Reflections on CanvasCon Europe 2025
Last week, I was fortunate to be invited by Instructure to attend CanvasCon 2025 in Oslo, their annual European conference. This year saw an increase in the number of attendees and quite apart from that numerical reality, it just felt bigger to me, more people, more vendors, and a bigger event feel than in previous years.
This shouldn’t come as a great surprise, as one of the main stories of the last 5–10 years in the UK virtual learning environment (VLE) market has been the growing number of universities switching to Canvas. Clearly, this is a company maintaining significant momentum in this market and developing strong brand awareness. Both the increasing number of attendees and the growing prominence of this event are testament to that.
This event doesn’t carry the same weight as InstructureCon, the company’s main annual conference held in the US. However, although it isn’t where the really big announcements are made, the fact that it follows InstructureCon provides an opportunity to see how those developments are progressing once the dust has settled a little.
As an analyst, conferences like these are interesting both for what is said and for what isn’t said, as well as offering a small window into how universities are using the company’s products. They also provide an opportunity to reflect on how the company is positioning itself and give insights into its strategy, product development plans and priorities.
Instructure’s rebrand and product restructuring
One dimension of this market is that companies like Instructure, while being strongly associated with a single product (Canvas VLE), offer a number of distinct products that are less well known.
This can present a challenge in understanding the full suite and the interrelationships between products. Like other VLE companies, Instructure’s product range has been evolving, with new launches and acquisitions adding to the mix.
To that point, the conference began with a short spotlight on the company’s recent rebranding and the organisation of its product categories under three main areas: Canvas (including Studio and Catalog), Mastery (assessment-focused products), and Parchment (credential-focused products). The latter was a 2024 acquisition by Instructure and now feels more integrated into the overall suite.
From a UK standpoint, some categories and products will inevitably be more familiar than others, but the demarcation feels relatively clear. However, Mastery as a term resonates less with a UK audience, and there is a slight risk of ambiguity between how Canvas serves assessment and assessment as a separate product category. Nevertheless, the rebrand and new organisation present a visibly coherent suite of products that the company offers.
Lifelong learning and the learner lifecycle
The conference theme this year was “Across the learner lifecycle”, and the topic it aligns with is, unsurprisingly, lifelong learning, which was clearly the dominant area of focus throughout the event. In many ways, it felt as though this had been amplified from last year, with session titles such as “Lifelong learning is the sector’s best lifeline”, “Engaging learners at every stage” and “Designing assessment for a flexible, lifelong learning world” reflecting that emphasis.
Lifelong learning is an inherently broad term, but the messaging from Instructure’s sessions focused on serving a wider range of learners at different ages and stages of life, and, relatedly, on the future of employment.
In a very entertaining keynote, Dr Paul Redmond captured this messaging well, in an engaging but classic rhetorical style typical of higher education and edtech conferences. By this, I mean the use of a somewhat caricatured depiction of the past and present, (in this case the world of work) used to set up a message that the future is radically changing…and the education system is not geared up for it and needs to change. Or, to use his words directly, “the education systems we’ve developed are for boomers,” offering us all that rarest of modern pleasures, a demographic to have a go at completely guilt-free.
Across the sessions, another component of the current lifelong learning narrative was emphasised, which was a sense of urgency, along with both the implicit and explicit stated sense of how imperilled institutions might be if they don’t move into this space.
Limited focus on Instructure’s major AI developments
Irrespective of what one thinks about the current lifelong learning narrative, including how important or pressing it truly is, it was refreshing to be at a conference where something other than AI took centre stage. The conference wasn’t saturated with discussion on AI, although clearly AI was addressed throughout. While it is clear to everyone that developments in AI and the behaviours influenced by it are important, there now seems to be a growing collective weariness about how much attention it has commanded over the past few years. In that sense, the way AI was woven into the conference programme felt welcome.
However, at the risk of contradicting myself, I was a little surprised that the major AI-focused developments announced by Instructure earlier in the year were not more prominent in the main sessions. The headline announcement from the summer was Instructure’s partnership with OpenAI, with one of the fruits of that being an LLM assignment feature currently in development.
The other announcement, which I think is actually more significant, was IgniteAI, as it offers a more revealing insight into the company’s overall AI strategy. The narrative surrounding IgniteAI is that it represents a more holistic approach to AI. Whereas competitors’ approaches have been characterised as focusing on a localised “spark button” type features, Instructure has described IgniteAI as “a coordinated ecosystem of AI-powered features and trusted partner integrations surfaced exactly where educators need assistance.”
I struggle to recall any significant or dedicated mentions of IgniteAI or the OpenAI partnership in the main sessions. This actually continues a pattern from last year, when one of the most eye-catching pre-conference announcements, the partnership with Khan Academy, was also not given much attention during the event.
In the case of the OpenAI partnership, the main by-product so far is what was described at the conference as an AI-powered conversational assignments feature. As this is still in development, there is a certain logic to more advanced features taking precedence in the product roadmap session.
Even so, the lack of a more dedicated focus on IgniteAI felt incongruous, given that what was announced was a development of some significance. The absence of that coverage actually made it feel as though Instructure’s approach to AI was developing localised solutions, with examples such as discussion summaries and rubric generation reinforcing that impression.
