r/edtech

5.21.26
On March 10 2026, govtech.com released an article titled “study finds most common ed-tech tools not backed by evidence”.

The article reference a separate press release jointly published by edtech company Instructure and nonprofit InnovateEDU. In that release, these two companies gathered and analyzed anonymized data to identify the most frequently used tools in k12 education.

The edtech company Instructure is best known for its widely used LMS tool — Canvas. The data it anonymized was collected from the third party tools and vendors whose tools are embedddd in Canvas by the school districts who use Canvas as their LMS.

The ostensible reason for this report? To shift the conversation around edtech from features to measurable outcomes. That purposed was immediately followed by the statement that Canvas is the only ESSA III research-based LMS.

Two months after this release, Canvas suffered a security breach. One week after that first breach, another security incident occurred.

Despite that not resulting in known data exposure, one of the companies whose tools are embedded in Canvas, and whose data was anonymized into that study, Renaissance Learning decided based on the significant security risks to sever their integration with Canvas — indefinitely.

With the recent chaos surrounding the Instructure / Canvas LMS breach by the ShinyHunters group, I’ve been digging into the current security status. Since a lot of institutions had their final exams disrupted and millions of users' data got exposed, I wanted to share a quick update on where things stand and get your thoughts.

The Current Situation:

Instructure has officially patched the loopholes, rotated the compromised API keys, and paid the ransom to secure the leaked data logs. Technically, Canvas is live and safe to use right now.

The Real Problem (IMO):

This is the second time in less than a year that this specific group targeted Instructure's infrastructure (remember the Salesforce environment breach?).

While the public cloud/multi-tenant setup is convenient, relying entirely on a centralized platform means we don't have absolute control over our server environments. Today it's patched, but tomorrow a new zero-day vulnerability could surface.

How to actually protect your institution?

For schools or corporate training programs that want the features of Canvas without the global vendor risk, migrating to a standalone, self-hosted custom instance seems like the only permanent fix. It gives you 100% control over your security configurations and data protocols.

Thoughts on this article?

This idea seems come up often as the core value and future of edtech. Personalized mentorship/tutoring at scale is supposed to be the solution to online content libraries and even traditional classrooms.

I like the idea of robots doing most of the annoying work in education and letting human educators focus more on connection and emotional support.

I noticed some students are very good at figuring out how learning platforms work without really understanding the material much better underneath.

They are good at keeping streaks going, retrying until they get green checkmark and moving through assignments fast enough to look productive on dashboards.

But if you ask them to explain the idea in their own words or to do it a different way, the understanding can sometimes appear to be much less than the activity metrics would suggest.

Wondering if this is happening to other teachers or people working in EdTech too.

drop your SaaS below and I’ll give you one scaling bottleneck I notice

Could be:
positioning
conversion
onboarding
AI visibility
distribution
trust
retention
pricing
growth ceiling

No pitch. Just one honest observation

Paste the link only

We went live with Ally sometime last year. It's the product that everyone in the institution has been using and trusting. (We use Brightspace D2L as our LMS.)

I gave it a PDF full of accessibility issues, even basic things like lists not being marked as lists, and it failed to detect those. Let's not even get into things like heading semantics.

Is this a joke? This is an almost 10 year old product and one that seems like the de facto choice for an institution our choice. We paid ~$10k for this and it fuxking sucks.

I'm part of a team responsible for ensuring that our university is compliant, and I don't have it in me to reveal that such a huge purchase we made is taking us nowhere.

As someone in Edtech. I'm seeing a gold rush of platforms using LLMs to generate 10,000+ practice questions for that SAT/ACT/AP exams. On the surface, it looks like a win for students as they get more practice.

Under the hood, it's a mess. Standardized tests aren't just about 'correct answers', they are about the 'specific dustractor logic'. Official test writers spend months crafting 'wrong' answers that catch common mental errors.

AI is currently great at 'correct' but terrible at 'subtle wrong'. It often creates questions that are either too easy or weirdly impossible because they lack the specific pedagogical traps of College Board.

If you're building or buying EdTech right now, do not look at the quantity of the question bank. Look at metadata. If they can't tell you the 'Distractor Logic' for a wrong answer, it was probably written by a bot.

I’m a corporate trainer and I also vibe Code apps for myself and the company to be more productive and to learn in a unique style that fits me. I’ve been working on some ideas, but I’m curious to see other instructors building something that is for a need but may also serve a larger community.
I just started the foundation of the core idea, but it’s a visual system for divergent people like me. When I create courses or apps for my job, they tend to be too pretty for the more traditional corporate world.
How can we turn things around for the future of learning?

Any benchmarks on what can really drive student-led adoption of ed-tech tools to be used (after-school).

Self-motivation to "learn" seems hard, so hoping for some guidance here

Been playing around with different AI tools in education over the last few months and I keep landing on the same feeling they’re good at generating content, but not so great at turning that content into something usable for real learning environments.

Like it’s easy to get lesson drafts, summaries, even quiz questions now. That part is pretty solved.

But once you try to turn that into something interactive or structured for actual teaching or training, things start to fall apart a bit you still end up manually organizing, reformatting, and rebuilding parts of it.

Most real world use cases need more than just text you need pacing, interaction, sometimes branching paths, and then LMS compatibility on top of that.

Right now it still feels like AI handles the content part, but humans are still doing most of the learning design, structure and delivery work.

Would be interesting to see tools that close that gap more instead of just speeding up the first step.

Are you a teacher or work for the school district? Help shape the future of digital learning by voicing your opinion on digital tools and their usefulness (or lack of) in a classroom environment. If you have strong opinions on AI, phones in classrooms, etc., then please sign up as we need these strong opinions to help shape state and school policy. This opportunity involves a 90-minute video call which pays $250. This is a PAID opportunity (because no one would sign up if it was for free), though the research goal is NOT profit, but rather profit and investment in the form of improving education for our students.

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