Instructure Chooses Partners for Its Open, Interoperable Ecosystem of Solutions
A Q&A with Ryan Lufkin
Education technologies are changing at an increasingly fast pace. New opportunities to enhance teaching, learning, and administration are compelling. Here, CT talks with Instructure's VP of Global Strategy Ryan Lufkin to learn how his company leverages partnerships in an evolving global marketplace.
"We've created an open, interoperable ecosystem of solutions, leveraging partnerships that bring in additional solutions to build an even more comprehensive ecosystem." —Ryan Lufkin
Mary Grush: What is Instructure's view of the higher education marketplace, and what are your company's priorities for new products and market development? As Instructure's VP of global strategy, what's important from your perspective?
Ryan Lufkin: I've been with Instructure for five and a half years now, and I've worked in education technology for more than twenty. One of the key things that has always impressed me about the education market is the sense of openness and collaboration. And that's reflected in Instructure's own ongoing commitment to openness. As we move Instructure beyond the Canvas LMS as our primary solution, to a full platform of solutions — the Instructure Learning Platform — one of the key things that we've remained committed to is an openness that allows educators to plug in whatever tools they want to use. In our extensive open ecosystem we have more than 800 partners who have built solutions that we can plug in to Canvas. That empowers customers with the flexibility to choose the solutions they want most.
Now that we're in an innovative phase in which AI tools are evolving rapidly, that openness allows us to leverage some of the best AI tools in the marketplace. We want to help education institutions leverage tools from partners they can trust. All of that supports our own long-term mission — which is "to elevate student success, amplify the power of teaching, and inspire everyone to learn together" — and it's the most beneficial approach for our education customers.
To speak somewhat more specifically to areas of product development, I'd turn to more recent times. We've recently experienced probably the most disruptive three years in the history of education, with Covid and the rapid adoption of technology. That happened all around the globe: An estimated 1.5 billion students suffered from learning disruption. So, our focus at Instructure in recent years has been to support the transition to online learning.
But now, as we're getting back to a new normal, we're focusing more on blended learning and using that technology to support students both inside and outside the classroom. And we're preparing tools for future disruptions, be they natural disasters or other rapid changes.
The bottom line is that we're poised to evolve [sic] the learning experience, if you will, worldwide. We do that in several ways. Perhaps most importantly, we see the accessibility gap, as well as an equity gap, and we want to help close those gaps for learning institutions at every level, around the globe.
We see the accessibility gap, as well as an equity gap, and we want to help close those gaps for learning institutions at every level, around the globe.
Just as we were adjusting to this new normal, we saw the emergence of the AI revolution with its amazing rapid progress during the past several months. So, what we are doing right now is working with learning institutions to determine whether we can all view AI as something other than a cheating tool — and in fact, as so much more. The critical questions that might be addressed with AI are: How can we help support educators who are burdened with the complexities of modern education, and how can we help students stay on track?