We'd like to announce that we've started publishing new guide layouts for Canvas Release Notes (Instructor and Student) in your environment:
- OOTB | Release of April 18th, 2026: Instructor
- OOTB | Release of April 18th, 2026: Student
The first layout is available for the April 18th Canvas release, with more layouts coming along the way. These layouts follow the same approach as our Impact campaign templates and are designed as history messages displayed on the dashboard page, helping you easily communicate release updates to your users. Each message includes a hyperlink to the full release notes, allowing users to click through directly to the detailed information for that release.
Additionally, if you’d like to measure guide performance and tool adoption, you can enhance your guides with tracking features after creating the guides from the layout:
- To track tool adoption you can add relevant features directly to your guide
- To evaluate the effectiveness of a guide you can:
- Set up a dashboard with guide metrics, including widgets for the corresponding feature adoption, or
- Navigate to the Guide Metrics area within the guide and add features there
We recommend using features that align with the specific Canvas release updates, so you can better measure how users are engaging with the newly introduced functionality. The following tags related to the release are recently published:
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: View all grades link
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Add new to do button
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: to do filter
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Save customized changes button
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Announcement read filter
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Show all grades toggle
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Date filter
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Hide grade on course card
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Switch to old dashboard button
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Course filter
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Dashboard tab
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Gradebook link
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Courses tab
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Submission status filter
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: Switch to new dashboard button
- Widgets for Dashboard | Dashboard page: People widget: Message button
- Portfolio dashboard: Enhanced Canvas Portfolio page
- Speedgrader page: Auto-evaluate button
- Speedgrader page: Reset auto-evaluation button
- Speedgrader page: Submit rubric assessment button
- Accessibility report page
We are also continuously working to keep up with new Canvas features, and we’ll keep updating the available feature set to reflect the latest product functionality—so you can consistently track adoption and impact over time.
We hope these layouts make it easier to keep your users informed and engaged with the latest updates.As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to share-we'd love to hear from you!
