For educators, tracking student progress isn't just about final grades—it's about understanding exactly which skills and standards a student has mastered. That is where the Learning Mastery Gradebook (LMGB) comes in, offering a dedicated view to monitor outcome-based learning.
Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of the enhanced Learning Mastery Gradebook, releasing on July 18th to all users after a successful Early Adopter Program! Over the past several months, educators participating in the program provided meaningful feedback that helped shape this final experience. Their input ensures these enhancements support the real-world ways instructors use outcomes data to guide daily instruction.
For institutions using Canvas Outcomes, understanding why students are or are not achieving mastery can be just as important as seeing the mastery score itself. While the Learning Mastery Gradebook has long provided visibility into outcome performance, instructors have asked for more context, deeper insights, and easier ways to act on the data they see.
The enhanced Learning Mastery Gradebook addresses those needs by transforming outcomes reporting into a more actionable instructional tool. With clearer visualizations, greater transparency into mastery calculations, and new ways to investigate learner performance, instructors can more easily identify learning gaps, understand what drives student mastery, and take targeted action to support learner success.
Below are a few of the updates that we’re excited to launch.
Understand what drives mastery
New Contributing Scores functionality allows instructors to drill into individual outcomes and see the assignments, assessments, and scores that contribute to a learner's mastery result. This added transparency makes it easier to identify why students are or are not meeting expectations.
Investigate performance more deeply
Expanded drill-down views provide additional context around outcome performance, helping instructors identify trends, investigate outlier results, and better understand student progress over time. For instance, the example below highlights how easily you can pinpoint specific gaps for a single student on an assignment. Here, you can quickly see that they struggled with Outcome 1.5: Web Design Fundamentals, marking their lowest score at 1.7, while the accompanying trend line instantly shows whether this is an isolated slip or a pattern that requires targeted intervention.
Understand performance at a glance
New accessible bar chart visualizations make it easier to interpret mastery distributions across outcomes and assignments, helping instructors quickly identify class-wide trends and areas that may require additional support.
Take action directly from outcome insights
The enhanced Learning Mastery Gradebook makes it easier to move from insight to intervention. Instructors can use Message Students Who and differentiation tags directly from outcome performance data to communicate with learners and support targeted instructional strategies.
Build confidence in mastery calculations
Instructors can view the calculation methods used to determine mastery scores, including approaches such as decaying average and highest score, providing greater transparency into how outcome results are generated.
What to Expect and Looking Ahead
We’ve also streamlined how this feature is deployed. Following general availability, these enhancements will be automatically enforced and enabled for all accounts that currently use the Learning Mastery Gradebook feature flag, manageable at the root account, sub-account, or course level.
And while general availability is a milestone, it’s not the end of the road. We’re already evaluating what’s next for Canvas Outcomes, including the refinement of advanced filtering tools, based directly on the workflows you've shared with us. If you haven't enabled the Learning Mastery Gradebook yet, now is the perfect time to enable it in your course and start shaping the future of your assessment workflows.
To everyone who’s tested, shared feedback, or pushed us to think differently - thank you. You’ve helped us build something better together, and we’re excited to keep improving.
