About the Canvas Insider

Chris Powell has spent nearly a decade as the Canvas LMS Administrator at Western Washington University, supporting thousands of faculty, staff, and students through every quirk, limitation, and quiet triumph the platform has to offer.

That experience lives on the Admin side of the desk, where the real operational problems arrive, the ones that don’t have a clean answer in Instructure’s documentation and can’t wait until the next new feature update.

The Canvas Insider exists because those problems deserve serious solutions. Not seven-step workarounds. Not a list of links to guides people have already read. Elegant, practical resolutions built from deep familiarity with how Canvas actually behaves in a real institution under real conditions.

In recent years Chris has expanded his toolkit beyond the Admin console, building Python scripts, Node web applications, and automated workflows that solve problems Canvas’s own feature set doesn’t address. These tools are openly licensed and available to the community.

The Canvas Insider is for Canvas Admins, instructional designers, and educational technology leaders who want to do this work well, inside institutions that don’t always make that easy.

From the Admin side of the desk.