Rethinking the Learner Experience on Mobile: New Dashboard is available
For students, the Canvas mobile app is often where they quickly check in with their learning. Whether they are commuting or standing in line, they’re usually trying to answer two questions: what needs attention right now, and how are they doing?
While those needs are the same on web and mobile, the way students approach them is different. On mobile, interactions are shorter, more frequent, requesting and more focused. The Customizable Learner Dashboard reflects that shift and is now available on both iOS and Android. This update represents a major step toward our broader commitment to delivering personalized, intuitive, and simplified day-to-day workflows for every learner. By evolving the dashboard into a high-utility "command center," we are ensuring students spend less time navigating and more time learning.
A dashboard built for quick check-ins
This update shifts the dashboard from a static landing page to something students can act on more easily.
Personalized Command Center: To create a more welcoming and human-centered workspace, students can now meet a personalized greeting through Hello widget, Customize dashboard colors, and reorder or toggle visibility to match their unique workflow.
High-Visibility Performance Insights: To eliminate the need for navigating through multiple screens, a more concise Course widget prioritizes current grades, new announcement alerts, and direct group messaging links so urgent info is visible immediately.
Streamlined Time Management: To help students master their schedules, a Weekly Summary provides dedicated tabs for missing work and upcoming deadlines, while a Daily To-Do acts as a checkpoint manager for all pending or completed assignments, institutional events, and personal tasks.
Rolling it out with confidence
Introducing a new interface requires confidence that it will work well in practice. During our pilot with over 3,300 users, students confirmed the experience is stable, high-quality, and reliable for daily use.
In our Early Adopter Program, 96.4% of students who tried the new dashboard chose to keep it enabled as their default view.
Students can switch back to the current dashboard at any time, making it easy to explore the new experience, supporting a seamless transition at their pace.
On mobile, the new dashboard is available to any user with a "Student" role in at least one course. If a user also holds Teacher or TA roles, the experience remains accessible but is specifically optimized to prioritize their student-facing workflows.
Admins can enable the new dashboard as a Feature Option at the root account level, and choose a rollout timing that fits their academic calendar. We are rolling out April 18th as a feature option to all users after a successful Early Adopter Program together with the web view.
Easy to Test and Toggle: This new experience is entirely flexible and is enabled by default on mobile once the feature flag is turned on.
While the web version remains an opt-in experience, our mobile data showed such high retention that we chose a default-on approach to deliver immediate value, while keeping the "switch back" toggle instantly accessible in Dashboard Settings. If a learner decides to return to the classic layout, the app will safely save their customized layout preferences for whenever they return.
We encourage you to explore the new dashboard and see how it will support your learners. We are incredibly open to your thoughts, so please share your feedback with us!
Happy exploring, Your Canvas Team
