Edtech Collective Marketplace
Context & Challenges
The Marketplace was built to give educators a single, trusted destination to discover, evaluate, and adopt edtech tools. It aimed to unify and subsequently sunset three fragmented data sources, highlight key trust signals like platform compatibility and privacy badges, and enable providers with a way to capture leads. Success required balancing the needs of educators seeking simplicity and evidence with providers needing control and visibility, all while laying the technical foundation for a scalable, partnership driven catalog.
AI Marketplace
Edu App Center
LearnCommunity Library
Problem
Fragmented discovery: Educators had to search across multiple sources to find Canvas-compatible tools, or any edtech tool with metadata. Sometimes apps listed the same tool creating redundancy and eroding trust.
​Lack of trust signals: Educators couldn’t easily verify integration standards or privacy readiness.
​Limited provider incentive: Providers saw little value in joining partnership community.
​Dual use cases: The library had to serve both as a public catalog and as a premium in-platform version with expanded features, creating complexity in keeping data, features, and user experiences aligned.
Solution
Unified three repositories into a single, public marketplace with accurate, up-to-date listings rerouting data from legacy sources into one unified backend during sunset period. Enabled providers to manage.
Introduced badges for interoperability, privacy, and efficacy to surface trust at a glance.
Enabled providers to claim and update listings, add new marketable assets, add tracking domains, and receive inbound lead forms.
Unified framework: Built a single backend architecture powering both surfaces—public for visibility and trust, premium for advanced features and deeper integrations—ensuring consistency while driving adoption and stickiness of both sides of the marketplace.
Discovery & Process
User-centered process: Interviews → Personas → User Stories → User Flows.
Our continuous discovery process revealed a critical gap: Institution Administrators and EdTech Providers lacked a streamlined way to interact within the ecosystem. Administrators and educators struggled to access clear, factual information about tools, while providers had no intuitive way to manage their products.
We interviewed Administrators and Educators to understand how they currently vet and procure API-based integrations, and Providers to learn how they prefer to manage their listings and interactions with potential buyers. Using AI, we consolidated findings into personas, which guided the creation of user stories and flows. This ensured the Marketplace was designed with empathy, validated against real-world needs, and grounded in evidence rather than assumptions.
Ideation & Development
Phase 1 – Discovery & Research
Audited internal repositories and industry libraries, and ran interviews with both providers and internal stakeholders. The goal was to understand pain points in discovery and lead management, while benchmarking against competitor platforms
Phase 2 – Concept Testing
Presented early prototypes and mockups to providers and internal teams. Feedback centered on usability, clarity of API compatibility and privacy badges, and provider workflows for managing listings. Insights were distilled into common themes that informed feature requirements
Phase 3 – Requirements & Feature Design
Translated research findings into core requirements: a tile-based browse page with imagery and filters (subject, grade, role), product detail pages with trust signals (privacy, integration, evidence badges), and a “Learn More” form to generate provider leads
Phase 4 – Engineering Development
Built the foundational API to pull real-time product data (filters, badges, images, tags) from LearnPlatform. Added publishing logic for sysadmin tagging and provider-partner recognition. Developed provider-side enhancements for managing assets and capturing leads
Phase 5 – Deployment & Launch
Delivered a public-facing marketplace optimized for discovery and trust signals, while sunsetting EduAppCenter. Established a framework to expand into international markets, accessibility compliance, and a premium in-platform experience with richer functionality.
Impact
The Marketplace launch delivered measurable impact for both Instructure and its partners. By centralizing tool discovery and management, it improved data accuracy, reduced internal overhead, and increased partner visibility. The result was stronger provider adoption, deeper institutional engagement, and a scalable foundation for future monetization and partnerships.
#1 Edtech Marketplace
Consolidated data from multiple legacy sources into a single catalog, improving educator access to Canvas-compatible tools. Becoming the largest private edtech marketplace of interoperable tools.
102% Increase in Listings
Partner listings increased by 102% within the 5 months, reflecting immediate engagement.
+2M in First Year
With access to new partnership features and services partnerships revenue grew to +$2M in first year.
+95% User Sentiment
End users interviewed reported positive reception of the new Marketplace as streamlined and easier to navigate.
Operational Efficiency
Consolidating three repositories meant reducing +20 hr/wk needed to maintain disparate environments and eliminate end user drop-off.
