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BRIAN WHITMER: Hi.
Good morning.
Thanks everybody for coming, again, to another day of
InstructureCon.
I hope you all had fun last night, actually got a little
bit of sleep.
The fire dancers are amazingly cool, as
were all of the treats.
So today we're going to start off.
I'm going to show actually a little bit of a demo of one of
the features that's going to be going live right now.
And after I'm finished, then I will introduce Richard
Culatta, who's going to be our keynote this morning.
So don't feel bad if you're like eating food and stuff
right now while I'm talking.
I won't get my feelings hurt.
But by the time Richard Culatta gets here, you should
feel bad if you're not listening to
what he has to say.
So there you go.
Can you guys see my screen all right on these?
It says Edu Apps.
It's a little bit squished, but we'll survive on the demo.
It's a pseudo live demo.
I learned a while ago, you don't do live demos.
Especially in front of lots of people.
So I'm going to switch between tabs, but you'll get the idea.
So what I want to show you guys today is
the Canvas App Center.
If you're not familiar with this, we made an announcement
about it actually a couple months ago, talking about how
it would go live today.
So I'm going to show you guys what it looks like.
This will be live for anybody that wants to turn it on.
So any Institution that is interested in using the Canvas
App Center, it won't be on by default.
But if you talk to your account manager, your ARM, the
can actually just flip a switch and turn it on for you.
And in the future we're going to make it on by default.
So you want to opt out of it.
But I'll remind everybody about that again at the end.
So a little bit of background about why we built the Canvas
App Center before I show it to you.
Integrations in the edtech space have always been a
little bit difficult.
I talked about this a little bit yesterday.
I think there's an opportunity to improve the experience in
educational technology by having seamless integrations
between different websites.
And there are a lot of them out there.
There are a lot of great, great resources that we want
to be able to work with Canvas and feel like
they're a part of Canvas.
And in the past, the only thing people have been able to
do is drop a link.
So you have your list of links, right,
inside of your course.
And you say, when you're ready to go do your lecture capture,
click this link and go over here.
And when you're ready to go look at these resources,
here's the links over to this website.
And that's OK.
But there's a lot of room for improvement.
And LTI, which if you haven't anything about LTI yet at this
conference, then maybe you've been asleep.
Because it feels like every session I've gone to has
mentioned LTI at least once, which is great.
I love it.
I love the idea of integrations
So LTI is a way to be able to have integrations in your
interplay between different websites and services.
We've had a directory of LTI integrations, which is what
you're seeing right here, edu-apps.org, for the past
six-ish months.
So this is a collection of all of the apps that we know of,
all of the integrations that work with LTI.
You can see there's ratings and reviews
that people have provided.
Like I said, my screen's a little squished, don't judge.
And then you can actually take the information from this
site, and you can use it to configure these
apps inside of Canvas.
Let me show you what that looks like if you're not
familiar with it.
Inside of the administrative interface, either in a course
admin or account admin interface, there's a tab
called External Tools.
This is what it looks like right now.
Is this tab allows you to be able to configure new tools.
So when you want to set up an integration, in Canvas you'll
click Add New Tool, and get assaulted with configuration.
So there's all these options, all these settings.
It's a little bit intimidating.
It's a lot bit intimidating.
But this is kind of par for the course for how
integrations have gone in the past.
You have to know what you're doing beforehand.
You have to set it up all yourself, and just cross your
fingers that you got all of the incantations right in
order to make it work.
We want to make that better.
We want to make that awesome.
So the new default view when you have App Center installed
inside of Canvas will look like this instead.
What you will see is a directory listing of all of
the apps, all of the LTI integrations that we know of
that work inside of Canvas.
So this is a discoverable list.
You can scroll through it, anyone.
You can hover on and get a more detailed explanation.
You can actually search.
So if you know what you're looking for, you can go ahead
and type it in.
Here and it'll show up.
See, I can type math and I'll get all the math related sites
that are available.
Or if I know exactly what I want, if I want YouTube, then
baboom, there's all the YouTube
resources that are available.
So I can filter to see the things that
are actually valuable.
The things that I want to install in my course.
When you click on any of them--
I'm not going to do it live because like I said, this is a
pseudo live demo--
but when you click on any of them, you'll get a more
detailed description of what exactly the integration does.
You get some more notes around what is the actual rating?
What's the privacy level of the app?
Does it actually send student information across, or does it
keep that anonymous?
