“Panda Bot empowers educators and students to get the information they need quickly and efficiently to return to their learning experiences”
By Harrison Kelly
After facing one of the most extended school closures to contain the pandemic, Filipino educators are digitalizing their classrooms to stay competitive and meet the expectations of the post-pandemic generation of students.
While some institutions had already been transitioning to cloud-based learning management systems (LMS) before the pandemic, many resorted to basic video conferencing and collaboration tools to respond to the emergency and now need to evolve and adopt fully-featured LMS.
Adopting a robust LMS allows schools to offer hybrid and blended learning experiences that support students outside the physical classroom, improving flexibility and serving tech-savvy students while future-proofing the classrooms against possible disruption.
With this new wave of innovation in education also fueled by generative AI-powered tools, especially within higher education institutions, there has been an awakening for learning and developing new skills among the faculty and IT administrators who have turned to online communities to learn and share experiences.
EdTech online community for teachers
Online LMS communities were already established and serving a large community of teachers and admins before the pandemic.
However, after 2020, a wave of new users turned to these spaces (the Instructure Community received 1.6 million page views on a single day in August 2020 and over 65 million page views in 2021) to seek new ideas into hubs for educators seeking inspiration, solutions to technical questions, or simply connections with fellow educators worldwide and find solace during this transformative period in education.
This year, the Philippines ranks third globally in traffic to the Instructure Community, the maker of Canvas LMS.
With over 1.9 million members, the Instructure Community is the largest, most engaged community in education.
From 2013 to 2023, their membership has grown by 3,000 percent, becoming the source of great ideas and innovation for online, blended, and face-to-face classrooms.
It also allows Filipino educators and admins to connect with different institutions around the world and learn from their experiences, including every Ivy League university in the United States.
The Instructure Online Community allows Filipino teachers to share learning resources, write blogs, read official guides and member-generated content, join discussions, and collaborate with peers from across the globe.
Community members can continually learn from each other and work together to solve today’s educational challenges, directly impacting students’ success.
Philippine higher education institutions such as Ateneo de Manila University, University of Santo Tomas, De La Salle University, and Far Eastern University, to name a few, have been using Canvas LMS.
They have access to this global community, which helps educators and admins come up with strategies within their academic environments for improving curriculum development, tailoring educational content to student needs, and measuring the effectiveness of teaching methodologies.
Power of AI to serve Filipino teachers
The emergence of powerful new generative AI tools is reshaping how we experience teaching and learning, offering new approaches and opportunities; the sense of community is critical to continue to help educators as they face this exciting evolution in education.
When implemented with an intentional, secure, and human-driven approach, Generative AI has the power to promote meaningful learning experiences for all, and using it to help teachers thrive and succeed will be critical to directly impacting students’ success.
Instructure has added AI capabilities to serve the online Community and help educators efficiently and effectively find answers. The recently launched [Beta] Panda Bot is an AI-powered tool trained with the official product guides for the products in the Instructure Learning Platform.
Panda Bot empowers educators and students to get the information they need quickly and efficiently to return to their learning experiences.
Anyone with an account signed into the Instructure Community can interact with and receive answers from Panda Bot in their native language.
As educational technology evolves and changes quickly, we need more than ever to facilitate the space and opportunity for faculty, admins, and students alike to interact and share resources with a broader community outside their institution and help them connect with their peers worldwide and have access to global resources.
More than that, these communities should also be a space to listen to their ideas by offering the ability to directly interact with product and engineering teams and share what they would like to see added to their favorite products, like Canvas.
(The author is Regional Vice President for Asia Pacific at Instructure. an educational technology company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It is the developer and publisher of Canvas, a web-based learning management system, and MasteryConnect, an assessment management system.)