 Well, then let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you all to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a terrific guest and great conversation ahead. So today let me introduce our guest. The topic of learning management systems is something of great concern educational technology. Every college and university just about has at least one LMS or VLE. They're very important for architecture. They're very important for how we plan digital technology in its intersection of the educational world. And the LMS world is now a very bargaining business sector. We've had several different guests on the show before including some analysts and the founder of one. And we're really, really excited to have Dan Goldsmith. Dan's the CEO of Instructure. He is a terrific, terrific thoughtful person. Someone that we've been looking forward to talking to for quite some time. And we're really excited to have him on stage. So without any further ado, let me bring Dan Goldsmith up and we can start talking. Greetings, Dan. Great. Greetings, Brian. How are you today? I'm splendid. How about yourself? Very good. Really excited to have the opportunity to talk to so many people in this forum and also converse with you. Whenever I get a chance to talk with you, I'm super excited. I remember that first hour when we met and we talked, it felt like five minutes. I went by so quickly. I jumped in right naturally to all sorts of interesting topics of the future of education. So I've been looking forward to this session for some time now. Well, it's very kind of you to say. And it's really, really great to see you. Listen, to introduce you to folks, let me just ask. We could talk about your background. Everyone on the email list has gotten your bio and your photo. Let me ask looking ahead a little bit. For Academic Year 2019-2020, what are you looking forward to? What are the big projects and issues that you're going to be spending most of your time on? It's a great question. And it's very apropos at this point in time as well, where as many of you are deep involved with right now, it's fall start, which is the busiest time. I imagine for all of you as well for the entire team here at Instructure. And this year upcoming, 2019 and 2020, I'm sure will not leave us disappointed in terms of all of the adventures ahead. There's a few themes that we see coming from the organization and institutions that we work with, as well as the many varied partner organizations we work with from content to technology partners as well. But I think the biggest theme for this year and probably moving forward in subsequent years is really about more integrated learning experiences. And so while we've been really privileged and fortunate as Instructure with Canvas to play a critical supporting role in education, what we're seeing more and more demand for now is more of these integrated learning experiences. And I think they come from the communities of students and parents and teachers that are becoming much more wide and varied and connected with each other, helping each other succeed. We see it from broader communities of different organizations supporting the educational process as well as professional organizations and corporations getting involved with the educational process. So I think the biggest thing we're seeing is that intercom activity of community and creating more communication support networks that go well beyond sort of a traditional learning management system. Wow, that's quite ambitious, integrated learning. Yeah. Friends, I have all kinds of questions to bombard, pour down with. I'm just going to roll off with one, but let me just invite all of you to ask your questions and to make your comments. And please use either that question mark to type in a question or comment. In fact, two of you have just done that, even as I'm speaking. Or click the raised hand if you'd like to join us up here on stage. In effect, we just had a question. Let me just flash this on the screen as a good example of this. This is from, let's see. This is Laura Gekler at University of Notre Dame. She says, integrated learning experience, give us an example. Here's an example. Good, really good question. So I'm integrated learning experiences. You know, we've seen a wide variety of sort of definitions or sort of around this concept. But some examples are sort of extensions of communities to be integrated with like tutoring systems or peer advisory systems and having them be more integrated into the actual classroom experience or the curriculum that an individual student is going through. In K-12, a great example is the alignment and the integration of assessments where we're seeing more innovative assessments evolve beyond just sort of your benchmark and formative assessments where assessments can happen in the flow of teaching at the point of learning. So you can truly address issues and challenges and learning objectives at the point of need. And then we're seeing more integrated learning experiences in collaboration with corporations. So, you know, we have a number of, we work with a number of institutions that have created a relationship with biotech companies or engineering companies or other types of professional organizations to actually bring those experiences or into the classroom and bring the classrooms or into those experiences as well. And although topics like or areas like co-ops and other type of experiences have always been there, we're seeing the need to have them more integrated into the curriculum and the way people learn and grow. Wow, that's quite an experience and that's quite an ecosystem. Thank you very much for the question. So if you're new to the forum, that's actually a really good example of how to use a question. So I'll just type it in the question mark button and up we run. So you can do this at any time. And we'll have more questions coming in as we go. So one question to ask you, oh, and by the way, friends, I put up a little button here on the stage. It's got a looks like a podium. It's kind of teal colored background. So if you don't want to ask me to beam you up on stage, you can just click that and up you'll go. So then thinking about the the LMS right now, you know, we've been developing this with quite a few different vendors, you know, others like Blackboard. We've had open source projects like Sakai. It's been going on since the 1990s. There's been a lot of talk of a kind of quantum leap forward in the LMS with what some call the next generation digital learning environment. I'm curious. Do you see the next say five years of the LMS? Do you think we'll keep doing incremental improvements and doing projects like you described, integrated learning? Or do you see us making a kind of quantum leap forward into this next generation? I think there's a great question. I think first and foremost, there's a symbiotic relationship in my opinion between the innovation and the change in the sort of educational landscape and industry and what education is looking to achieve. And I can talk about some of those themes as well. And then the technology that supports and enables that change. In fact, at Instructure with Canvas, our objective is to