Quick note before I start: where I’m describing what Instructure announced, I’m working from the press releases and their own product pages. Where I’m reacting to it, that’s me.

Foundry

Instructure has launched Instructure Foundry, a standalone organization for building products adjacent to the core business. Small AI-native teams, fast iteration, faster validation with customers. Chief Product Officer Shiren Vijiasingam framed it this way: “…the answer isn’t rushing innovation in core products faster than institutions are ready to adopt.”

CEO Steve Daly added that investors provided incremental funding so Foundry doesn’t compete with core product investment. Canvas, Mastery, and Parchment keep their resourcing. Foundry runs a parallel track.

My experience with what Instructure announces in big conference keynotes, what it communicates on the public roadmap, and what actually shows up in Canvas Production can be three different things. Foundry looks to be a place where “currently under development” is the expected state of affairs rather than a somber disclosure to customers. Products get announced, ETA coming soon.

This is a useful path, but I want to shoot straight. Foundry could, repeat could, become the answer to questions from the Instructure community about the core roadmap. As we approach a new academic year, I’ll be keeping an eye on the workflow modernization work touted in April, and I’ll be checking news articles now that there’s a new, shinier place for talent to go.

Athena

Project Athena is Foundry’s first announced product, unveiled in the day one keynote. It’s an AI study coach that connects to Canvas and generates personalized quizzes, study guides, and coaching prompts from a student’s course materials, assignments, and upcoming assessments. Mastery model rather than answer generation. Students can upload their own notes. Hinds Community College in Mississippi is providing it to all 7,000 of its students this fall after a spring pilot. That’s big.

But this sentence made me re-read it three times to make sure I was comprehending it correctly.

Athena will access Canvas course information through a read-only connection governed by the student’s existing permissions, so it can only retrieve information the student is authorized to view.

Authorization lies with the student account? Not a setting enabled by a Canvas Admin? Not an approved LTI install? Not a developer key a Canvas Admin can scope and revoke?

I’m putting down the brown paper bag that I’ve been breathing through for a minute.

Athena just got announced, and I’m sure Instructure is going to provide more information in the weeks to come. I sure hope I’m wrong, but the announcement refers to institutional participation as a partnership option, with account sign-up at studywithathena.com, a separate website from Instructure’s, listed at $5 per month as of this morning, day two of InstructureCon. From what I can tell, this looks to be a product built primarily for schools to adopt, with student adoption a close second.

From a Canvas Admin perspective, I’m concerned about some students connecting a third-party study tool to their course content this fall term. I have no way of pulling a report for upper management to show how many are using this product. No one needs to submit a request. The only way I’m going to catch wind of Athena’s usage will be a faculty complaint about the integrity of their assessments.

I finished a full LTI governance audit at my university earlier this year. There were 46 account-level installs and 39 developer keys. I did solid work cleaning up the unnecessary and the outdated. That audit was possible because I have access to the third-party tools that can reach Canvas content. Athena’s described architecture doesn’t show up on my radar by design, because the student has an account created outside my university and outside my Canvas instance.

Here’s a related move that paid off. I disabled access token creation for everyone but Canvas Admins at WWU, and I’ve received a noticeable number of requests from personnel I didn’t know were using tokens for their own API-call methods. It’s helped update my mental rolodex of who’s doing what in my LMS. If your Canvas instance still allows students to generate personal access tokens without restriction, that’s worth a look regardless of what Athena turns out to require.

One more thing

Athena’s press release states that Instructure serves as a FERPA-designated school official when handling education records on behalf of participating institutions.

School official designation normally flows from an institutional agreement, with the institution retaining direct control over the use of the records. When the connection originates with a student rather than an institution, that designation gets more complicated. (Captain Obvious has entered the room.) A student can consent to disclosure of their own record. Course content isn’t entirely the student’s record. Teacher-created content, other students’ discussion posts, peer review comments, and student group work are all present in the course the student is authorized to view.

Here’s the email I’m sending my Registrar’s Office this week:

If one of our students connects Project Athena to their Canvas account and we have no agreement with Instructure, under what authority does that data transfer happen? And does it include coursework and discussion content authored by other students in the same course?