If IgniteAI really represents a more paradigm shifting approach, it still seems some way off being realised and until it is, the message contrasting a holistic approach with point solutions is unlikely to be impactful.
Highlights from the CanvasCon 2025 product roadmap
One of the key sessions for most attendees at these conferences is the product roadmap. This year, the session was structured around the learner lifecycle, with three organising components:
Engaging learners. Improving outcomes.
Preparing learners for the world of work.
Embracing the lifelong learner
Brevity prevents me from delving deeply into everything covered, but I will pick out a few highlights.
First up were the development of widgets for the learner dashboard and the creation of an educator dashboard.
For learners, this was presented as a way to help them identify what to focus on next, and for educators, as a time-saving aid. The educator dashboard shown at the conference included features such as identifying students in need of attention, outstanding grading and login metrics, but its visual design clearly drew attention to the AI assistant. I believe this refers to the Educator AI Assistant, which is currently at the early adopter stage of development.
It remains to be seen how these developments will be received or what their impact will be, but I am definitely supportive of any efforts to improve the experience of arriving on a VLE and making sense of it.
Other announcements that stood out were focused on improving accessibility. These included a course accessibility assessor and a block editor that removes the need to use HTML. The latter feature is particularly interesting, as it highlights a tension, which are technological efforts that may simultaneously address accessibility issues while limiting the agency and ability to customise courses.
For those working on fully online courses in particular, the ability to use custom code to, how do I put this politely…remedy some of the visual and interaction challenges presented by VLE’s has been a relatively common practice.
Whilst technology has a role to play in addressing accessibility issues, creating accessible courses is fundamentally primarily achieved by educators having knowledge on accessibility, and then in actual real proper human life applying that knowledge in their courses. If that were happening consistently, there would be little to no need for accessibility remediation.
One of the things that is always interesting to observe in product roadmap sessions is what gets the biggest reaction from the audience. This year, it was the introduction of surveys in new quizzes, which is expected before the end of the year. Presumably there was less of a cheer from survey companies that institutions have had to resort to due to the absence of this feature.
I have to admit, amongst all the trappings of a slick well-organised conference, that juxtaposition of seeing clearly positive reactions to what amounts to fairly mundane product developments that genuinely make a difference appeals to me and reflects a kind of “what’s the smallest thing you can do that has the biggest impact” thinking.
Overall, I found this year’s product roadmap session an improvement on last year’s, as it was more easily digestible thanks to better pacing and structure.
Reflections on the conference and Instructure
There were a lot of positive indicators from the conference and more broadly for Instructure in the UK. Their European conference continues to grow in attendance and prominence. They entered the event on the back of another major UK university, Imperial College, choosing Canvas as their new VLE. Their focus on lifelong learning, supported by products such as Canvas Catalog, is drawing more institutions into their orbit, and from the conversations I had, sentiment among UK university clients was positive.
In addition, senior leaders at the conference emphasised their strong investment in both existing and prospective client relationships. While this is something competitors would also claim, the importance of such relationships to a company’s success cannot be overstated. Although it might be tempting to think that success in this market is about products meeting the most requirements in a tendering process, the reality is that many more subjective and relational factors influence these decisions.
All the conditions currently exist in this market for Instructure to continue its progress. However, having seen enough edtech and online education companies fall from lofty perches, there should be a note of caution here. I have witnessed the decline of companies, often due to misguided strategies and decisions, sometimes exacerbated by ‘events dear boy events’, but always built on particular beliefs or assumptions about the world and the future.
Areas of concern related to that coming from this conference would be a creeping amount of facile assertions and understandings of complex issues and realities expressed throughout the conference. These include on matters such as how higher education has or is going to change in the future, how technology is influencing the world, the speed in which things are changing around us, how the world of work is changing and what it will actually look like in the future, the very nature of higher education at the moment and what it currently does and doesn’t do and what should influence how we design learning experiences for people both now and in the future.
Unlike other VLE companies, my impression is that Instructure tends to have a broader view, engaging with a wider range of issues in higher education. It is not as narrowly focused on digital learning experiences as some of its competitors, and increasingly contributes to discussions on lifelong learning, educational reform, credentialing and the future of work. It is a company that is essentially getting itself into bigger cross-cutting higher education themes, issues and futures, supported by some products aligned to those areas.
For example, there is a world of difference between saying, “We understand that more universities are seeking ways to offer sub-degree courses but lack the technical infrastructure to support discovery, application, e-commerce and enrolment, and we have a solution for that,” and offering more performative futurism about the supposed imperative for higher education to embrace lifelong learning.
In my view, there are two potential risks for a company like Instructure moving forward. The first is the possibility that paradigm-shifting developments in AI could alter competitive dynamics. This might sound fanciful in what is a well-established oligopolistic market that has seen new entrants come and unceremoniously go in recent years. However, Instructure itself was once the new entrant, and it would be naive to assume that another could not emerge in the future. My point is not to predict this as an outcome but to highlight that significant technological change might create opportunities that did not previously exist.
The second, and arguably greater, risk lies not in its products or services, but in the potential for its current success to make the company more susceptible to drifting away from grounded, realistic understandings of education and learning. Such a drift could subtly influence strategy and decision-making, leading towards reductive and overconfident narratives that too often dominate discussions about the future of education, human learning and work.
