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.
Key takeaway #1: Administrators need more streamlined ways to manage edtech and gain visibility into usage
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.
💬 “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.”
Key takeaway #2: HiEd leaders see the connections in their work, and want to share feedback and vetting results
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:
- "Water cooler" for edtech: A virtual space to connect individuals who heavily use educational tools, fostering a sense of community and knowledge sharing. This could be used to discover edtech tools other faculty members are using.
- Community of Practice (CoP): A way for institutions to share their strategies around discovering and implementing educational technology.
- Feedback for Partners: Support and Feedback couple be shared with Partners to support faster compliance vetting and documentation requests
Key takeaway #3: It all comes down to teaching and learning.
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:
- Sharing training and support resources: There was a need to share training and support resources for faculty and administrators related to tool usage within Canvas.
- Offering in-app walkthroughs: Edtech walkthroughs could provide more proactive and meaningful faculty support.
- Recommending tools to faculty: This could look like a leaderboard of the top 5 tools in use and the top courses they are being used in.
- Feedback from faculty: There was a desire to gather and share feedback from faculty about tools, to help improve adoption and effectiveness.
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.