Big neon-flashing disclaimer: I’m not the person who answers this question. I’m the Insider who has to abide by the answer. Which is why I’m bringing it up now. And it’s why I want answers before the busy fall term begins.

The third release

Instructure also published survey research this morning. Among 1,125 U.S. respondents surveyed in mid-June, 90% of higher ed students report using AI in class at least occasionally. Sixty-one percent of higher ed educators do. Forty-one percent of higher ed educators report no formal training at all, and mean educator confidence with AI came in at 2.60 out of 5.

From what the results are showing, students are already doing this without guidance, so a responsible move is a governed tool rather than no tool at all.

What I’m doing next

First, I’m asking my Customer Success Manager these questions once they’re back from InstructureCon. Does Athena provide an account-level or sub-account level control to enable or disable this product? Does a student-initiated connection require any institutional agreement beforehand? What shows up in Canvas admin logs when a student connects with Athena?

Second, in addition to the email mentioned earlier, I’m revisiting FERPA with my Registrar’s Office to be fully familiar with approved language before fall term.

Third, I’m sharing these product announcements with my university’s academic honesty personnel. A tool that could know what’s on an upcoming exam and generate practice questions from it? That’s a something a university’s faculty senate will want to know about now rather than in week three of fall quarter/semester.

A product reaching Canvas course content through student credentials, announced in July for a fall rollout, deserves your questions before your students find it on their own. I believe the conversation needs to start now. The answers get harder to act on in mid-September.

Thanks for your time,

Chris

The clients who trust me most have no authority over me. The institution that has authority over me has kept me at arm’s length for 29 years. That’s a hard thing to reconcile when you bring high standards and high energy to a low-profile, low-authority seat.

The realization surfaced a couple of years ago, and I wrestled with the lack of affirmation quietly in the car after a podcast episode ended or during the last set of incline bench press in the gym, compartmentalizing everything the workday threw at me. I mulled it over in the comfortable silences with my wife while we walked the dog after dinner. I was working out how to convince inner Chris that it was okay for work to withhold the trust I wanted.

In previous essays I’ve used the word Consigliere. It entered my mind before I understood it in my internal operating system. I picked it up the way you pick up any good Italian word, more sound than meaning, a little cool on the tongue, always inviting you to wave your hands and land heavy accents on SIG and ERE when you imitate someone speaking Italian. And just for the record, I’m half Italian, half Welsh. The four syllables sat in the recesses of my mind for years. Then I started paying attention to why I’d kept it, and took the word out for a test drive.

I’ve watched Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather most of my adult life, and for most of that time I was watching the wrong people. Sonny Corleone, a son of the Godfather, running his mouth in every strategy meeting, emotions out ahead of his judgment. Vito Corleone, the boss at the head of the table, the man everyone came to. It took me six or seven viewings to notice the guy who barely spoke. Tom Hagen, not a blood relative but familia just the same, sat slightly back from the table, present in every scene that mattered, reading the room while everyone else performed in it. He said the least and knew the most. His quiet was never timid. He was cocked and loaded, the most dangerous mind in the room precisely because he spent nothing on being seen.

It’s funny to look back on now. My 20s had their share of dangerous rooms. Bar fights that almost happened, loud rock concerts packed with aggressive guys in black t-shirts and piercings looking to do anything but sit and watch the band. I learned the demonstrative loud one was never the threat. He was a yapping chihuahua. I scanned for the quiet one, the guy watching everything with narrowed eyes, staying out of the conversational melee, the one who would land a huge impact when he finally moved. Little did I know that I was the quiet one in many cases.

Speaking of rock concerts, I play bass guitar, so of course I watched the Consigliere role play out on stage too. Every band tells you the same story about attention. The lead guitarist is Sonny, prancing all over the stage, squirting notes into every gap, impossible to ignore. Vito is the lead singer, out front, the voice everyone came to hear. And Tom Hagen? He’s in the backline on bass, locked in with the drummer, holding the groove, walking the whole song up to the chorus so the big moment lands. Nobody claps for the bass player, but the bass player is also the reason the song succeeds. Take him out and the whole thing goes thin and wobbly and nobody can say quite why. I know this because I used to wear a black t-shirt while playing live that said, in simple white letters, “You would notice if I stopped playing.” Todd Snider nailed the dynamic in Joe’s Blues back in the ‘90s, the way a crowd fixes its eyes on the star up front while its hips answer to whatever the bass is doing.

