineers and product managers. Participants engage in discussions about generative AI, prioritize quick wins, and share unfiltered insights. These sessions highlight Instructure’s commitment to listening and shaping educational tools based on user feedback.

To All Our Amazing Teachers, Instructors, and Educators Across the Globe, Happy Teacher Appreciation Week to you!

Are you curious about the future of humanity and the role technology plays in shaping it? Do you want to explore the possibilities and challenges that lie ahead with others? Join us in our upcoming book club as we explore the thought-provoking insights of Dr. Jordan Nguyen ahead of his Keynote at InstructureCon 2024.

We would love to get your views on Open Educational Resources (OER), your experience with their usability, and what you feel is essential to its future. 

We're adding new Instructure Live reminders, a redesigned home page for unauthenticated users, updates to our blog pages, and a new all guides page.

Today’s a big day for the Instructure Community! We’re acknowledging a significant milestone for Instructure’s Community Coaches program.

Canvas Release Notes will be published two days after updates are added to the Beta environment.

We’ve updated the Canvas LMS Question Forum user interface to provide easier access to answered and unanswered questions, upgraded the question feeds to match the new design throughout the Community, and made browsing and answering questions easier. These changes will roll out to the Canvas LMS Question Forum today and will roll out to other product question forums in the coming weeks and months.

We’ve also added a new Share button for earned badges. On the Badges tab on your profile page, you can share badges you’ve earned on social media using the provided text and links.

We refreshed and updated the Canvas LMS Release Notes pages with a clean design, added functionality, and easier back-end management. We also created a new Release Notes Archives page to let users easily browse and search older release notes. For now, these changes only apply to Canvas LMS Release Notes. Other product release notes will be updated in the coming months.

As we are all reflecting on the past year and thinking about the future, I thought I would share a bit about my new journey as the first Chief Academic Officer at Instructure.

We updated the Instructure Community gamification structure with a brand new set of badges. The badges represent actions you take in and the value you add to the Instructure Community. The new badges also help you identify the credibility of members throughout the Community by giving you better context about a member’s participation in the Community. For more details on what the new badges mean and how we decided on the new badges, read Kristin’s Announcing: New Community Badges blog post.

The Instructure Community is launching a new set of badges to acknowledge members for their valuable contributions. We’re also thrilled that the scaled badges will make it easier to identify credible members throughout the Community!