Can AI Do That?

Old Courses Still in Dashboard

If you didn’t catch my previous conversation with Instructure’s IgniteAI Agent, I’m putting the synthetic concierge through its paces. This time, I’m wondering if AI would know what to do with an email like this:

Have you ever encountered something like this?

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.

Fun fact:

A staggeringly-wise and ruggedly-cute Canvas Admin who has fixed this issue 80+ times can pick off the solution simply from seeing the words, “still in my 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:

End Dates help conclude courses and remove them from dashboards.

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.