That’s the role I wanted. Not the frontman. Never the frontman! The one at the back who makes the thing work for the people counting on him.

Back to that recent realization. The trust that fuels me doesn’t come down through the org chart. It comes laterally, one client at a time. The one who slides the credit card across the table after I recommend a device upgrade, no questions about the cost. The widow who gives me permission to back up six years of her late husband’s tangled accounts and trusts me not to lose a single photograph. The professor who started out sure I was useless and ended up nominating me for an award. None of that has anything to do with my job title, my education level, or what any manager wrote in an annual review. People handed me that trust across a table, one room at a time, and it turned out to be the only kind of professional food that ever fed me.

I think I finally understand why trust means this much to me. You don’t hunger for what you already have plenty of. If the institution had trusted me the way those clients do, their trust might feel pleasant instead of essential. It feels essential because it’s filling a space the frame left empty for three decades. I could have let that space turn into a wall. For a while, I did. What I built instead was a role designed to receive exactly the kind of trust the frame was never going to offer.

So Consigliere became the word I use for the work. After 29 years under the common title of tech support, I’ve got a name for the guy in the corner who reads the room, holds the groove, and makes things happen for the people who trust him. It’s the role I’ll be doing on purpose when the institution and I eventually part ways, and it’s the one I was quietly doing the whole time.

More later...

I got five bucks that says creating quizzes generates more support tickets than any other area of Canvas. Not because writing quiz questions is hard, composing them in Canvas’s native quiz tool is what’s hard. Click a question type, then a text box, then another text box, then select your correct answer, then wash-rinse-repeat forty more times for a Week 2 exam. Teachers already wrote the quiz in Word, where they write everything else, but Canvas makes them write it again, one click at a time.

So I built a way around that.

CanvQuizConverter takes a quiz written in a plain Word document and turns it into a file Canvas can import directly. Type your questions the way you’d type anything else, mark the correct answer with an asterisk, upload the file to a small tool running on your own computer, and download a package ready for Canvas’s import screen. No new interface to learn. No clicking through forty individual question forms. The writing you already did is the only writing you have to do.

What it looks like

Open a blank Word document:

1. Chris' favorite color is:
*a. Black
b. Blue
c. Red
d. Turquoise

8. Chris is happy to convert your properly-formatted Word document into a quiz or question bank in your Canvas course.
*a. True
b. False

Star the correct choice. Star more than one on any question and the tool builds a select-all-that-apply question instead, no extra steps required. Upload that file, get a preview right in your browser showing exactly what Canvas will see, correct answers highlighted in green, and anything missing or ambiguous flagged before you download anything.

Those two questions are lifted straight from the actual sample quiz in the repo, which runs eight questions deep and gets progressively more personal. Download sample_quiz.docx if you want the rest, or just want to confirm the tool works before writing your own.

Get it and run it

The tool and full setup instructions live at the CanvQuizConverter GitHub repository. You can also jump straight to the script file itself if you already know what you’re doing.

For everyone else, here’s the whole setup, start to finish, so you don’t have to leave this page to get running.

macOS

1. Press Command (⌘) + Spacebar, type Terminal, press Enter.

2. Go to python.org/downloads, download the macOS installer, and run it. Defaults are fine.

3. In Terminal, paste this and press Enter:

pip3 install streamlit python-docx --break-system-packages

1. Download the tool from the GitHub page (green Code button, then Download ZIP), unzip it, and move CanvQuizConverter.py to your Desktop.

2. In Terminal:

cd ~/Desktop
streamlit run CanvQuizConverter.py

Your browser opens automatically with the tool ready to go.

If you get an unexpected “bad interpreter” error instead, it’s an old Python shortcut, not a broken tool, common on school-managed Macs after an update. Run python3 -m streamlit run CanvQuizConverter.py and should work for you.

Windows 11

1. Go to python.org/downloads, download the installer, and run it. On the first screen, check “Add python.exe to PATH” before clicking Install Now. Do me a favor? Don’t skip this box.

