Canvas Insider

As you valiantly stay afloat in today’s ocean of online blogs and social media posts claiming AI can do everything-including-cook-you-breakfast-in-the-morning in Canvas, I’m wondering if AI would know what to do with a panicked email like this: Has this ever happened to you? If you’re an experienced Canvas Admin like me, you’ve encountered a number of S.O.S. communiques like this. Teachers of Canvas courses, please hear me when I say this: ...

Instructure recently released its IgniteAI Agent for Canvas Admins, and will soon be making it available to teachers of Canvas courses. I wanted to have a conversation with this upcoming feature update, so I made a screen recording. Couple of things to keep in mind: This is a 17-minute video without narration. You’ll see a lot of mouse wiggling as I attempt to emphasize important information. I recommend you view this video full-screen on a large monitor. You might not enjoy the small mobile phone viewing experience. This is a raw recording of my conversation and IgniteAI Agent’s responses. There was no AI manipulation (ha!) of what you see in the video. The Canvas Beta instance is a bit slower than our usual Canvas Production environment. Thus, the Agent’s “Thinking” was taking quite some time in some cases. The jumps you see in the video are me pausing recording until it completed thinking…then I resumed the screen recording. I’m a fan of Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes. Topics I asked IgniteAI Agent about: ...

Hello again Canvas Insiders, Had an encouraging success story with a recent issue with meeting accessibility standards for <code> tag formatting in Canvas’ rich content editor. Appended some CSS code to the theme, saved the theme, and made our faculty client very happy. Check out the video to learn more! Thanks for your time. Have a good day, -Chris [email protected]

Welcome back to the new academic year, Insiders! I noticed a recent update to Canvas Assignments that might be helpful for teachers: annotating documents. While Instructure has an extensive online guide for students navigating through an annotation assignment, I wanted to show both the teacher’s and student’s perspective with this new update in Canvas. Thanks for your time. I hope today is better for you than yesterday, Chris [email protected]

Sometimes teachers in Canvas courses encounter error messages and are unable to upload files into their courses. Often it is due to them exceeding their File Storage quota. After a conversation or two with Google Gemini I was able to find a way to proactively alert teachers in my Canvas instance about exceeding their storage quota. Check out this short video for more! [This was originally posted on my LinkedIn account, and is mainly geared towards Canvas Admins. If you’re a teacher, and you find this nerdy process interesting, feel free to forward it to your school’s Canvas Admin! I’m happy to help them with the process if they could benefit from it…] ...

What happens when a Canvas Admin like me wants to help staff with their Academic Honesty course, and visits Google Gemini for some “Vibe Coding” to help staff work smarter than harder? A web application to quickly add students to the course behind the scenes! Check out the video for my experience in Vibe Coding with AI. [This was originally posted on my LinkedIn account, and is mainly geared towards Canvas Admins. If you’re a teacher, and you find this nerdy process interesting, feel free to forward it to your school’s Canvas Admin! I’m happy to help them with the process if they could benefit from it…] ...

What happens when a Canvas Admin like me wants to work smarter instead of harder, and visits with Google Gemini for some “Vibe Coding”? A web application to quickly cross-list courses! Check out the video for my first foray with AI. [This was originally posted on my LinkedIn account, and is mainly geared towards Canvas Admins. If you’re a teacher, and you find this nerdy process interesting, feel free to forward it to your school’s Canvas Admin! I’m happy to help them with the process if they could benefit from it…] ...

Attention: Book Publishers, EdTech Software providers, and my fellow Canvas Admins… This video is for you. Recently Instructure debuted Canvas Apps, “…a new feature designed to streamline app integration and management for Canvas root admins.” Their words, not mine. One of the more noticeable changes I found with this new way of managing and installing LTIs is the sequence of how Canvas Admins enter the third-party vendor’s specific information in the install fields. As I ventured into the new era of LTI app installs in my Canvas instance, I failed three times to get all the information entered correctly in Beta. ...

Hello Canvas Insiders, This ain’t no podcast, this ain’t no “…smash that like button and subscribe” video found on a popular website. This is a conversation with a colleague of mine, AJ Barse, where we discuss a new-ish web browser on the scene that has some…interesting capabilities. Especially when it pertains to students taking quizzes in Canvas. I appreciate your time. See you soon with another Back to Basics video. -Chris ...

I have received a number of requests from my university’s department chairs and staff to have access to teachers’ courses for evaluative or content support reasons. It’s lightning-quick for a Canvas Admin like me to add someone to one or many courses (with permission) but sometimes all those current-term courses can fill up one’s Dashboard, sometimes eliminating important courses from view, or “friction” may occur in searching for other teachers’ courses in the Past Enrollments section. ...