As I approach my first anniversary as Chief Technology Officer, I wanted to share with you, our customers, how my team is approaching some of the foundational technical work that will power our product into the future. I have been busy working with the Tech team to understand each and every part of the technology that supports you. With that understanding, we can establish a technology strategy that builds on everything you love about Instructure products, while putting us in a position to continue innovating for you into the future. I am delighted to be able to share some foundational technology work that we’ve been taking on that will power our products into the future.
The changing tech landscape
Looking at the big picture, there are two major factors from a technology perspective at play in our industry at the moment. First, the educational landscape is shifting. Learners are pursuing new, non-traditional pathways to get their education, beyond the traditional degree. Second, the evolution of technology has never moved faster. With the emergence of generative AI, the pace of innovation will only accelerate further.
In this context of rapid change, we at Instructure must acknowledge that we are 16 years old. And like any teenager, special care and attention is sometimes needed. The great news is we are very focused in ensuring our technology is future-ready and we are investing in our underlying technology to unlock the pace of innovation we once enjoyed.
So what kind of things are we working on?
Speed, starting with SpeedGrader
Let's start with what we have heard from you, our customer: some features are too slow.
One of the biggest offenders, particularly in a large classroom setting, has been SpeedGrader. Over the last several months, we have been busy updating it with large classroom support in mind. For the most part, it will look and feel the same, but we have adopted newer technology and better design to load data as needed instead of loading everything up front. This newer technology and architecture will also allow us to make future changes faster than ever before, unlocking our ability to innovate.
This newly enhanced SpeedGrader is already in alpha with three large universities and will be generally available to all in January. We aim to ensure a seamless transition and, while we don't anticipate any negative impact, we have a clear path to revert if necessary as we understand how critical the grading process is to your teaching and learning cycle.
And this is just the beginning. We are deeply committed to continuously improving and innovating our core LMS. In the coming months & years, we will invest in Canvas and many other areas of our core products, with a particular focus on unlocking capabilities to support large classrooms.
Identity
We have heard from many of you that a seamless view of a user across our products is needed. For example, you may have a student enrolled in a certificate program who is also enrolled in a matriculating program and they might be viewed as two separate users today. Additionally, it’s cumbersome when different credentials are needed across our different products.
To address these issues and more, we are investing in a new global identity solution that will allow a user to access all Instructure products with a single username and password.
Organizations will have the ability to centrally manage their user accounts and authentication settings, including privacy controls such as MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) enablement. And with a new global Instructure ID, organizations will be able to more easily generate cross-product reports and analytics.
As we think of certificates and credentials as a key component of lifelong learning, we want to give learners visibility into their complete learner record across institutions. This allows a prospective employer to have a full view of a learner's achievements. This identity work will allow us to more easily connect individual learners with institutions so they can have this visibility, all while the schools retain control over the credentials.
This work will be happening on the back end with a pre-population and harmonization of data, and we’ll ensure no disruption to current services or reporting for customers. We will share in a future post how we will be selecting schools to test the solution in early 2025.
Cohesive Experience & Accessibility
Next up, let's talk about the look and feel of our products. Over the last year, under the guidance of our Head of Design, Nina Ong, we have invested in making our product portfolio look and feel the same across products, reducing unnecessary clicks, and enabling ease of navigation between products. We’re just getting started, but we’re committed to this work because we know that having easy-to-use products that look like they’re in the same family reduces cognitive burden for our users. And, we know it runs so much deeper than look and feel. In almost every conversation I have had with customers, accessibility has come up as a major priority. Today, many of our products, including Canvas, enjoy VPAT certification, and over the next 12 months, we will increase that number significantly. Accessibility is built into our Design Framework from the ground up. So, as we are rolling it out, we are meeting the required standards as well as designing the technology such that future changes can be applied rapidly across products. Accessibility is a core value that we are all deeply committed to.
AI
Of course, AI is on everyone’s minds right now (and we talked about it a ton at InstructureCon this July). I believe GenAI is uniquely suited to play a significant role in EdTech, but there are constraints. Cost, privacy, and bias may not be the most exciting considerations of the topic, but I believe they’re mission-critical when building solutions. Instructure’s approach has been to focus on supporting institutions through every stage of their adoption of AI and building solutions that create efficiency for educators, enable student success, and drive learning outcomes. Through it all, we’ll do this in a safe way with clear privacy and security boundaries and an emphasis on affordability and equity.
At InstructureCon, you heard about numerous exciting announcements that are AI driven. I will mention one that I am particularly excited about - our SmartSearch API, which will allow both customers and partners to retrieve course content and use it with their preferred AI models. I love this example because it illustrates our belief that AI isn't a one-size fits all tool, and each institution needs the freedom and flexibility to tailor its usage to their campus.
Conclusion
Beyond all of these topics, we are doing so much more, from enabling our partners and customers who want to integrate with our APIs, to security, privacy and making your data more accessible to you. We are going to continue investing in our platform technology so that you and your students can continue to focus on what matters — learning.