2. Click Start, type PowerShell, right-click Windows PowerShell, choose Run as Administrator.

3. Paste this and press Enter:

pip install streamlit python-docx

1. Download the tool from my GitHub page, unzip it, and move CanvQuizConverter.py to your Desktop.

2. In PowerShell:

cd ~\Desktop
streamlit run CanvQuizConverter.py

Your browser opens automatically with the tool ready to go.

After the first time

You won’t need to reinstall anything. Open Terminal or PowerShell, navigate to wherever CanvQuizConverter.py lives, and run streamlit run CanvQuizConverter.py again. Press Control + C in that window when you’re done.

Getting it into Canvas

Once you’ve downloaded your converted file, go to your Canvas course, click Settings, then Import Course Content in the right-hand panel. Choose QTI .zip file, select what you just downloaded, and import. Your quiz lands in the course’s question bank, ready to assign.

What it isn’t

This isn’t a Canvas API integration, and it doesn’t connect to your course in any way. It produces a standard QTI package, the same format Canvas already accepts, and the import happens through Canvas’s own import screen, the way it always has. No credentials involved, because none are needed.

One more thing

This is released under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. You are welcome to use it, and if you like it you can share it with your faculty colleagues. If you’re a Canvas Admin you can include it with your onboarding documentation, whatever’s useful to your school. All I ask is that the attribution stays attached. An acknowledgement that your Canvas Insider created this tool.

Thanks very much for your time. Have a good day,

-Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

On May 7, 2026, faculty and students across the country opened Canvas and got a ransom note from ShinyHunters, a cybercriminal extortion group, telling thousands of institutions to negotiate or watch their data get leaked. Canvas login pages at roughly 330 schools were defaced. The platform went into maintenance mode. Finals week for a lot of institutions were inaccessible.

This was actually the second hit. Instructure had confirmed a breach on May 1, said it was contained by May 2, and by May 7 ShinyHunters was back on the login page explaining, in their words, that Instructure had “ignored us and did some ‘security patches’” instead of negotiating. The whole thing ended with Instructure paying the ransom on May 12 and receiving what the group described as “shred logs” -- digital confirmation that the data was destroyed.

I’m not here to argue for or against the breach; other people covered that thoroughly. I’m here to talk about what got exposed that nobody was talking about.

The problem nobody wanted to mention out loud

When Canvas went dark on May 7, admins and faculty started reaching for their export files. Teachers may know what I’m talking about. The .imscc files you can generate from Course Export in the Settings menu. It’s the official Canvas backup format. The thing Instructure points you toward when asked about portability.

Here’s the problem with .imscc files: they’re a zip archive of XML and HTML that requires Canvas, or a compatible LMS, to interpret them. Open it with any other program and you get gibberish. You can’t read your assignment instructions, you can’t access your quiz questions, you can’t reference a rubric. The content is there, technically, in the sense that the food in your refrigerator is technically in your house even if the lights are off and you can’t find it in your kitchen.

If Canvas is offline, and Canvas is the only place that can read your course export, your data has limited use.

Faculty were asking questions during that outage that admins couldn’t answer well. Where are my quiz questions? How can I get to SpeedGrader to view my students’ essay submissions? What about grading three weeks of accumulated discussion replies? The honest answer, for most of them, was: we’ll have to wait until Canvas comes back online.

I built something because I didn’t want that to be the answer.

What CanvExporter does

CanvExporter is a Python tool that uses the Canvas API to pull course content out of Canvas and write it into files you can actually open on your desktop computer. Real files like a Microsoft Word .docx file with your assignment descriptions and quiz questions with answer keys. An Excel .csv spreadsheet with your importable rubric criteria in template form. Organized subfolders for announcements, discussions, content pages, rubrics, question banks, and uploaded files.

Make no mistake: CanvExporter is not a backup tool in the traditional sense. It won’t restore your course. It’s a content extraction tool. It answers the question what’s in this course in a format that works whether Canvas is running or not. Your quiz bank becomes an editable Word document. Your rubrics become Excel documents formatted for easy import into another course. Your discussion prompts become files you can email a colleague, print out for hard copy, or just read in a text editor.

