RE: Announcements at InstructureCon and D2L Fusion

To the TimelyGrader Community,

Recently there have been two significant announcements that we want to share. The first from D2L (makers of Brightspace) regarding a partnership with LearnWise (https://www.learnwise.ai/news-insights/learnwise-d2l-brightspace-ai-partnership-2025) and the second from Instructure (makers of Canvas) and their partnership with OpenAI that they have titled IgniteAI (https://www.instructure.com/ignite-ai).

At first glance, these announcements may be cause for concern to us, but in fact it is the opposite. We celebrate further opportunities for instructors and institutions to improve student feedback and to reduce marking time and effort.

Simply put, we also see both of these announcements as having different values and origins as TimelyGrader, and servicing a different target audience. As was so succinctly put by a member of the Instructure team during last week’s conference, “grading and feedback is an emotional endeavour”, one that we at TimelyGrader take to heart.

Both solutions are bundled within an entire AI package, therefore institutions need to consider much larger implementations and change management that frankly we feel is too far away from current status. At TimelyGrader, we are a pedagogical support company that delivers service via our excellent IT team. Our perspective is that both of these announcements appear to be IT companies targeting the Higher Education sector.

At TimelyGrader, we feel strongly that because we focus solely on the critical (and emotional) process of grading and feedback with ‘Human in the Loop’ being core to our solution, we are an easier implementation and uplift with an immediate ROI for students, instructors and budget-conscious administrators.

Our differentiator is in our product focus, and our pedagogical support for instructors.

Rob Peregoodoff

Chief Learning Officer