almost fade into the background. We want to be able to support the teaching and the experience in a way where we are not the star player. And we really want to, you know, emphasize sort of the teacher and the student as the key focus in the educational experience. But when you talk about that next gen digital, I think there's a few trends and changes in education that are going to drive that need. And there's a few broader ones, but some of the specific things is obviously more online and blended learning will drive change, both in the educational experience expectations and then the technology that's required to support that. And we see that in our daily lives every day where things are becoming more online integrated and sort of blended in the way that we operate. And that's more and more natural. The other thing is the shift towards a much wider sort of spectrum of credentials and how we measure academic achievement or learning and the application of that learning. The largest growing population right now, as we all know, is the professional worker coming back to school. That's not your traditional sort of, you know, college student. And that's creating a big difference in demand as well in terms of how people balance their time. How do they access learning and education and technology again can be a key enabler and the digitization of technology. I also think there's going to be really two other things. I think quantum leaps and shifts in content. And we're seeing the storming phase of that now with a proliferation of OER content. We're seeing content sources being developed from organizations that we haven't seen before. Amazon has an entire curriculum around cloud computing that's available to everyone. Apple has a swift computing capability. We see organizations like Wiley that is now sort of changing the whole paradigm of how they look at developing and delivering content that is oriented around job classes. So if you're a chemical engineer or a law student or a marketing professional or student, there's different modalities of learning that can be better applied and experiences that can be applied. And then the last thing there that I think will help with that quantum leap or seismic shift in that next-gen digital model is really data and information. And that's a big, big topic right now. It's a hot topic, which I'm happy to talk about. But data, as organizations, institutions are really looking at the key imperatives regarding driving retention and graduation rates, being more accountable and having more measurable outcomes and driving success through the educational process and all of that being supported by continual improvement of education, data is required to sort of inform that ecosystem at every single level. So all of those factors, I think, will create some of those quantum leaps in the coming sort of five to ten years. That's a lot of major trends really pushing on the LMS. Your opening thoughts are reminding me of this classic phrase from a great computer scientist, Mark Weiser, when you mentioned Canvas kind of fading into the background, he has that beautiful phrase, the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. It's in 1991, you've heard of this. People have been, as you spoke then, people have been throwing all kinds of questions. Let me just grab one from Twitter. This is Laura Gibbs who wanted to come in, but ran to a bandwidth probably completely understand, and she asked, I'll quickly paraphrase, can Dan say something definitive about individual data opt out, not institutional, but individual, so that we can opt out from having our data included in data sets? Yeah, so that's great. So Laura, I really appreciate the question, and this has been a dialogue and question that has raised a lot of time, not only around sort of how data is used and where ownership lies, but the opt out of that information or the opt into that information as well. If you look globally, this is a hot topic, and it varies from market to market. In fact, I worked a lot in the healthcare industry prior to joining in structure, and so dealing with HIPAA and different privacy concerns of some very sensitive individual data as well as hospital systems and pharmaceutical companies and clinics and other areas. So in the US, we have, in general, I'm not talking about in structure, in general, there's an opt-in culture, which people by default are opt-in, and that's one of the unfortunate reasons why we all get spam and phone calls on our cell phones that are unwelcome. In Europe, it's an opt-out culture by default, you're opt-out. So not only is this a hot topic in terms of how we navigate it, but it's also something that really differs from market to market. With in structure, we really believe that data is owned first and foremost by the individual, and they should have controls over accessing usage of that information. In fact, one of the things that we are trying to enable is more ownership by that individual. Now with in structure, for the most part, we don't really generate data. Most of what we do is really more is what's called a data processor, if you will, not a data controller. So when we work at different institutions, different institutions have very different requirements and considerations around how they want data to be used and accessed, and actually the broader topic of student data is usually controlled by the institution we're working with, less so by in structure. Well, that's a very, very rich answer. You've gone from the micro level of individual action to the macro level of major technology and economic trends. Thank you, and thank you, Laura, for that great question. We have a few more questions coming up, and let me just pull up a couple on video. So we have David Stone coming up from Penn State University. Give me a second here. Hello, David. Hello. Good to see you. Good to see you. I have a question. There's been a lot of trends in terms of interinstitutional collaboration, shared services, partnerships. Students are moving from institution to institution, from location to location. I'm just trying to get a... What is the instructor's thoughts or strategy about how to accommodate those kind of things? Because I think typically LMS instances are really focused around a single institution, maybe some third party tables, or maybe a single institution information system and things of that nature. Yeah, so David, great question. And I think there's a lot that still needs to be defined in this area of these networks of institutions. And I see two things going on. You may have an individual student that's looking to navigate course offerings, for example, at different institutions or go from one institution to the other. And we collectively don't make that easy right now for a number of reasons, technology being one of them. And so that's really the student-driven. And then what we're seeing is some really incredible network. And I know Penn State University has a number of campuses. And it's good to talk to you, by the way. Pennsylvania is my home state. I've acclimated to the warm, dry weather of Utah now, but Pennsylvania is still home. But then we see networks like UNIT in the Nordics, where all of