Introducing Intelligent Insights - a New Product Offering in Analytics & AI

[GergelyTar]

At Instructure, we're dedicated to enhancing educational experiences through innovative technology. We're thrilled to introduce Intelligent Insights, our latest product offering designed to revolutionize analytics and AI in education at this year’s InstructureCon, on July 10th 2024. Intelligent Insights empowers institutions with self-service analytics and actionable insights to improve course effectiveness, student retention, and graduation rates. This exciting, cutting-edge tool comprises four key features: Course Readiness, Students in Need of Attention, Ask Your Data, and LTI Usage. Let's explore how each feature can transform your educational landscape.

1. Course Readiness: Elevate Your Teaching and Learning Standards

Ensuring course readiness is crucial for delivering a consistent and effective educational experience. With Course Readiness, Canvas admins can manage and measure course effectiveness from the start and throughout the term. Institutions can customize criteria to set their standards when it comes to course quality, allowing for data-informed decisions and actions to enhance teaching consistency and learning outcomes. This feature provides the insights needed to maintain high standards and continuously improve the quality of education.

2. Students in Need of Attention: Proactive Support for Student Success

Student retention and success are paramount for any educational institution. The Students in Need of Attention feature allows educators to identify students who may be struggling due to underperformance or low participation. By establishing leading indicators, institutions can proactively recognize these students and offer timely support and outreach. This proactive approach ensures that students receive the necessary assistance to improve their academic experience and outcomes, ultimately enhancing retention and graduation rates.

3. Ask Your Data: AI-Powered Insights at Your Fingertips

Navigating through vast amounts of data can be daunting, especially for those without technical expertise. Ask Your Data simplifies this process with advanced technology, AI and a sophisticated large language model that allows users to ask questions in natural language. Canvas admins and Business Intelligence (BI) teams can now effortlessly interact with and visualize data, making informed decisions without needing advanced technical skills. This feature democratizes data for Canvas admins, and enables them to gain valuable insights effectively.

4. LTI Usage: Uncovering the Value of Your Learning Tools

Understanding the utilization of Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) tools is essential for maximizing their impact. The LTI Usage dashboard provides a comprehensive view of where, when, by whom, and how often LTIs are used within Canvas. This feature helps administrators answer critical questions about LTI tool usage, identify key users, and spot trends. With these insights, institutions can better support educators and optimize the use of LTIs to enhance the learning experience.

 

Transform Your Institution with Intelligent Insights

Intelligent Insights is more than just a product - it's a strategic ally in advancing your institution's educational mission. By harnessing the power of advanced analytics and AI, you can make informed decisions, provide targeted support, and continually improve the effectiveness of your courses and tools. Embrace Intelligent Insights to take a proactive approach to education, ensuring that your institution has the resources it needs to thrive.

[IanGoh]

Million dollar question.  What'll it cost us?

[dkpst5]

Absolutely... And the one most obviously marked "premium" -- LTI reporting -- is something that's been glaringly, obviously blatantly, missing from built-in Canvas reporting and a top-ask for forever. It's a hole in core functionality, basic reporting. It should not be a premium feature at all. Hopefully no one breaks down and pays for what should have been built in ages ago.

[AlleneFrederick]

Is Intelligent Insights available now?  If not, when will it be available?

[kristy_bergeron]

I'm surprised and disappointed to see this is an "add-on" feature of an LMS we already pay for. Administrative reporting and analytics features should not incur an additional cost--especially when the old Canvas reporting and data features have always been inadequate.

[Mikee]

Really really disappointed at the beg ad in the analytics hub for this. 

[Jeff_F]

This is such a terrific development. About eight years ago when we started using Canvas Data we developed our own Early Warning dashboard to detect at-risk students. To create this we needed someone skilled with creating and maintaining the data feeds from Canvas Data, creating databases and dashboards, a license for Canvas Data, licenses for the dashboard creation software, and of course licenses for the teams of advisors so they could view the dashboards. Being able to avoid all this development time and overhead would be a substantial cost savings to institutions. And having the ability for the advising team to bookmark a page in Canvas, apply a few filters, and pull out the list of students with low grades/ no activity, etc. is a rather nice development. I am hoping the filters are 'smart enough' to enable the listing of active courses, filter by subaccount, course score level, the date of last activity, etc.