The tool uses the public Canvas API exactly as designed. Authenticated requests, only for content the user running it has access to, rate limit compliant, nothing stored server-side. I checked it against Instructure’s Acceptable Use Policy and Canvas API Policy before the repo went public. It’s clean. And it’s cool like Fonzie.

It’s licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0. Free to use. Credit required. Not for commercial resale.

Where it stands

The repo is live at https://github.com/techconsigliere/CanvExporter. Initial release is coming soon. I’m not shipping before it’s solid, because tools that handle course content need to be reliable or they’re worse than nothing. The README has the current status and what’s in active development.

Since the breach, I’ve already put the tool to work in ways that have nothing to do with disaster recovery. Our Civil Rights and Title IX Compliance department received a records request for content from a required employee training -- seven Canvas courses worth of material. Printing Canvas content pages directly produces formatting that’s somewhere between “unhelpful” and “cringey.” CanvExporter exported all seven courses in 35 minutes. A less-than-half-day turnaround on a compliance records request. That’s not a small thing.

I’ve also used it for faculty clients preparing their tenure evaluation packages. Their quizzes and assignment curriculum needed to be uploaded to an external platform for review. CanvExporter pulled all the course content in minutes. I picked the relevant assignment and quiz folders and sent my clients exactly what they needed. Clean files, right format, no manual transcription.

Both of those use cases happened in the normal course of the job. Not during a crisis. CanvExporter handles normal requests on a Tuesday afternoon just as well as a crisis, and can provide some insurance at the start of the academic term once all course content is updated.

I’ve also submitted proposals to present CanvExporter at EdTech conferences in Portland later this year and I’m tracking toward EDUCAUSE Seattle 2028.

If you’re a Canvas admin who lived through May 7 and thought there has to be a better answer than this -- that’s exactly why I built it. Watch this space.

Chris Powell is a Canvas LMS Administrator at Western Washington University and publishes Canvas Insider from the Admin side of the desk. The CanvExporter repository is at github.com/techconsigliere/CanvExporter.

I started this blog in 2022 because I had information to share about Canvas and no place to say it.

Back then COVID was on the decline, but Canvas LMS was everywhere. Accelerated adoption had outpaced what most schools were ready for, and support staff were mostly invisible. Faculty had questions about their courses. Departments had problems with outcomes and assessments of learning. And through no fault of anyone, knowledge and experiential skill about Canvas got pushed to the side.

So I created a Substack and started writing.

For four years, I’ve been showing up in your inboxes the way a wise colleague appears at your office door: informal, carrying something useful, occasionally cracking a joke. Every word was written by me. Every video was narrated by me, a Canvas Admin paying attention to the quirkiness of his LMS and sharing what he noticed.

If you’ve been here for any part of that era, thank you. I am grateful you have stuck with me as I found my voice. That version of the Canvas Insider was exactly what it needed to be, and whom I needed to be.

Things are different now. Here’s what changed.

Over the past several months I’ve been acquiring something I didn’t have back then: an enhanced skillset for LMS administration built around Python scripts, Node web applications, and automated workflows that resolve issues Canvas’s own feature set doesn’t address. I developed these tools through conversations with AI, but the observations, the ideas, and the customizations are mine. Each one exists because a recognizable problem arrived in my inbox and the existing solutions weren’t clean enough.

This work deserves a more serious tone of voice than a post that signs off with “stunningly vivacious Canvas Insiders.”

So here’s what the Canvas Insider looks like moving forward.

The problems I write about are real issues, the ones that populate my email inbox first thing in the morning from several faculty. The tools I share are explained clearly, downloadable, and openly licensed. The workflows I walk through are elegant because the people I serve deserve elegant solutions, not seven-step bullet-point lists and a handful of links to documentation they’ve already read.

The razor-sharp wit stays. The warmth stays. The hurdy-hurr cheeky jokes are done.

I’m writing for Canvas Admins who want to do their jobs effectively inside schools that don’t always make that easy. For instructional designers who need creative solutions their IT department hasn’t thought of yet. And for directors of educational technology who are quietly deciding whether the person they’re reading is someone worth knowing.

I think I am. This is where I’m going to prove it.

-Chris

I wanted to see if I could bulk-suspend, not delete, guest accounts that haven’t signed into my Canvas instance in over six years. So I had a conversation with an AI agent.