these institutions are utilizing Canvas or the OEI initiative in California where there's 114 community colleges that are utilizing Canvas across that network. And it's really pushing us to change and define how do we support systems like that. I think there's a lot more that we can do. But what's interesting is we look at some of these systems in the Nordics, for example, in California, they're looking to create new efficiencies and more of a frictionless experience for the students while also trying to optimize resources. So how could a student, for example, in California build either towards a degree or navigate down a pathway towards a credential or set of stackable credentials where it's completely seamless for them to access the best course offerings across multiple institutions within that network. And so these are the types of problems that we're working with these organizations to try and sort of support and solve. From a Canvas perspective, there's a few things I think we can do to make it more frictionless, and these are things on our to-do list. One is to make data more interoperable sort of across those institutional networks. The second thing is as we've moved more into the ePortfolio realm, we acquired a company called Portfolium earlier this year. We really see that ePortfolio having the potential to be a longitudinal vehicle that can be communicated and transferable sort of from institution to institution owned and driven by the individual student. And we've even gotten a lot of requests over the past months to think about transcripts in a new way. So this could be a vehicle that helps with universities and colleges looking at applicants in different ways, but also people sort of navigating these systems. So in summary, I think understanding how we can better technically support within a network and then support students as they're trying to navigate different experiences sort of across networks. What a rich answer, Dan. Thank you. And David, great question. Please enjoy the end of Pennsylvania Summer for us. We have a whole bunch of questions that are piling in, friends. And if you're new to the forum, what we just did with David, bringing him on stage like that, that's how a video question works. It's pretty easy to do. Speaking of which, let me just add another fellow. We now have Ray Garcelon. Ray, greetings. How's it going? I was at Long Beach, saw your keynote, and Ben and ASU in the transition from another LMS. So I inquired with this pretty hopeful because of what I've seen, all the requests and changes that are made three weeks, now four weeks. But specifically what I brought up through the text was, I said for a minute this way, rich content others haven't changed much in 20 years in LMSs, but they have changed in other web creation, cloud-based tools, you're seeing the word presses change. But I guess my question is, is there a strategy for richer content and more granular, articulate changes within Canvas? Because I could see two strategies. I could see either a remake of what modern web creation tools are using within Canvas. Or again, I was at InstructureCon, and there was a pretty lobby session about the new LTI. And so would integration of tools that can be more rich be more the way that you think Canvas will go to improve content creation? I'm not sure which, if there's a plan that's going to be more successful. Yeah, so Ray, I mean one of the unique and sometimes challenging situations for us being an LMS provider is we need to be considerate of both. What are the capabilities we provide for creating content, and how do we evolve those capabilities? We actually have on our roadmap a number of features and solutions that will continue to enhance our rich content editor, so I'm glad you brought that up. We started to talk about that a little bit in some of the breakout sessions in InstructureCon, but it's a recognized need for us to continue to involve that. In the same respect, there's a lot of incredible tools out there, and then there's also content creators, publishers and others that are creating content. And so the way we're looking at the strategy is quite broad because we want to make sure we're inclusive of all of the different players that are generating content with itself generated, professionally, whatever that content may be. And so for us in our strategy, we're going to provide tools for institutions that gives you a lot more creativity and sort of being able to generate content at speed. And we're also really thinking through and working through what are a set of tools that can not only serve the institution, but can serve the broader set of content creators out there in the world, whether it be sort of large publishers or smaller content creators. So I'd say that's really the two prongs of our strategy and incorporate more features and capabilities in sort of the rich content editor within Canvas, but also build into more integrations, not just sort of the advanced LTI, but also sort of broader integrations and APIs with Canvas, which many of our partners would use today. Okay. Yeah. And of course, the third prong is learning analytics, which is more important. And I know it's hard enough just any one of those prongs, but all three that I did, whatever great content comes in, I know the importance of analytics that was stated and restated at InstructureCon among us has to be along with that, those other two prongs. It is. Just a quick comment on that. You know, as you probably saw it in InstructureCon, we announced and we've released, at least in beta, new analytics offerings already included into Canvas. So you've seen course analytics, student analytics, usage analytics as well, which has been a big request. We were also doing a lot of work around data. And I talked to a number of people around data. And what I always say is, there will never be a time when we are sort of done with data and analytics and insights. And so it's an exciting thing for us because we're continuing to pursue things that add value to teachers and to students, but there's an endless set of opportunities to do that. We have an incredible group of about 20 institutions, academic institutions, that work very closely in partnership with us right now, helping us to define that roadmap for analytics and data. So, you know, hopefully all of you are sort of confident that we're getting very good real institution feedback that is shaping our roadmap today. