We’re excited to unveil our Canvas Collaborative Roadmap, which summarizes our team’s priorities for improving Canvas in response to your needs. Together, these improvements are designed to reduce friction in the workflows educators rely on most, from course setup and content creation to grading, feedback, and learner engagement, while helping organizations deliver meaningful learning experiences across both academic and professional learning environments.
Over the past quarter, we’ve collaborated closely with educators, administrators, and institutional leaders through interviews, surveys, advisory councils, community conversations, and early adopter programs. These conversations help us understand where workflows break down and where new capabilities can make the biggest difference. The priorities in this roadmap reflect the themes we heard most consistently from customers.
Your feedback has shaped the roadmap
We’ve had the privilege of connecting with you, our customers, in a variety of ways over the last few months. Our roadmap reflects what we’ve heard, and the insights you’ve shared have directly informed and sharpened our current priorities.
Here’s some of what you told us:
Visibility into learner progress must be clearer. You shared that they need centralized dashboards that surface performance alerts, accommodations, and course activity so you can quickly identify where intervention is needed across multiple sections.
Course creation workflows still require too much manual effort. Updating due dates, managing course rollovers, and organizing materials remain some of the most time-consuming tasks for instructors. Customers want guided workflows, often supported by AI that streamline setup and reduce administrative overhead.
Flexibility in evaluation and assessment is essential. Different disciplines and learning models require adaptable grading and evaluation tools that support a variety of pedagogical approaches.
Accessibility requires both visibility and action. Teams need dashboards that clearly show accessibility status across courses, along with the ability to track unresolved issues, identify high-need areas, and export reports for institutional compliance.
The experience must feel more connected and personal. From dashboards to communication workflows, users want Canvas and Canvas Career to surface the most relevant information quickly and make it easier to navigate daily tasks.
Early adopter programs reinforced these insights. When testing capabilities like customizable learner dashboards, AI-assisted grading in SpeedGrader, and course accessibility tools, institutions consistently told us:
- Learners want control over their experience, including the ability to enable new dashboard experiences when they’re ready.
- Task-focused dashboards help learners prioritize assignments, deadlines, and grades more effectively.
- AI delivers the most value when it supports existing workflows—such as assisting with grading—while maintaining instructor control.
Conversations with advisory groups and user communities across regions, including the NORAM and EMEA Canvas Career Product Council and Higher Education communities in the Nordic, Dutch, and Spanish regions reinforced these themes and helped validate our roadmap priorities.
Outcomes we’re driving toward
Our roadmap reflects all of what we’ve been hearing and boils down to three outcomes for Canvas and three outcomes for Canvas Career.
Canvas Outcomes
1: Personalized, intuitive, and simplified day-to-day workflows
Making the improvements to everyday teaching and learning experiences that customers need means making it easier for instructors to focus on meaningful engagement, and for learners to navigate their academic journey with clarity and confidence.
What we’re focused on:
- Introducing customizable dashboards for learners and educators.
- Delivering a modern content experience that clearly shows what’s done and what’s next.
- Simplifying educator tasks through course creation flows to remove friction and streamline setup and readiness for teaching and learning.
- Turning cohorts, programs, and attributes into actionable, visible groups across Canvas with Institutional tags.
- Introducing mobile dashboard improvements that help on-the-go learners quickly identify assignments, deadlines, and priorities.
2: Elevated content creation and quality
We’re making it easier for educators to design engaging, accessible, and high-quality learning experiences by improving content creation tools and embedding accessibility and AI-assisted support directly into course design workflows.
What we’re focused on:
- Helping educators build more accessible courses by introducing course-level accessibility checks that identify issues and guide remediation across content
- Improving how video is used in learning by adding richer media experiences such as interactive transcripts and improved video navigation (Canvas and Studio)
- Fulfilling our promise to provide more flexible, accessible, and consistent block-based content authoring experience
3: Versatility of learning evaluation
We’re expanding the flexibility of assessment and grading so educators can evaluate learning in ways that align with the different teaching approaches they’re using today, while driving efficiency across the workflow.
What we’re focused on:
- Saving time and reducing manual management with automatic peer review assignments
- Providing feedback and scores on open-ended assignments directly within SpeedGrader
- Giving educators more flexibility in how they evaluate student work by expanding rubric capabilities
- Designing AI-guided conversations that help students explore concepts, practice critical thinking, and demonstrate learning
Canvas Career Outcomes
1: People-first architecture powered by skills
Many modern LMSes are not built for skills-based learning use cases, and organizations feel they are rigid and course-centric. We are building around people and their roles, skills, and adaptability.
What we’re focused on:
- Ensuring instructors can grade consistently while saving significant assessment setup time
- Reducing manual overhead for administrators and ensuring a more responsive LMS environment
2: Engaging learner experience
Learners today are consumers with high expectations, which means they can easily become apathetic or unengaged if not provided with the right type of learning. We are making learning feel modern, relevant, and worth learners’ time.
What we’re focused on:
- Helping learners discover relevant courses and content from curated collections of content
- Encouraging learners to discuss course content with each other and their instructors in a shared workspace to facilitate conversations in real time
- Providing content creators with improved creative control and AI-assisted workflows for a consistent learning experience
3: Connected ecosystem
Many learning platforms don’t play well with other essential tools, contributing to a disconnected tech ecosystem. We are building to fit into your existing tech stack and make sure both internal and external connections are seamless.
What we’re focused on:
- Enabling administrators to surface relevant organizational data to ensure the most important insights are always front and center.
Where to dive in next
We’re grateful for the insight you’ve shared to help shape the current roadmap. We hope you’ll continue partnering with us as we work to support your district even more effectively. Get involved today by voting and commenting on roadmap ideas on the Canvas Collaborative Roadmap that would have the greatest impact in your organization.
