If you missed it, you missed it. But here's your chance to catch up (and crash the next one).
Some conversations run long because the ideas keep coming. This was one of those. Renee Carney welcomed Chris Gaudreau back from Bay Path University alongside Daniel Guillot and Emily Koutsoyannis from Instructure, and in 30 minutes, the group covered quiz building at scale, rogue enrollments, differentiated content, and a live moment where Chris asked a question nobody had tested yet and Emily just... tried it.
That's the spirit.
3 prompts, one very capable agent
1. Build a 125-question quiz from a doc
Chris came back with a win. Since his last Prompt Party appearance, his institution confirmed they're moving forward with Canvas Next, which meant he could finally go deeper with faculty on what Ignite Agent can actually do.
The use case: an applied behavior analysis program that replicates board exams inside Canvas. 125 multiple choice questions per quiz. Multiple quiz sets. Each question used to require four or five clicks plus copy-paste from an external doc. The faculty he supports yearned for time back.
Chris's solution: a template. Faculty do all their question-writing in a Google Doc or Word doc, marking correct answers with two asterisks. Then one prompt, one paste, and IgniteAI Agent builds the entire quiz.
"You can build 125 questions — takes you an hour to build the quiz in a doc — and then five minutes to build it in Canvas." — Chris Gaudreau, Bay Path University
Daniel added a tip that opened things up further: if the text is too long for the prompt window, drop it on a Canvas page and point the agent there instead.
"I have transcripts of an hour-and-a-half-long lecture that I just drop on a page and direct it there. It's a whole lot better than trying to copy-paste into the tiny prompt window." — Daniel Guillot, Instructure
And Olivia dropped some news mid-session: file upload is coming to Ignite Agent. An early adopter program is starting in two weeks. Check out the testing opportunity, and upvote to get involved!
2. Track down a rogue enrollment causing ghost announcements
Emily's prompt solved a problem every Canvas admin has chased: a student receiving announcements from a school they no longer attend. The cause is almost always the same — an active enrollment in a sub-account that nobody remembered to conclude, sitting in the default term with no end date.
The fix used to mean scrolling through a user's enrollment list, hunting for the culprit, and manually tracking down the course. Emily's prompt does it in seconds: target the student by ID, pull their active enrollments in the relevant sub-account, and return a list with course names, terms, and clickable URLs.
"As a past Canvas admin, I remember trying to chase down those abandoned courses." — Renee Carney
Then Chris asked the question that turned into a live experiment: could the agent pull a list of all courses set to term participation instead of course participation across an entire sub-account? Emily tried it on the spot. It found one, which turned out to be the only course in that sandbox sub-account.
"Even if it comes back with a no, it leads me down the path of where I need to go." — Chris Gaudreau, Bay Path University
Seed for a future prompt party? Renee thought so too!
3. Differentiate a lesson three ways — scaffolded, standard, and extended
Daniel closed with his go-to: differentiation. The prompt asks Ignite to take an existing lesson and generate two versions: one with extra scaffolding, broken into smaller steps with common mistakes called out, and one extended version with the deeper detail that high achievers want.
Both pages come back unpublished, ready for review before anything goes live.
"If that's the only thing I have to go back and do is clean up a little bit of the typesetting, I still have 90% of a lesson done." — Daniel Guillot, Instructure
Renee asked how long this would take manually. Daniel didn't hesitate.
"Hours of work." — Daniel Guillot, Instructure
Emily noted the math formatting can occasionally go sideways. Daniel agreed, but the scaffolded version, he said, almost always lands exactly right. The extension version sometimes needs to be reined in when it wanders past the scope of the course entirely.
The next step Daniel's already thinking about: pair the differentiated content with a template so the formatting matches the rest of the course from the start.
The Prompt Library is open. Go feed it.
Chris already posted his quiz-building prompt last week! Go find it, try it, and vote on it if it works for you. The library gets better when everyone contributes. Head to the Community Prompt Library, post what's working, test what someone else shared, and vote on the ones that earn it.
Chris is a past MVP winner — your prompt could be next. Read the original Prompt Party announcement for the full picture.
Don't miss the next one
If this recap gave you the smallest twinge of FOMO, good. Forward the invite to the colleague who'd love this. Bring a prompt you're proud of, or one that's half-baked and you can't figure out why. Both are welcome!
And if you want to do more than watch! We'd love to feature you. Leave a comment if you're interested in demoing a prompt live. No script required. Just you, your course, and something worth showing.