What are the suggested grade levels for this app?
And you can also see the ratings and reviews that have
been provided for this app by people who have been using it.
So this is actually useful feedback.
This is not just, I love it.
But what typically happens is people say, this thing--
other than this one, which is me doing a demo.
Which is a horrible review.
Don't ever do this.
Give real reviews.
It is good is not a good review.
But providing meaningful feedback on what works and
what doesn't work.
What people wish they had.
So you can get an idea of what the app actually does.
You can provide ratings and reviews right here inline.
So these would be stars.
But you can actually provide-- you can give
feedback right here.
You can rate it.
And then that will get propagated.
And anybody else anywhere inside of the system will be
able to see those reviews and feedback, and know how the app
worked for you.
To install an app, it's a lot easier than it used to be.
We're talking about essentially one click
installation.
So I'm going to click this button and then, boom.
I can install the Khan Academy app right there
inside of my course.
Some apps will still have additional
configuration options.
And you'll see those show up there.
But we get rid of as much as we can.
The goal is to make this something that teachers could
set up on their own.
Because I don't think that's been the case in the past for
almost any integrations anywhere in edtech.
We want to make it possible for teachers to find and
install their own integrations.
And not have to feel freaked out that they're going to go
mess something up and they're going to ruin their lives by
experimenting.
It turns out, experimentation is one of the most valuable
ways to improve the learning experience.
To try new things.
See if it works.
See if it fails.
And continue to integrate.
It's when we stop iterating and trying to
improve that we stagnate.
And nobody wants that.
And teachers honestly don't really want that.
It's just there's such a barrier to trying new things
that they tend to avoid it.
Because it's so much work and it's so hard.
Defrost.
Once you have these apps installed, they'll show up in
a bunch of different places.
So for example, Khan Academy, you can see the extension.
It'll show up.
It's an editor button extension and a resource
selection extension.
Which means that it will show up as a button in the editor.
You can see it right here, the learning registry.
Again, I'd click it but it will break things.
So I'll show you a screen shot instead.
When you click that, what would happen is you would then
have this selection resource that would show up.
The learning registry is a great
repository of open resources.
It's supported by the Department of Education.
They're trying to get a great federated search solution,
which is really, really interesting.
And Richard Culatta, our keynote, is going to talk
about it a little bit more.
But the idea is, again this would be a one click setup.
A teacher wants to use the learning registry.
They click a button, install it, boom, it's in their
course, and they're ready to go.
So that, in essence, is the App Center.
It's all of these integrations that are available
for anyone to use.
One click wherever possible.
There are ratings and reviews.
You can search and filter.
And then you can install these at the institution level,
where they'll be propagated down to anyone inside of any
other courses.
Or at the course level, which will then apply, obviously,
just to the course.
And you can still get back to that traditional view if you
just click View [INAUDIBLE]
Tools.
So we didn't restrict the ability for you to do crazy
junk if you want to.
But the default view will be much easier for people to
understand and use.
So I'm going to open it up for questions, even though I'm
standing on a giant stage.
Does anybody have any questions real
quick before I continue?
Shout them out, because I can't see hands.
So the question was, how does this work with tools you have
to pay for?
Some integrations will still require configuration.
And if you have an existing relationship with a vendor,
they'll be able to provide you with the information you need.
Typically all you'll need is a key in secret.
And you can ask for that as part of your partnership or
your relationship.
But that's all you will need to set up.
You don't need all your configuration XMLs anymore.
And your domains.
All of that should be taken care of for you.
And the vendor should provide you with just the very few
configuration options that you actually need.
Now that we have a couple more people here, I'm going to say
what I said again at the beginning.
So App Center, the Canvas App Center is live right now.
This is running in production on My University.
Anybody that wants it right now, we can flip a switch and
turn it on if you talk to your account manager.
They already know how.
They've got a great doc that will walk them through it.
So you can chase them down right after this if you want,
and go get this turned on, and try it out for yourselves.
It is an opt-in piece of Canvas for now.
So if you want it, you're going to have to approach your
account managers.
In the near future, we are going to change it to an
opt-out piece inside of Canvas.
So if you don't want the Canvas App Center, it's also a
good idea to let your account manager know.
And they'll make a note of that.
So that when we change to opt-out, you won't get it
automatically turned on unexpected for you.
So one more thing I want to show you, but first, defrost.
Just a sec.
The question was, is this available in open source?
