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Turnitin employees from across the country came to Louisville, Kentucky, this week for Instructure’s annual conference, InstructureCon 2026. Through keynote addresses, breakout sessions, customer roundtables, and casual conversations at our booth, we learned a lot. The biggest takeaway? AI tools deployed in classrooms and lecture halls need to be tailored for education. Publicly available AI is not healthy for education. At Turnitin, we agree.
What else did we learn? I’ll give you four themes:
- Positivity around AI is high: Many of the educators we spoke with are thinking less about punitive approaches to AI use and more about positive, formative ways to integrate AI into their teaching. They need solutions to properly assess students in the age of AI, and changing how they assess is the primary way we heard they are thinking about tackling this challenge. We also heard about the complex and mature attitudes students have toward AI.
- Institutions are still defining “academic integrity” in the age of AI: The struggle to preserve integrity is real. We heard about a variety of approaches to “AI-proof” assessments, including proctoring, pen and paper, video, locked down browsers, and more. And while there is an acknowledgement that we need to redesign assessments because of AI, we also heard about resistance to change. Many instructors have spent years developing their curricula and ways of teaching, and the path to “better” assessments is unclear. Until there is a clear path to redesigning assessment that works, many educators are understandably stuck.
- We need more information on how students actually use AI: There is more work to do in order to understand students’ everyday–or occasional–use of AI. Some presentations and a student panel started this conversation. What stood out to us was the theme that students are using AI not to do work for them but to study, whether it’s simplifying difficult concepts, generating practice quizzes and flashcards, and getting unstuck. We have more to learn here.
- Trust is essential…and there’s a long way to go: We heard the word “trust” often from customers and presenters. We learned that some students are hesitant to use their institution’s enterprise AI tools because they think their institution is reviewing their prompts and use (even if they’re not). And instructors are looking for trusted partners and reliable solutions made for their workflows. Students and faculty alike need to have trust in the tools, or they won’t get used.
It’s a time of immense change, but there is one constant, the passion of educators. Whether starting out or decades into their careers, the energy and motivation we experience from educators at events like these is a powerful and inspirational reminder of why we do this work.
About the author
Marlen Rattiner is an edtech leader with nearly two decades of expertise in product management, AI, and instructional design. As VP of Product Management at Turnitin, Marlen drives innovation in academic integrity, leading the team behind Turnitin Feedback Studio. This includes Turnitin’s Similarity and Originality reports, grading and feedback tools, integrations, and new innovations like Turnitin Clarity. Marlen previously served in product leadership roles at Blackboard and Wimba and holds a Masters degree in educational technology from NYU.