The course readiness dashboard is also interesting. One of our reports is sent to the residential campuses and it summarizes the courses offered and lists the type and number of assignments by course. It also lists the courses that do not have assignments, which I think is useful for leadership and faculty development teams. This new course readiness tool takes it a step further and enables filtering by the number of outcomes, rubrics, quiz type, as well as content (pages and modules?). And it has a built-in messaging tool.

Our team uses a customized process for course readiness. We currently use customized Canvas Data Tableau reports that include checks for the instructor name and term dates being added to the course home page, a 90-day extension to the course participation end date (this delays the concluding of courses which is our policy/ approach), grade weights totaling 100%, check to see if sections combined correctly/ incorrectly, link checker semi-automation (we use Power Automate to click the link validation button and to web scrape the results into a single Excel file), module and assignment due dates creating correctly, the missing / late policy setting being present and correct, and the Turnitin Plagiarism assignments list so we can visually check and confirm settings (if only there was API support for this). We have another report that checks to ensure at least one announcement is posted, that the exam availability dates are set, that the instructor added contact information to their bio page, that all integrations are configured and ready, and that all the due dates are correct. (Yes, we check these twice).  I am sharing this level of detail as these are important elements for us to check in all courses ahead of each term start. Perhaps one or more of these checks would help improve the new course readiness tool. Just yesterday a colleague was mentioning she was taking a course (at a different institution) and the course was riddled with broken links. That is just poor quality control on the part of the instructor which results in a poor course experience. So yes, a global link checker sure would be nifty.

As for the conversational AI that generates SQL queries, are you guys trying to put me out of a job. ;o) All kidding aside, this sure looks interesting and I see several benefits.

ps. after Instructurecon we travelled to Zion National Park and rented ebikes. After the day was over I commented to the shop keeper that I would have paid extra for a larger seat made of gel. My point is that I support the creation and offering of premium services for additional cost as one size does not fit all. Way to go, Instructure!

[GergelyTar]

Thanks you all for your feedback. We're really excited about the launch of Intelligent Insights and we believe it will provide a ton of value to you/your teams in terms of making critical Teaching and Learning data more accessible and relevant to your specific institution. I want to make sure I address a few topics you've brought up:  

First, this is available now! 

Please speak with your CSM if you're interested in a demo or learning more about the product. 

Second, I want to address the additional cost. 

Our goal is to give all of our customers the ability to get relevant, timely insight into critical Teaching and Learning activities so that you can ultimately ensure student success. 

We do provide a foundation for that for free. 

• Your raw data, from Canvas Data 2 is available to use to create your own dashboards and insights. 
• Admin Analytics is also free. We process and classify your data (clean it up and organize it) and then put it into easy-to-understand data visualizations to help you look at Canvas usage, course success and student engagement. All of this data can be viewed in many different ways (by term, sub-account, course, etc). We have some great examples of institutions, like Portland State University, using Admin Analytics to identify at-risk students early and provide targeted support, make data-driven decisions for resource allocation and program development, and customize course design based on teaching and learning data. They had a great presentation at InstructureCon, and it’s worth a look! 
• Course-level analytics is also free, and available for teachers to see how students are engaging in the course, which resources are heavily used, and make it easy for teachers to communicate with students who have low grades or activity in the course. 

Intelligent Insights goes further. 

• We wanted to make some of the advanced data work — that customers with large data teams are doing — available for everyone, right in the LMS! 
• Users are able to tune the data they want to see in Intelligent Insights, create criteria that are specific to their needs, and use AI to interact with data they might not be able to query on their own. 
• Some of our customers are building these tools themselves, but that can be a costly and time consuming process: ingesting the data into a warehouse, transforming, organizing and maintaining the data, building queries, adding a BI tool for visualization, licenses, and more - and also in addition, the cost of AI.
• There are also other LTI tools available that give you some of these insights. Some of these are even Instructure partner products! 

Last, I want to note that we’re going to keep building features to make Intelligent Insights fit your needs. 

[carlycurran]

@Jeff_F  We love to hear the ways you’re doing this now. You are always ahead of the game and were tremendously helpful to the team as we built Admin Analytics.

During our beta, we also heard that due dates set correctly and link checking are important parts of Course Readiness – they are on our roadmap! Thank you for the details on other items you check – this is such valuable feedback! 

P.S. Happy you got to explore Zion!! On a bike no less!!

[JACOBSEN_C]

What AI model/service is Instructure using for these features?