What resulted was a handy-dandy Python script that I can run from my desktop computer that requires three things:

1. A specified domain for your insitution, e.g. canvasinsider.instructure.com

2. An access token for an API call

3. An Excel .csv file with the User IDs in a list

Here is what a proof of concept looks like. You might want to watch this in full screen mode to see the details:

If you would like to obtain a copy of my Python script, send me an email. I’m happy to share the info that helps keep my university LMS a little bit more secure.

Thanks for your time. Have a good day,

Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

If you are still using Classic quizzes, your printout may not be...nicely formatted.

I recently had a conversation with AI, and was able to create a web “bookmarklet” that contains some javascript to print a Classic Quiz. Nicely formatted. This proof-of-concept video was done with a Mozilla Firefox. You might want to view this at full screen size to see the little content:

Also, I recently shared how one can convert a properly-formatted Word .docx file into a Canvas quiz with a neat little python script I developed. What about converting a Classic Quiz to a Word document? I had another conversation with you know who, and developed another web bookmarklet to create a .doc file from a quiz. Again, full screen size viewing might prevent headaches from squinting:

Please note: If you are using Safari with web bookmarklets containing javascript, you must go into Settings, Advanced, check the box to “Show features for web developers” in Advanced, then check the box to “Allow JavaScript from Smart Search” in the Developer menu.

If you are interested in trying out either of these web bookmarklets for yourself, send me an email. I’m happy to share what I’ve developed as long as you do not blame me for your computer blowing up, the high price of gas per gallon, or for any of the world’s problems. Speaking of gas, your mileage may vary with my web bookmarklets. :-)

Thanks for your time…Have a good day,

Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

Recently I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they got a popup recommendation when editing the Roll Call assignment’s settings page?”

So I had a conversation with an AI agent and was able to accomplish this by appending my Canvas theme with some javascript and css. Proof of concept video for you here…might want to view this at fullscreen to see the small text as I go clicky-clicky around the browser window:

Should you or your institution be interested in learning more, or getting a customized proof-of-concept for your situation, send me an email. I’m always happy to share information with my stunningly vivacious Canvas Insiders. :-)

Thanks for your time,

Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

A software application I’ve used for years to convert properly-formatted Word .docx files into Canvas quizzes gave me error messages after I changed the “New Canvas Login UI” settings.

Nerdy background info: I use a Mac Mini as my daily driver for work. The quiz conversion software I use is only made for Windows. For years I have relied on Parallels for macOS to let me use a Windows11 virtual machine solely for this software as a way to provide a service for my faculty clients. This week I discovered my software stopped working, and a faculty client needed a Word document converted to a quiz for later this week.

So I had a conversation with Gemini.

What resulted was a python script requiring no elevated rights in Canvas and no access tokens to leverage an API call. When I ran the command in my terminal application it immediately opened a new tab on my web browser, allowed me to upload my .docx file, showed me a preview of the quiz questions with correct answers, and required two mouse clicks to download a QTI .zip file of the converted quiz onto my desktop computer to import into a Canvas course of my choosing and create a new question bank as well. No cloud requirements, no tiered pricing structure, no external sources. Needless to say, I was chuffed with the workflow.

Here is a no-dialogue video of what I was able to create. Might want to view it in fullscreen size to see the small text:

If you’re interested in converting properly-formatted Word .docx files into a multiple choice / true-false quiz in Canvas, drop me a line. Always happy to share my nerdy info with my fabulous Canvas Insiders!

Have a good day,

Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

Couple of things:

1 - I used Canvas Beta for this video recording which has IgniteAI Agent enabled. I don’t have any AI tools enabled in my university’s live “Production” Canvas environment. Yet.

2 - You might want to view this video on a large monitor full-screen to see the details.

3 - I like Erik Satie’s Gnossiene #1. It’s playing in the background.

4 - If you have concerns of me violating FERPA or PII by showing an actual student’s essay in Speedgrader, you might want to check out the Ted Lasso TV show.

Thanks for your time,

-Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

PS and by the way - I don’t use AI to generate my written words. This is my own original blabbering.