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Great to be at the Canvas school now. Good stuff. And you guys, by the way, ASU, you guys now have the Slack Canvas integration. I got a good note today. We just put a bow on that, and that's hopefully, you know, knock on wood working really well for you as well. So that's another example of where we want to have really good communication frameworks. It's ramping up. Yep, definitely. Yeah. Very good. Thank you for the question, Ray. Thank you. Dan, you remind me of scholarly publishers these days when you're talking about your data, and data is central. We had a question from Beth. Beth, we can beam you up, but we'll turn your camera on so that we can see your smiling face too. We have a question coming from Bob Nash and Bob Campion video, but I can read this question out loud, and this is an important one. What can Canvas do, if anything, to improve equity in the online classroom to better serve and support disadvantaged or underrepresented student populations? Wow. So, Bob, it's good to see you virtually again, and I thank you for joining us in previous events and initiatives as well, and thanks to OEI because you're a huge supporter as well as throw down lots of challenges for Instructure and Canvas as well. In terms of underserved and disadvantaged populations, this is something that's always been in the mission of what we want to help support with Instructure in terms of give-by corporate social responsibility and creating experiences that are inclusive. Things like accessibility are always a high priority for us, so there's a list of some non-negotiable technology design principles that we have around Canvas and everything we do in education, and one of them is really having a high level of accessibility embedded in our applications. If I expand the question more broadly and maybe where you're going is, how do we reach some of those populations as well that may not have as immediate access to technology or logistically it's more difficult to work within that classroom or even online environment. We're continuing to explore options in terms of how we can support that. Utah State University is actually a very good example. We work with Utah State very closely. They've built an entire facility, entire approach around accessing broad populations across Utah State of every type. In fact, part of the money they get from the state is really there to support broad access to education to the point where they have different styles of classrooms for different types of students, both virtually online as well as in the classroom where someone who is maybe working online is working almost as seamlessly with the people on site as well and they've created these pods and different video capabilities, and then they've gone as far as to have mobile classrooms as well where they'll drive a mobile classroom out into a remote area of Utah where there may not be a strong internet connectivity or technology availability. So these are all things that we work on and we love these types of projects, by the way. So if any of you have ideas on populations that are having difficulty accessing education or disadvantaged or underprivileged populations where we can help, that would be really awesome. One more mention on this one, which is important and it's close to my heart as well, is in the younger years, we're focused a lot on foster children now. We have a new initiative that one of our employees is very passionate about in terms of helping create continuity of the educational experience for foster children as they sort of go to different homes and they have these fragmented educational experiences and we can use Canvas to help those students or transition in these non-regular points of academic transition to maintain continuity and not these progress. So we're always looking for opportunities to support different populations in different ways. Well, that's a terrific answer. Just building on that quickly, we had a question from someone splendidly named Brian, I'm not sure who that is, who says, what are some examples of infrastructure or anybody else making post-secondary education available in rural communities that don't have a college or university campus? In rural communities. Rural communities. Rural. Sorry about that. So I gave the example of Utah State. Utah State is a great example of one as well. There's also some examples where we're working with an organization in Canada right now which is providing education for all and creating great accessibility of online programs. We also see some of the post-secondary educational resources being structured in more digestible ways that are accessible to people that may not just be geographically challenged, but it also may be just time challenged and for what time do they have to be able to spend and access information. So we're doing an initiative in Canada right now that both touches on that geographic element as well as the time element. And then we're starting to work with some global organizations as well with some sort of, you know, some world health topics and some other educational topics. There's an initiative that we're working on with the UN in UNESCO around world health training, population training and others. So there's a whole spectrum of how do we reach different populations. One of my big priorities is actually understanding that the audience for us as an organization and thinking about LMSs and the power of what we can do to be a couple hundred thousand sort of students that are privileged enough to be part of school systems and universities that have this technology infrastructure and LMSs today, but there's 1.5 billion students out there in the world. And so that's the frame that I think of when I think about education is how can we really serve the broader population in unique ways and do that at scale. Not an easy problem to solve, but we're very lucky to be part of education, which is a truly global, global industry, if you will, where it's universal, everybody understands education and everyone should have access to education no matter where you are. Agreed, agreed. Brian, that's a great question. And thank you, Dan, for the very rich answer. It's going to be hard for you to fade in the background with this global reach. We have a question from Shannon Leflich, Columbia College. Shannon, you need to turn on your mic. I think you've muted yourself. This is actually my co-worker Shannon. I'm using her now. Hello, both of you. Hello. My question is about video. I know you have recently improved Canvas Studio, which used to be called ARC. That's something I'm going to be having the privilege of testing myself in a couple weeks. Great. Can you talk more about how you see video playing a role and within that accessibility for video captions, audio descriptions and how Canvas is responding with the new web content accessibility guidelines and what ways I guess you see involving accessibility and media in one within the platform. Yeah, so we have a group of people on our team that focus on accessibility in our agenda there and we have a dedicated team. So they're probably the best to get into the details. That team actually monitors the evolving, not only monitoring the evolving standards and approaches for accessibility, but they actually participate in a lot of groups defining the new model for accessibility and what we need to pay attention to. Studio was actually interesting. We first came to market with ARC, which is now branded Studio. As you know, accessibility was a big challenge and we said, how do we handle that? One of that is the captioning, where we've invested in auto-generation of captioning in a variety of languages. The other thing that we found with accessibility involving the standards, not only for video, but for a lot of the digital interactions throughout, is we have a deep partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft has some incredible accessibility tools