IBL News | New York
Instructure (NYSE: INST), the maker of Canvas LMS, celebrated this week its annual conference, InstructureCon, with 10,000 virtual users registered to attend the event, talks, and announcement of partnerships and new features. Instructure is one the last companies still celebrating a virtual gathering, despite almost all of the industry has already moved to face-to-face conferences. Next year, InstructureCon will take place in person in Denver, July 25-28, 2023.
These are some of the product updates on its learning platform:
- Discussions redesign: the user interface now allows for quoting replies, tagging respondents with @mentions, and the capability of flagging or reporting replies.
- Assignment enhancements for students: an improved submission workflow includes a progress tracker for each assignment, clear submission options, improved access to rubrics and feedback, and access to each attempt if multiple are given.
- Course pacing: a feature that allows the automatic distribution of due dates with different start dates based on an instructor’s defined pace, all to better support outcomes-based, or competency-based education (CBE).
- SpeedGrader and Gradebook improvements: updates that streamline grading workflows.
- Canvas Studio updates: Canvas Studio now supports media uploads from Vimeo and automates uploading from Zoom. With improved analytics, instructors can understand how students engage with course videos.
- Canvas Catalog updates: time-saving updates streamline purchasing and enrolling in courses, including in multiple listings simultaneously.
- Canvas Credentials: after the purchase of Badgr, the micro-credentialing tool was rebranded as “Canvas Badges” and “Canvas Credentials,” a suite of tools with unlimited badging, analytics, and personalized pathways.
Mastery Product Updates
Mastery, Instructure’s competency-based solution for K-12 assessment allows teachers to identify what students know and don’t know, standard by standard, in real-time when they can most influence learning. Recent improvements include the following:
- Enhanced Integration with Canvas
- Assessment content additions: expanded high-quality district assessment offerings in several states.
- Expanded tools, workflows, and accommodations: new text-to-speech options and improved reporting features.
Elevate Product Updates
The recent updates to Elevate and student performance help give educators a complete picture of their students, curriculum, and programs. For example:
- New Assessment Analytics Edition of Elevate K-12 Analytics: gives school districts the ability to compare student outcomes in the Mastery Connect AMS with state assessment results and to disaggregate by demographics and enrollment.
- “Group Perspectives,” like recently released student perspectives, Group Perspectives will soon enable highly-visual and interactive views of outcomes for student groups, such as classrooms, schools, English Language Learners, and more.
- Elevate Data Quality: planned enhancements include a new user interface and added features such as custom rule writing, user management, and integration with Elevate K-12 Analytics will provide additional assurances of downstream data quality in the analytics platform.
- Integration: Impact is expanding to even more products in the Instructure Learning Platform.
- Impact Virtual Assistant for Tier 1 Institutions (currently in beta): this will allow educators to intervene earlier with users and anticipate and resolve questions or issues.
In terms of new partnerships, Instructure announced further partnership integration with 40 popular EdTech solution providers, including AWS, Google for Education, Microsoft, Terracotta, eLumen Insights, Turnitin, Cidi Labs, Blindside Networks (BigBlueButton), Pathify, Terracotta, and InSpace.