Instead of joining in the middle school cafeteria food fight online about artificial intelligence and agentic AI browsers, and their impact on Canvas, I am drawn to a story famously shared by Alan Watts, a mid-20th century “philosophic entertainer” about a Chinese farmer:

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

— Alan Watts

In addition, I often repeat this statement when faced with life situations that give me elevated states of anxiety and stress:

Christopher, there is more to the situation than you are aware of. Lift up and out of it to get a better perspective.

— My inner narrative

My hope for you, my fabulous and dazzling Canvas Insider, is that you will consider the possibility that a new product might not result in a career that is flushed down the toilet. A calling that is all for naught. A job that is unceremoniously terminated. My hope for you is that the overwhelm incurred from concern for events that have not yet happened might actually result in change that will ultimately benefit you and others.

Thanks for your time,

Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

PS and by the way - I don’t use AI to generate my written words. This is my own original blabbering.

In 9+ years as a Canvas Admin, I receive about 10 emails a calendar year from students asking why their course from a past term is still in their Canvas Dashboard.

I’ll masquerade as the student’s dashboard and locate the past-term course since the term is usually in the title. I then go to Settings and smile knowingly as I see Course set in the Participation field, but no end date set:

As soon as I enter that past-term’s end date and click Update Course Details to lock in the changes… POOF. The course disappears from the teacher and student dashboards, moves it to everyone’s Past Enrollments section, and sets it to read-only access.

I can hear you saying, “But Chris - we know you are a brilliant and benevolent Canvas Admin, but can the IgniteAI Agent fix this for teachers? Get back to the task at hand, nerd-boy!”

I recently had a conversation with the IgniteAI Agent about this very topic. Like to see it? Here it go:

As you witnessed, hopefully in fullscreen video, the IgniteAI Agent did indeed share the correct way for the teacher to fix their problem, but it wasn’t capable of entering an end date for the teacher. That would require specific input from the teacher, perhaps in a follow-up question sometime in the future. As we are in the second month of 2026, the IgniteAI Agent can provide a path to issue resolution for teachers of Canvas courses…but I have concerns with advising teachers to conclude their own courses, “…by changing its status from ‘Available’ to ‘Completed’…” when only an end date is necessary.

Thanks for your time,

-Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

PS and by the way - I don’t use AI to generate my written words. This is my own original blabbering.

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:

You are not alone if you find grades have mysteriously disappeared in your gradebook. This happens quite often. You should not be expected to know everything about Canvas. Situations like this happen, and they are fixable.

-Chris Powell, Canvas Insider

An experienced, caring, highly-attractive, witty, and extensively-knowledgeable Canvas Admin would guide Professor Plum to their gradebook to confirm what they are seeing:

The empathetic, patient, entertaining, and vivacious Canvas Admin would then go to the Edit quiz page and notice only one student is assigned the quiz:

Nodding their head, the benevolent, charismatic, and appealingly-charming Canvas Admin would assign “Everyone else” to the quiz and include the previous date/time info to prevent students from taking the quiz in the future:

Hopefully Professor Plum will exhale in relief as all other student grades return to their gradebook for that quiz:

This method works for assignments, discussions, quizzes….all graded curriculum in your course.

It’s obvious that AI agents can be trained on situations like this. But isn’t it nice that you have a wise, approachable, and eye-catchingly delightful Canvas Admin to help resolve these crisis moments?

Thanks for your time,

-Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

PS and by the way - I don’t use AI to generate my written words. This is my own original blabbering.

Couple of things to keep in mind:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. I’m a fan of Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes.

Topics I asked IgniteAI Agent about:

• Student participation in my demo course.

• Creating an announcement.

• Creating a Group Set and adding students to groups.

• Hiding unpublished assignments in the gradebook.

• Providing a student additional time for a quiz.

…and other questions.

Thanks very much for your time and checking out this lengthy video,

-Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

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

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

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

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

[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…]

Thanks for your time,

Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

[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…]

Thanks for your time,

Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

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…]

Thanks for your time,

Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com

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.

Now that I learned the appropriate steps, I wanted to share with my fellow Canvas Admins ~ as well as online book publishers and software companies providing LTIs to Canvas institutions ~ so that we all can progress together with the least amount of installation friction as possible.

Thanks very much for your time,

-Chris

canvasinsider@protonmail.com