that they've built in, like the interactive reader. And so what you'll see very soon in Canvas within the next couple of months is we're doing deep integration work with Microsoft where all of their accessibility suite and like the interactive reader will be available natively in Canvas. So think of it as anywhere you have text in Canvas, you'll actually be able to use things like the interactive reader. So we're going deeper than just the visual and audio enablement of accessibility. We're going into lots of different types of accessibility and what's going to help an individual with whatever challenge they may have to sort of navigate and be able to consume content in different ways. So there'll be more innovations in Studio. The other topic with Studio that's really important for us that's a hot topic is security and access to video as well. This is a big thing that we've worked on is if you're using videos from YouTube, for example, or using third-party source videos, how do we do the best job we can in creating an avenue for students to access videos that become part of the curriculum, but it doesn't create a gateway to things that may be inappropriate or off-topic or whatever. And that's another initiative that we have going on is to make sure that we can utilize online resources but also do them in a secure way. That's a rich answer. Thank you. Thank you. I didn't get your name. Benjamin. Benjamin, great. Benjamin, actually, if you're just starting with Studio, if you would do me a favor, send me an email in a few weeks or give me a call and let me know how things are going. I always love getting feedback, so please keep me posted. Well, thank you for the question. That's really, really nice of you to say, Dan, and you're getting a lot of feedback today. Speaking of feedback, we have a detailed question from Beth. Beth Havicks at Dillabar College. She says that she works in an online tutoring center using Canvas. We write comments to students on their quizzes. Canvas would integrate better if the links we send could be live. Is that possible? Can Canvas make that happen? Do you know what? I need to look into that. But Beth, it's a really great question. So let me look into that and get back to you. If you wouldn't mind sending me an email or an update, my email is simply dan at Instructure.com. I'd love to be able to correspond with you and make sure I can answer your question accurately. And if it's something we can't do today that's really important, it's something that I hope we'll be able to do very, very soon to support those needs. By the way, on this note, tutoring and advising is a big priority for us as well. One of the questions that we get a lot is when working with advisors or tutors, creating the ability in Canvas to be able to look at groups of students or students across courses and really understand the full picture and portrait of a student is a priority that we're hearing more and more. Especially as we look at these innovation schools that are creating these pathways for students that are very individualized and they're working in more of that advisor or tutoring model. So that's a priority on our roadmap as well. So you should all stay tuned. There's going to be more to come around supporting really solid tutoring and advising models both at the K-12 and higher-ed level. Oh, great. Great question. Speaking of technical questions, we have another really great technical question. Let me flash this one on the screen. This is from Karen N at UC San Diego. If there's additional information about the Slack integration in Canvas, please let us know. I'd love to explore that LTI. So there's Slack being Karen. Good. So Brian, what's the best, these are great questions. What's the best way for me to follow up on these questions and make sure we get information back to this group because I think that's really important. There's a couple of ways. One is we could do a follow-up event if you like depending on your schedule. The other is I can post these as I can email you these questions and then I can post the answers as a blog post so that that'll be available and then I can share the URL for that with everybody involved. Perfect. No, I appreciate it, Brian. I'd be happy to follow up on this. I'm going to go through this specifically and then broader communication. Just a couple of comments. So we've done some really innovative work with ASU and to give Slack credit as well. You know, it was really the Slack and Instructure teams coming together with ASU providing a lot of the requirements and inspiration around the experience that they wanted to create where we invested in our integrations with Slack. So those things can be easily available. I'll provide more information after this group on these communication platforms and the integration of those. Communication, by the way, is another area where we see a lot of change and this is an area where as in structure with Canvas we're trying to figure out what our role is because the communication avenues and the network of communication within the an institution with students with educators is much broader than just the LMS. So this is something where we've deliberately sort of worked on integrations with Slack with teams from Microsoft for example with Remind we have great integration with Remind and a handful of others as well to make sure that we can plug into these really incredible communication tools but there's really a balance that we're trying to figure out between what kind of communications and groups should happen within Canvas maybe enabled by Slack or others and which kind of communications should happen seamlessly in these broader networks of communications whether it be Slack or Teams. That's a really detailed answer for another technical question. We have another video question coming up. Let's bring Elizabeth Elmore. Elizabeth, we need your camera on for that. It should be on. Okay. I'm just seeing a black square it's either really dark or there's a camera issue. It is it's probably really dark. Let me see if I can I had a tab across it I guess I have two questions that are sort of related. I work in an institution that uses blackboard and I haven't been courageous enough to use Canvas although I hear wonderful things about it because they tell us we're on our own if we use Canvas. If I could adopt Canvas as just one faculty member, what kind of support do you provide for people like me? Well so we have a 24x7 really strong support organization so we love to support people with Canvas. We also have a free-for-teacher offering which will help give you support if you're an individual teacher utilizing Canvas and we'd be happy to help give you support along those lines as well. It's not uncommon by the way for an institution such as yours or they may say hey we have a standard but we allow a number of different capabilities out there so what I would recommend Elizabeth is we have if you go on Structure.com or our Canvas website you can download or you can click and access our free-for-teacher there and start utilizing Canvas and you know you can access our support and ask questions and all sorts of other things as well and that's a great way to start to