Instructure Chooses Partners for Its Open, Interoperable Ecosystem of Solutions

• 08/14/23

Grush: Where are we in the timeline for all this? Where can our readers get more information and maybe some good resources as all this develops?

Lufkin: We've added an AI-specific roadmap to our larger Instructure roadmap. In fact, if you search "Instructure roadmap" you will find helpful, public-facing roadmaps for all of our products.

In the AI tools category, you will see that most of the tools are in beta right now. We are pulling the test groups together. Soon, and through the end of this year you will see these tools being rolled out.

If you search for and visit the "Instructure community" online, you will see and be able to access the open community. You will also see that there are some customer-only areas. In general, we are providing access to quite a lot of resources. Within our "Canvas community" we're launching a new "brand hub" with helpful resources to keep you up to date on all things Instructure.

In terms of more upcoming resources, one of the things that we announced a couple of weeks ago that's under development is an Emerging AI Marketplace. We want to make it easier for people to understand what's available and what's new in the area of AI-powered tools. The Emerging AI Marketplace is where individual educators and administrators will look at AI-powered tools and determine what might work best for the challenges they are trying to face. The Emerging AI Marketplace is coming soon. Again, we are creating a trusted marketplace where educators will be able to find the tools they need and can trust.

We are creating a trusted marketplace where educators will be able to find the tools they need and can trust.

Grush: Is the formation of partnerships a trend that's getting stronger in the tech world?

Lufkin: Ten to fifteen years ago there was a real tendency for software vendors to create a walled garden, focusing on wallet share and the hope that customers would use their technologies to the exclusion of others. As I mentioned earlier, the fundamental principles behind Canvas were the very opposite of that. We've created an open, interoperable ecosystem of solutions, leveraging partnerships that bring in additional solutions to build an even more comprehensive ecosystem. In recent years, we have seen a shift in the market, where the level of interoperability and interaction among systems is higher than ever before. This has special implications for partnerships when we recognize that eventually we're going to be seeing technologies emerge that we haven't even thought of at this point.

Grush: Getting back to the recent announcement of Instructure's partnership with Khan Academy for Khanmigo, what do you think or hope will be the best thing that comes out of that partnership?

Lufkin: Khan Academy has done such an amazing job building Khanmigo, especially on the student side of the equation, whereas a lot of our work at Instructure has been on the educator efficiency side of it. Bringing it all together where we have both sides so strongly represented is great, and I hope we get very broad adoption of the tool.

Also, there had been a lot of trepidation initially about AI in education. There were those first, knee-jerk reactions, in some cases labeling AI tools as cheating tools and banning them across the board. But now, a few months later, we are seeing many of those bans being lifted, with a better understanding of AI. What I'm really hoping is that Khanmigo, with its ease-of-use directly within Canvas, will open the doors for broad adoption of the tool as well as for a lot more uses of AI in general, by a more confident, open, and accepting higher education community.