In EP 38, John and Jason talk with Ryan Lufkin of Instructure about the evolution of online learning, the impact of Agentic AI on education, and how Canvas is shaping the future of digital classrooms.

See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

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Guest Bio:

Ryan Lufkin is the Vice President of Global Academic Strategy at Instructure, where he works to enhance the academic experience for educators and learners, worldwide. With over two decades in the edtech world, Ryan has experience with every major technology platform that institutions use to deliver education, from the LMS to the SIS, and all the systems in between. A well-known thought leader in the edtech industry, Ryan is a podcast co-host, frequent media spokesperson, and speaker at industry conferences and webinars. Ryan earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Public Relations/Communications from the University of Utah and certificates in Data-Driven Marketing and Brand Management from eCornell.

Resources:

Canvas LMS https://www.instructure.com/canvas
EduCast3000 Podcast https://www.instructure.com/resources/podcast
Chole 10 Report https://qualitymatters.org/qa-resources/resource-center/articles-resources/CHLOE-10-report-2025

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript:

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

[00:00:00] John Nash: You, you ready? Jason? Anything else?

[00:00:02] Jason: Nope. Just taking a drink, that's all.

[00:00:04] John Nash: Alright, I'll let you do another one.

[00:00:06] Jason: Yeah, that's

[00:00:07] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Do the vocal exercises, you the

[00:00:08] John Nash: yeah, me, Mimi. Red leather. Yellow leather. Yeah.

[00:00:12] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah.

[00:00:13] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:15] Jason (2): Hey, John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half, the Online Learning podcast.

[00:00:20] John: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last three years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but some of it still isn't. And so how are we going to get to the next stage, Jason?

[00:00:35] **Jason:**John, that's a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?

[00:00:39] John Nash: Perfect. What do you want to talk about today?

[00:00:42] Jason: Honestly, and I'm not just saying this 'cause Ryan's in the room, but one of our favorite ed tech tools, Canvas. And we're here today with Ryan Lufkin from Instructure to talk to us. Welcome, Ryan.

[00:00:56] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Thanks for having me. I love these conversations. Looking forward to it.

[00:00:59] Jason: Good. Why don't you just kind of describe the role that you play at Canvas?

[00:01:04] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah so I'm the Vice President of Global Academic Strategy which means I, I spent a lot of time talking about the trends that are impacting education across the globe. In that role, I travel all over the globe. Honestly, I was in Singapore and Meine Columbia and me. City and all over the United States this year.

Talking about exactly the topics that you all focus on as well. How does technology impact learning experience good and bad? And what does that look like? And I've been within Instructure it's funny 'cause I always say Instructure the makers of Canvas because everybody, Canvas is a household name. Fewer people know the company name.

[00:01:35] Jason: Right.

[00:01:36] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: But I've been there for seven years now. I've been an ed tech for over 25 years, and I just love the company, love our mission. I love the focus and so it's, it truly is a pleasure to be able to come out and have these conversations.

[00:01:47] Jason: Do you, do you work with anything other than Canvas at Instructure? Are you kind of over multiple things there, or?

[00:01:55] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: It's honestly our entire suite. So I think a lot of people know that we bought Mastery Connect, which is an assessment tool. We bought Parchment which is a credentials tool which I, I've watched my kids use I've used myself to send your transcripts when you're applying for college and university and things like that. We've bought Badger the Credentials program. We bought Portfolio, which is a portfolio program. So we, we really, over the last 14 years have grown from just a single product company to a real ecosystem of solutions. And unlike, other companies, we don't buy our competitors we, we buy our closest partners and extend that, that that ecosystem.

[00:02:29] John Nash: Yeah, so that's why you didn't buy Blackboard, you just decided to just destroy them.

[00:02:34] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: We, in doing so, we evolved the market, right? And I always say Canvas came along when we were still having arguments about whether or not education over the, put data in the cloud and never moved towards SaaS solutions, right? And whatever be, open source.

We're technically commercial open source. We publish our core code on GitHub as well. So to, to give people that peace of mind that, you own the code, that kind of

[00:02:56] John Nash: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:57] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: it was, it. Truly transform the market from that, your LMS systems that would go down every month when you got your little update disc in the mail to, 99.99% uptime. And when we have an outage, it's a big deal now across the industry,

[00:03:10] John Nash: Right.

[00:03:10] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Used to be super common. So it's been a bit of fun ride.

[00:03:13] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. Just that little bit you just described there, it really encapsulates how much has changed in just, , a decade or even, , 15 years.

[00:03:22] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: been in it, yeah, if you've been in that change, it you take it for granted.

[00:03:24] John Nash: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:25] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: how much it's fundamentally changed over the last

[00:03:27] John Nash: Yeah.

[00:03:28] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: And, education has the reputation for moving slow. And in a lot of ways, we're moving faster than people think.

[00:03:32] John Nash: Yeah, you're right. When you're in it, you forget. And again, we didn't have you on, so I could talk about all the other tools that are out there that we didn't like, but we used Adobe Connect for a long time and that was a, an abysmal failure for us that we, we just couldn't get it to go. And so I mean, we're just thankful to have tools that are stable and up and, and then even now thoughtful about instructional design.

Well, that killed the conversation

[00:03:55] Jason: we say all that to say we, . We're kind of, we're kind of fanning on Canvas today because we do, because we, as you said, we have been around. I mean, I think the first, not, I think the first LMS I used was, I it was Blackboard in that early stage 20 years ago. and at that point it was so bad that I just made my own websites basically for my for my students, right? And we're kind of left to that and a lot of, a lot of institutions were doing the same thing. It's like, these are so bad, we're going to make our own LMS system. At the time Canvas and others too have stepped into that gap and created products truly that work well. They're responsive both in the web sense of things, but also responsive to the users. Continue to get better. Run without a lot of outages are secure. , There's a lot of, lot of things that go into these LMS systems that, as John said, , it's easy to take, take for granted in in 2025.

[00:04:55] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah. And , there were four kind of key pillars when they founded the company, they were simple, engaging, open, and reliable. And the reliability piece was really the software as a service co-hosted right. Partnership with AWS. But that openness piece is one that, that still remains a massive differentiator for us, we have. I think publicly we see we've got 600, over 600 open APIs. We actually have 847 or something crazy like that. And then we, comply with the common standards like the LTI standard, right? To make sure that if oh, we've got over a thousand partners that have developed LTI apps that plug directly into Canvas.

And, we were very clear. We don't own the data. We are caretakers of the data. We don't own the experience. We facilitate the experience for schools as much as possible. We've done everything possible, not kind out of. Create that walled garden that I think, other vendors that you may have mentioned earlier, I really tried to protect and box out competitors. We work with coopetition on a daily basis, right? And embrace terms like that, right? And so it's, for us, i...