get to know Canvas and see what you think and hopefully it supports you in what you need. As I said some faculty have been using it for years but I haven't been courageous enough to do it. I am now using Remind one of the faculty told me about Remind we no longer in Blackboard they're using now Zoom we've gotten rid of the Blackboard Collaborate and now that Zoom is part of it okay well that's good. My other question we are working in Atlantic City now we have a campus in Atlantic City and one of my concerns is that there are many kids who don't have access to computers outside of their school building and you were talking about a mobile classroom how does that you actually put a trailer somewhere and then yeah so I mean that's not in structure that does that we support it with sort of the software and the technology but Utah State for example has mobile trailers and they have mobile classrooms where they literally drive to rural areas and provide access to technology so that's really sort of a collaboration between us and Utah State it's not in structure that provides that sorry it's not in structure that provides for the mobile trailer but it's the university I have read about schools who use school buses as sort of a mobile classroom to allow internet access alright Elizabeth and we do work with a number of organizations that are providing internet access more broadly for free and we have mobile apps as well so that's the other thing we actually have a large number of students that utilize our mobile app and so if they don't have a computer that they have access to all the time sometimes individuals have access to a mobile device and that can help with the experience these people probably don't have access to a mobile device alright so maybe I'll send you a private email and you can give me the names of those organizations that work with this I've tried to find it through Verizon or AT&T or Xfinity but I haven't I haven't found it yet what they would do yeah please send me an email and I'll be happy to help make connections where I can to support that need well our semester starts on Tuesday so I will use this semester as a way to learn about Canvas for the spring just in time learning yes JITL alright thank you good luck Elizabeth and thank you for the question we have friends we're running out of time we're coming to 10 minutes before the hour and you've been asking a bunch of terrific questions we'd like to we'd like to end the session by thinking about the future and a few people out there help us think so well that the future is Tom Haymes from Houston long time friend of the program Tom you're in a blue mode I can see I'm usually in a blue mode oh track out of that it's called the paint in my walls so I wanted to harken back to what Brian was asking about earlier you know you can see a direct line in the way in the evolution of LMS's for the last 20 plus or more years and in many ways what we're doing collectively as institutions and the LMS providers is trying to mimic formulas and ideas that work in the physical world in the virtual world Brian about 10 years ago when his beard was a little bit less gray introduced me to this concept of paradigms of technology and then the first paradigm you are basically copying the existing modality but making it better and more efficient but it doesn't really change the way you work and it's only when you get to the second paradigm that you start to where the technology changes society you think about the car going from the horseless carriage to the automobile and the impact that is had on the 20th century for instance so what I wanted to see if I could get you to cogitate on and there's a couple of ways you could think about this is that where is this step for the LMS I mean I think we haven't really explored what online learning can do because we have been tied too much to this old educational paradigm and I see this repeated all in all and a lot of the issues you're talking about are very important functional issues but they're building on existing problems you're solving problems I get that the other way to ask the question is which company is going to come along and disrupt canvas in structure and I hope you guys are having those discussions but I'm curious what you have to say on that I'll let you talk about it great questions and I agree with you and by the way I've been a technologist for over 25 years I've been there at the dawn of client server computing moving to thing client moving to cloud computing and now the various horizons of cloud as it's gone through definitions of ASP to process orchestration to sort of data clouds as well and I think we'll continue to see technology paradigm shifts open up opportunities to support the current modality and model for different industries not just education as well my last company before infrastructure we evolved through a very similar process and evolution there's a couple challenges I think with organizations such as Instructure in moving forward to that sort of second horizon if you will where you're moving from supporting the existing model the way things are done to being a partner in innovating and changing and evolving the model and it's a very hard thing and there's a few things I think that are challenging one is does an organization like Instructure have the DNA frankly to innovate are we an innovative company or have we just sort of used the new cloud technology paradigm to support the way teaching has been done for some time and done today and that's a very existential question for us but it's something that we contemplate a good bit some of the things that I've talked about from time to time is over the last decade with Canvas we've supported and we've helped to sort of create more of that digital frictionless sort of classroom and classroom experience but looking forward we're going to have to really partner to innovate because the innovations of the next 10 years that will really move the needle to your point are things that don't exist today we can't look at the patterns of today and just apply technology now for a lot of technology companies there's risk in doing that so it's not just a DNA problem but there's a risk in doing that as well you know I'm a big believer in the whole concept of disruptive innovation if you look at Clayton Christensen how he's talked about the innovators dilemma I believe there are going to be some things over the next five to 10 years where we'll have to sort of disrupt what we've done over the last 10 years and say you know we're going to break these things that we've done in the past so we can get through to that new innovation the other big challenge I think which is a universal challenge for all of us is how do we not only identify new ways of doing things that generate beneficial results but do them at scale because there's there's definitely an ecosystem of education that is hard to move and change there is this great there's this great program on PBS I don't think it's on the area anymore called connections I don't remember the connections but one of my favorite examples is they would they would start with sort of a question and then they go back in time to understand you know