By Derek Newton
Reposted from Forbes, with permission
Instructure may not be a name you know.
But if you’re in education, you are nearly certain to know their core product, Canvas. The learning management system is nearly ubiquitous. As of last year, the company said that about half of all college students and approximately one in three K-12 school districts use Canvas.
This means that what Instructure does impacts millions of students, teachers, and education providers. It also means that what company leaders say, or promise, or are working on – that matters too. Fortunately, Instructure hosts a well-attended and anticipated annual conference with educators, administrators, and innovators, called InstructureCon.
I was fortunate enough to attend last year. Although my schedule did not permit my in-person participation this year, as the conference opened, I was able to sit down with Shiren Vijiasingam, Instructure’s Chief Product Officer, for a remote conversation about what Instructure was planning and thinking about for its services and, consequently, for its customers and partners.
Vijiasingam described InstructureCon as “edtech’s burning man.” Having been last year, that feels exuberant. But that’s excusable. Vijiasingam is exuberant about what he and his team are doing. It’s impossible to miss.
“We are continuing to iterate our core LMS,” Vijiasingam said. “We’re strengthening our tools and continuing to build on what is clearly a lifelong learning journey for most people. Teaching and learning don’t stop at a degree or graduation anymore, and we’re really embracing that as part of our approach,” he said.
But, Vijiasingam said, the two little letters that were on everyone’s mind were also forefront for his team, and for his presentations at the conference. Those letters, of course, are “A” and “I.”
“We are talking about and thinking about AI along this progression, akin to a hierarchy of needs,” Vijiasingam said. “That progression follows along how it’s being used, from basic awareness and readiness, to internalizing and owning your own artificial intelligence tools and systems that we can build on to or connect with,” he said.
It’s the tiered thinking about AI adoption and use in education that will drive Instructure’s product lines in the near term and may also work as a make-shift template for education providers to assess their own individual and institutional positioning.
As described by Vijiasingam, the first tier of education AI is awareness and willingness to try it out. “The next tier,” he said, “is the people who are already doing basic things with LLM.” An LLM is a large language model that powers generative AI tools such ChatGTP.
“Those folks in tier two, are doing things like generation of content, using AI to generate questions and ideas,” Vijiasingam said. “And it’s in this second-tier area where we’ve seen the biggest proliferation of solutions out there, coming into the market from a host of new startups and even some older companies,” he said.
Next, in Instructure’s way of thinking about it, is the group of people for whom AI has changed the way they work or teach. Using AI to navigate a large, remote course, for example.
“Imagine trying to read and wade through a conversation thread that’s four, five conversations deep across a thousand students,” said Vijiasingam. “Good AI tools can summarize those conversations, allow you to ask questions of the summaries. It can even have tools that help drive equity,” he said. As an example, he said AI can help students search for things in their native language, get results in English, and add to a discussion. Or allow students to compose a text in their native language and easily convert it back to English.
Finally, tier four, Vijiasingam says, is where institutions are building and bringing their own LLM to the party. Those making big investments and big bets on AI are coming to Canvas with their eyes on integration and interoperability.
“Working with customers and partners to build out tools and services in tier three and tier four is the sweet spot for us,” Vijiasingam said.
We are close, he says, to the point where teachers and other teaching leaders can ask simple language questions of their data and unearth actionable information. “Show me all my students who missed two assignments and are scoring below 70 percent,” Vijiasingam offers as an example. “Using these tools in these ways will make data accessible, give meaning to the people looking for real insights in haystacks of data,” he said.
Looking ever further ahead, Vijiasingam talks about Instructure’s work on developing a standard for badging and a standard for comprehensive learning records. Goals, he says, that relate back to some of Instructure’s acquisitions and the company’s ongoing focus on learning anywhere, all the time, both formally and informally.
“It’s not new for us,” Vijiasingam said. “But post-pandemic we are seeing a deeper appreciation of lifelong learning and non-degree programs at traditional institutions, as well as those that exist outside those traditional institutions.”
Instructure is so influential and their shadow so large that, if you follow education at all, it’s worth looking at whatever they’re looking at. For now, Vijiasingam has his gaze firmly fixed on AI and the far horizon of continuous teaching and learning.
