We imagine that this feature could be used by teachers, school admins, and select students to make announcements, share updates, and more, and given how popular Instagram’s Stories features are, it actually makes sense that Instagram might try to get schools to use more “trendy” means of trying to appeal to students.
However this feature was only spotted within Instagram’s code and there doesn’t appear to be a live version of it yet. Instagram has also declined to comment on the discovery, although as TechCrunch points out, the company has declined to comment on features in the past ahead of their official launch, so it is possible that this could be another one of those times.
Interestingly enough this isn’t the first time that Instagram’s parent company has tried to appeal its platform to schools. Earlier this year there were reports that Facebook was looking to develop a Slack-like messenger for high schools, so this wouldn’t be the first time that Facebook has shown its interest in the education sector.