At Instructure, we are dedicated to providing our customers with an unparalleled learning experience. We see our customers as advisors and co-creators of our best-in-class education platform. As part of our commitment to integrating customer insights, we are holding over 15 Customer Discovery Sessions in 2025. These sessions provide us an opportunity to listen to a diverse set of customers and gather valuable feedback on our latest themes, features, and prototypes.
We recently held our first session in Lakeland, Florida and had a dozen administrators from across the state in both K12 and Higher Education, as well as nine faculty from Polk State College participate in ideation exercises and feedback sessions, where they shared their suggestions for improvement and reconfirmed their excitement for many of the initiatives we have in the works.
We discussed a range of topics such as AI, accessibility, the instructor experience, and the learner experience within Canvas.
Intentional AI
At Instructure, we’re committed to using and developing tools with AI in an intentional, safe, and equitable manner. The group expressed a common interest in using AI in a responsible, clear, and deliberate manner to save time for both educators and students, while maintaining academic integrity within their courses. We shared prototypes of potential tools that would utilize AI to support educator efficiency and efficacy as well as student success. Our participants shared that they found powerful use-cases for AI tools in supporting educators with instructional design, content development, grading and feedback, and making learning more engaging. However, they reiterated the concerns of proper use of AI to protect both students and educators as well as concerns for academic integrity, which is still high for both K-12 and Higher Education. Our participants encouraged us to keep this top of mind.
Improved User Experience
A key focus of our conversations was around the user experience for course organization, assessment, and content creation. Despite requests for more advanced or customizable features, the CDS group reiterated the importance of keeping an intuitive and user-friendly experience for both instructors and students. They called attention to specific areas within Canvas that could be easier to navigate such as New Quizzes, Modules, and the Dashboard. Our participants encouraged us to make New Quizzes more intuitive during the creation, administration, and reports review processes, continue to surface information about student progress and performance through modules, and make the dashboard a more meaningful place to start a learning session. We were pleased to show prototypes of user interface updates to the Block Editor and New Quizzes, which are in active development, and will further enhance the ease of use of Canvas LMS for educators. We also showed a prototype of an updated Module experience that will surface more progress and performance data to both educators and learners.
Accessibility
We also examined how each institution or district is adapting to forthcoming Accessibility legislation affecting learning technologies. We collaboratively identified and prioritized evolving workflows in K-12 and higher education, and explored how Canvas can better facilitate and support content accessibility for their faculty.
Finally, we shared our strategy for involving customers in new ways, which includes even more Customer Discovery Sessions and investments in tools that allow us to better track, manage, and respond to the hundreds of ideas we receive every year in the Canvas Community.
Main Takeaways
While there was no shortage of engaging discussion, we would summarize our takeaways as such:
- Our customers expect AI developments to assist faculty with their common time-consuming tasks, but the implementation of AI needs to keep humans at the center and needs to be centrally managed and controlled.
- Common features and views from New Quizzes to Modules can have streamlined navigation while also demonstrating student progress to save time and provide greater insight to faculty.
- Our work to bolster Canvas’ Accessibility features can scale best practices that ensure equitable learning for all, and our partnership on all things Accessibility provides a real opportunity to alleviate administrator and faculty burden.
We are so grateful for the feedback we received during this customer discovery session. The insights gathered here are helping shape our priorities, influencing the design and development of our products, and determining timelines and strategies for product releases. By leveraging these insights, and those of future CDS sessions, we can better ensure our products are not only innovative, but also aligned with the needs and expectations of our users.
CDS Committee collaborating during a prioritization activity
CDS Committee collaborating during a protoype demonstration