these questions or these connections and I remember one of these shows said why are the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle the width that they are and then they'd say well they're the width they are because the Roman chariots and they go through this whole like connection process saying well what it boils down to is that the solid rocket boosters are the size they are because they have to drive them down certain roads to be able to get them to the launch pad which means they can only be a certain width so they're not going to treat these and other things and the roads we have today are the size they are because the number of progressions where the Roman chariots when roads were created you know sort of set that standard and so you know I give that example because in any industry and especially in an industry as pervasive and broad as education and as long as education how do we together break through those paradigms and understand the effort it takes to sort of change from those those constraints that we we've lived within now I believe in structures role in that is to be a partner and supporter and we want to try and inspire innovation and change and it could be a partner in experimentation but I don't think that we solely will sort of define or drive what education looks like over the next 10 years so you'll see us even more active out there in the community working with a lot of organizations your last question very quickly let me address that you know I've been through this cycle in a lot of technology areas there's a cycle of technology leadership that goes over and over in these 8 to 13 year cycles and the reason why sort of companies may rise to popularity and then fall from popularity very quickly is because they stop innovating and stop innovating means you stop investing and so that's something that's very important to me is that we don't stop investing in canvas and all the things that we're doing we maintain that commitment we are bringing on more engineers and product people into our organization into canvas than we ever have in the history of infrastructure so I think the best thing that we can do moving forward to continue to hold all of your trust and provide what you need in education is to continue to listen and continue to sort of invest in what we're doing and not become complacent good answers on that those are very thoughtful and I do appreciate that it's tough because I mean the establishment is very conservative there are things pulling institutions in certain directions around expectations around grading and assessment all these other things which raise a whole host of issues that you have to to manage but it's I don't know I feel like there's an opportunity for Instructure to help sort of gradually pull the giant cement block a little further down the road and some of that stuff and it seems like you're talking about we're trying and I do think when you look at online these frictionless integrated experiences that will set a new foundation for what we can do and how do we create these experiences that are not designed but delightful in what we have and they're surprising and that's really the hard part architecting those experiences and the other thing that's important when we think about design principles is not every innovation has to be big I'll never forget the there used to be a service I'm sure there used to be this service where you call 4-1-1 information to get a phone number for something and I call 4-1-1 there's a period of time I call 4-1-1 and say hey what is the phone number for this restaurant or what is the phone number for this hardware store and I remember one day I called the phone number like I normally did I called 4-1-1 and said hey could I get the phone number for this restaurant and the person responded to me and said well here's the phone number would you like me to make a reservation and it sounds so simple but it blew my mind at the time I said I never thought that was possible I never expected that so I think that's part of our challenge too experiences that are unexpected add a lot of value but not try and do things that are so overblown or massive sometimes it's these small things that make a big difference just one real quick thing I want to throw in there as far as change when you're talking about content creation earlier don't forget the students my class is now completely turned around to where the students are doing 90% of the content creation in my government class not me and I'm just guiding them along the way and helping them with their creation of their own content and the platforms need to do a better job so Tom I'd love to follow up I'd love to follow up on this one with you because one of the biggest challenges we actually see and maybe all of you can help with this is sort of adoption and utilization by instructors and I look at this it's interesting I take a lot of cues on the future of technology in the world for my three daughters 15 12 and 10 they're amazing they're going to take over the world and I'm very biased but but you know what's fascinating is and they're all canvas users and it's fascinating to me one of my 12 year old last year she said to me she said dad you know what I have three types of teachers I have teachers that use canvas all the time and I can trust everything in canvas and what they're doing I have teachers that don't use canvas at all and that's not great but that's okay and then I have some teachers that sort of use canvas and it creates a lot of stress for me it's very hard for me because I don't know what to trust I don't know whether I'm missing something and so it's this interesting concept and then I see her I see my daughters really networking and communicating with other students to provide resources and help each other and support their studies so one of the ideas actually we have in canvas is could we create tools where students could effectively crowdsource or author create content into a course that would be helpful to that sort of class as a community so yeah Tom I'd love to follow up and hear how you've done that with your class I'm happy to talk to you about that well that's great we are running over but we have time for one great question from Ophelia Mangan at Columbia Ophelia you've been awfully patient and we're really really glad to hear from you please let us know your question hi Brian thank you so we talked a little bit about sort of the opt-in and opt-out sort of cultures I've been referring to it as the sort of era of uninformed consent and then sort of on the other side a couple of people mentioned the resources that are available for individual instructors and what canvas and structure are doing to provide direct support to them and a lot of the work that I do is sort of in that in between space and making sure to connect people to the things that they need and the way that they need it speaking of someone coming in for my 3 o'clock I'm sure she'll be happy to wait just a moment so my question to you and if we don't have time for you to answer this maybe you could follow up at some other space and share thoughts with us is that what are what's your perspective on the role of institutions and