Yes.
So there are two pieces to this.
The Canvas App Center is actually pulling data from
edu-apps.org, which is a live service.
It's an integration that we have inside of Canvas.
Any other third party service can actually
leverage this as well.
So I build a Chrome extension that lets you use the Canvas
app center.
We wouldn't call it the Canvas.
You'll use the App Center inside of Blackboard
or inside of moodle.
Because these are LTI apps and they should work anywhere.
And so one click installation should be something that we
can leverage anywhere.
And hopefully, this is something that will get
leveraged by other players in the space.
Because it's a great repository.
It is the largest repository I know of, of LTI integrations
that are interoperable.
And so I want to make sure that other people
can use that as well.
So yes, it will be in open source.
If you want to provide ratings and reviews to the live site,
you'll have to talk to me.
Because we need a secure relationship between the two
of us in order to make that happen.
Otherwise we'll get spammed like crazy on
the ratings and reviews.
Any other questions?
Yeah.
Two really good questions.
How does this work with sub-accounts?
And then, how does this relate to LTI 2.0?
Sub-accounts, this is something that's turned on at
the institution level.
So root accounts can turn this on and it will propagate
everywhere down inside of the account.
You can't opt-in or opt-out at the sub-account level.
Similar to BigBlueButton and some of the other integrations
that we have.
The second question, LTI 2.0.
LTI 2.0 will actually make the App Center even more usable.
Because one of the things that it allows for is, I said
before, if you have a relationship with a vendor,
you still need to get the key in secret and copy
and paste that in.
One of things that LTI 2.0 I will do for us is it will
allow us to get a key in secret on your behalf from the
vendor, without you having to copy and paste it.
Using a secure workflow.
Basically, what it'll look like is you'll click a button
to say Install.
You'll go log in on their site.
They'll say this really who you are?
You want to set this up?
Similar to what you've seen with OAuth
authorization before.
And then they will send us the key in secret.
So you won't have to manually configure
those things anymore.
So I'm excited for LTI 2.0, because it'll make things even
more easy and approachable.
Any other questions?
OK, so one more thing.
So, by the way, we've been piloting this App Center with
six universities, including UW, UCF, Nevada State,
Rockingham school district, and there's two more I don't
want to forget.
Oh, University of Utah and Utah State University.
So we've gotten a ton of great feedback.
One of the questions that we have gotten a
lot is, this is great.
I love it.
I love the idea of it.
I'm a little bit nervous about having a wide open app store
for all of my teachers.
If that's the case and you're not quite
comfortable with that--
by the way, you probably should try to get there
eventually, because this is kind of where the internet is
heading in general.
But if we need to work our way over there, that's OK.
One are the features that we are going to have is the
option for institutions to provide a whitelist list of
applications.
So part of the Edu App site, if you log into this site with
your Twitter account, and then you click on your name in
Twitter-- and we'll put together some
guides around this--
then what you can do is you can actually go through and
whitelist the apps that you want to show up for teachers
and administrators inside of your account.
So you can say, when new apps are added, I want to go ahead
and accept those.
You can say, I only want apps that are at the anonymous
level to protect student identity and privacy.
Or you can manually select the apps that you want to be
installable.
And then when you click Save, you'll get this code, which
you provide to your account manager.
And they'll be able to set up a whitelisted version of the
Canvas App Center for you.
So now there's no complaints.
You can't say it's scary and everything.
Because you can control the number of apps that are there
if you want.
So that's what I wanted to show you guys.
Any other questions?
Well that's the Canvas App Center.
If you talk to your account manager, as of today they can
set this up or you.
You could start messing with it today if you want.
You can set it up in your beta environment if you're a little
nervous to just suddenly turn it on for your entire
institution.
And you can get to know the Canvas App Center.
We're always open for feedback.
This will continue to improve and develop over time.
But the most important thing, and the reason that we're
putting it out as quickly as possible, is the most
important thing is those ratings or reviews.
As you use integrations that leverage LTI, it's important
that you provide feedback on what's working
and what's not working.
Because that lets our vendors improve their LTI experience.
There are a number of apps that I wish were a little
cleaner and a little more elegant that use LTI.
And they need that feedback from you.
And we need it as well, honestly.
So that we can share, and we can start to push people on
the right direction.
So it is the community of all of us that will help make
these app integrations and this app ecosystem what it
needs to be.
So thank you all, and happy App Centering.