Swoop had a great time being whisked off to Spokane, Washington, for the 2025 Canvas InstructureCon Conference. In between the experiences of meeting Big Foot, seeing moose, and playing on a huge Radio Flyer wagon, there was plenty of learning and connection going on.

AI and Student Success: This brought home the importance of teaching students how to properly use AI so that they will be successful in the workforce. The workforce they will enter demands that they have experience and know how to use it well, as one statistic from 2024 noted, “71% of leaders are more likely to hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced one without them.” A lot of research was shared, and the framework of how this college developed a successful AI + Careers Workshop Series for students.

Keynote with Canvas: Canvas has already made great strides to become fully accessible across the board and has a goal to meet WCAG 2.2 A/AA by December of 2026 for all its products. 

Canvas and AI: Instructure is leading the way with AI integration. The “Ask Your Data” feature in Intelligent Insights helps administrators with institutional and compliance reporting. The University of Texas at Tyler is utilizing “Ask Your Data” to drive student success initiatives, identifying students early in the semester who may be at risk of dropping out. Additionally, Canvas integrates with Google’s Gemini, enabling college administrators to set restrictions on age-related content for dual-enrolled students. In the same session about Gemini integration, we learned about the Gems feature, a customized version of Gemini that helps tackle repetitive tasks or more expertise in a specific area of study.  Gems can be created by instructors for editing papers, acting as an expert in your field (Freud or Darwin), or even to build games that can be embedded into Canvas. Students must be 18 years or older to use Gems. NMC has not yet enabled Gemini LTI in our Canvas instance.