individual instructors when it comes to the responsible use of the LMS and I'm thinking specifically about accessibility and the learning curve there there's a lot for people to unlearn a lot for the to learn in order to be able to provide inclusive learning environments for students both on a technical level and otherwise and then also learning systems data with someone with the best of intentions who is not used to making use of data quantitative formats for example or doesn't know how to sort of unpack and realize what that is telling them about an individual student again lots to unlearn and lots to learn so just again from the position that you hold in the company that holds such an important position in this space your thoughts on what institutions roles are to do that I appreciate the questions I think the first one is really you said accessibility and responsible use of the LMS and if I can maybe try and interpret that question a little bit it feels like that's sort of the how to utilize LMS is in the most universal accessible way and in the most productive way that's sort of serving the instructor serving the student as well and then what resources are there to support that too it's an interesting challenge universal challenges for all universities as well as students I think it's also the type of thing where I've seen students become very very proficient and they have a set of expectations for what they're going to get out of technology and the LMS as well and sometimes that I've even seen that create a divide between the instructor's view of the use of technology and what the student expectations are and so I think there's some really good example of institutions that are doing a good job both in professional development for instructors as well as support resources for instructors as well whether they come from an instructor or whether they come from the organization probably one of the best examples I'll give a K-12 example is OCPS in Florida they have a massive faculty base that is distributed across many schools they have certain curriculum standards they want to apply they also want to have creativity in their curriculum and they have a variety of instructors that have various levels of comfort, confidence and sort of usage of the LMS and they've created a central team that is doing sort of adoption management with each of these schools they're going into the schools, they're working with the instructors they're creating these peer connections with these super users to make sure that the LMS can really provide benefits not just in general but to the individual instructors as well and some of that then connects to the data we're implementing a lot of analytics capabilities in Canvas pretty much everything we're implementing right now in Canvas for analytics is driven by all of you all of our customers and it's great to sort of see that but one of the things I've noticed with data and I'll get to the usage question in a second one of the things I've noticed with data as well is there are many institutions out there in the world broader that sort of throw data over the wall and I think that's responsible it's irresponsible I actually think that providing data you need to provide data and information in context you provide data and information in a way that's sort of secure and doesn't provide risk and you provide data and information in a way where you're educating the consumers of that data as well we've done a lot of work on things like advising and how do we utilize information to inform different structures or advisors in different ways and it's a different way of operating so I think there's some education to be done there as well now with data and data usage in general we're very happy that this is becoming a topic of conversation out in the open and it's creating a lot of heated debate and dialogue right now we have no timelines on what we're doing with data and analytics and how we're doing things we're very much taking cues from the community and from our customers but the topic of data and data usage especially at an industry level is a topic in just about every industry I can think of right now and so I think there's a really good healthy dialogue that is evolving in education because it's inevitable that that data is going to be out there and is going to be available I know of many institutions right now that are utilizing data for students and teachers and others and trying to figure out how to use that in the best possible way so I think the best thing we can do right now is to really have a rich and open and transparent dialogue and ask those hard questions but also not do things in haste where we could make mistakes and cause risk especially when we're dealing with students so I know that maybe is not a very specific answer but it's something we're going to solve and navigate together Dan that's a fantastic answer and Ophelia thank you for that great great question of greetings to your three o'clock appointment person too friends I hate to wrap this up because we've been going a great great torrent of information and questions of thought but we are just past the end of our hour and we really do have to wrap things up Dan let me just thank you so much for all of your comments your willingness to engage so thoroughly with everybody really really impressed thank you very much if people want to reach you and keep up with your work is dan at Instructure.com the best way so yeah that's my direct email address it will come to my inbox and at risk of getting inundated with lots of questions and requests I'm more than willing to sort of take that on I want to thank everyone for joining today and asking some really great questions I'm just sad that we don't have some more time to continue the dialogue and maybe even flip it around where I could ask all of you some questions too maybe Brian that's a future future trend but yeah you can reach me at Dan at Instructure.com and I'd love to hear from all of you ask questions give feedback I also love it if there's someone you know from Instructure that's doing a great job I always welcome the back that I can pass on to some of my team as well so Brian thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk to this group well my pleasure thank you very much don't go away friends we're going to follow up and try and bring Dan back maybe next year but just to give you a couple of tips about the next week what's happening in the form and let me also just thank you all very much for really terrific questions this has been like a seminar in the past and its future next week speaking of the future we're going to be meeting with Michelle Weiss from Strata Education she's been talking with us about the reinventing higher education so please join us for that session if you'd like to get a recording of this session or dive back into nearly four years of forum sessions just head to tinyworld.com slash FTF Archive and you'll be able to dig in now if you'd also tinyworld.com slash FUTE forum survey 2019 we'd love to hear your thoughts and if you'd like to keep talking with social media we have groups in Facebook Slack, LinkedIn and we tweet like mad it'd be great to hear from you