According to a news release Wednesday, Instructure introduced a series of free software updates to Canvas at a company event this week in Las Vegas, alongside plans to add AI-based Khanmigo teaching tools from the nonprofit Khan Academy in September. Those will include AI programs to help educators with tasks that range from lesson planning and question generation to writing letters of recommendation and preparing for substitutes.
Instructure’s Chief Academic Officer Melissa Loble said the addition of Khanmigo tools to Canvas aims to ease the burden on teachers and enhance their connections with students.
“This is a collection of all sorts of tools specifically aimed at teachers so they can have an easier time building more engaging courses and content, and even doing some of the administrative tasks,” Loble said. “We really want to help take work off teachers’ plates.”
Besides forthcoming Khanmigo Teacher Tools, new AI tools announced this week that come directly from Instructure included automated discussion summaries, content translation and a Smart Search feature that can find course content related to, and not merely containing, search terms. Loble said the discussion summaries are especially helpful in her own work as an online educator.
“Those discussion summaries are really powerful, especially for a fully online course, because if there’s a robust discussion thread, as an instructor it’s a lot to read and keep up with,” she said. “Now I can just push a button and get a summary of the discussion, and I can do that any time — it will just automatically update that summary.”
Instructure also unveiled a label of “AI nutrition facts” at the annual InstructureCon conference this week, listing the large language models (LLMs) and data policies of all first- and third-party AI tools available in Canvas. In addition, the company announced a September launch date for its new Certified LTI Apps program, which will allow institutions to see which AI tools in Canvas meet the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, an industry standard of best practices from the nonprofit 1EdTech.
For educators who want to connect their own AI services to Canvas, Instructure announced its Smart Search API, which “vectorizes Canvas course content so that LLMs or third-party AI tools have the context they need to produce more relevant results,” according to the news release. Smart Search API is available in Canvas now, along with support for institutions that want to integrate Canvas with their own LLMs. A new extension that allows AI assistants to plug into Canvas courses is in the LMS now as well.
On top of the free AI tools outlined above, Instructure announced the launch of a separate AI tool, Intelligent Insights, for data analytics. One component of the tool called “Ask Your Data” allows users to ask questions in a conversational way.
“A great example is if an administrator wants to see all the courses that are about to go live but don’t have any content in them, or the teacher didn’t finish building the course,” Loble said. “They can just type in ‘show me all the courses that aren’t ready to be launched next week,’ and it will bring up a full list of those, and it’ll define how it gave you that list, so you can get the context for it.”
Loble said Intelligent Insights is available now for administrators, and a version for teachers is in the works.
