The most popular tools related to content, collaboration or video.
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Despite widespread hype about integrating artificial intelligence tools into college classrooms, faculty aren’t using them as much as other types of education-technology tools.
That’s one of the big takeaways from a report Instructure—which owns the nation’s most popular learning management system, Canvas—released Tuesday entitled, “EdTech Top 40: Inside the U.S. higher education digital learning stack.” It’s an analysis of de-identified data from 19.5 million U.S. higher education users between September 2025 and April 2026 and the Learning Tools Interoperability integrations they used during that time period. (LTIs are external tools capable of connecting with Canvas, or another LMS.)
According the report, the five LTIs that reached the most users during that time period included McGraw Hill (11,369,232 users), Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys (10,632,703 users), Zoom (9,051,162 users), Kaltura (8,592,923 users), and Panopto (8,333,378 users). By contrast, the most widely adopted dedicated AI tool—Google Gemini—didn’t even crack the top 100, reaching 87,788 users across 211 institutions.
“You would expect to see ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot all on the top of the list,” Ryan Lufkin, vice president of global learning strategy for Instructure, told Inside Higher Ed. “But what we’re seeing from the LTI data is that even though institutions are signing enterprisewide deals and making these tools available, they’re not leveraging the LTI tools to actually embed them into the class yet.”
While most faculty and students are still interacting with AI-powered chatbots, LTIs have stronger agentic capabilities that could work to improve pedagogical approaches, advocates say. However, separate data from Instructure shows that only 11 percent of higher education instructors have received comprehensive AI training.
Although AI’s potential in the classroom has remained largely untapped, Lufkin said that’s starting to change.
“We’re in this fundamental shift where it’s been hard to find those examples of what good [uses of AI in the classroom look] like,” he said, adding that some college instructors are beginning to share notes on AI integration. “The more we learn about it, the more it will move us beyond thinking of AI as a cheating tool and into an opportunity to make courses more engaging and interactive.”
But integrating AI into teaching and learning workflows also “requires a higher bar than individual pilots or experimentation,” Mary Styers, director of evidence and learning strategy at Instructure, said in a news release about the report. “Institutions weigh accessibility, data privacy, interoperability and existing research before a tool becomes part of the learning environment. That scrutiny shapes which AI tools ultimately reach institutional scale.”
For now though, 90 percent of the 40 most used LTIs—including McGraw Hill, Simple Syllabus and MyOpenMath—were specifically built for higher education customers.
Roughly half of the most popular tools are used for content, collaboration or video, while 15 percent help with administrative functions and 12.5 percent aid productivity.
“We’re still seeing a very solid place for standard digital publishing, and we don’t see that changing … They’re the ones that are leveraging their experience [in the higher education sector] the best,” Lufkin said. He added that the vast majority of the 40 most used LTIs “are all tools that are directly impacting the student experience.”
Although Canvas has previously ranked LTI usage in the K–12 sector, this is the first time it’s collected such data for higher education users. The goal is to equip institutions with data that may help them make the most of their often lean technology budgets—regardless of whether it includes investment in dedicated AI tools.
“Modern students want that flexibility in how they access different courses in college. So it’s really important to be able to offer the technology infrastructure to support that and measure how effective it is,” Lufkin said. “Are the tools that universities spend their budgets on actually being used to improve student outcomes? Are they being used as deeply as they can?”
