Canvas Insider

From the Admin side of the desk. Practical writing for Canvas LMS administrators and the people who manage them, published since 2022. This is the canonical archive; the publication continues at canvasinsider.blog.

Write Your Quiz in Word. Let Canvas Take It From There.

I got five bucks that says creating quizzes generates more support tickets than any other area of Canvas. Not because writing quiz questions is hard, composing them in Canvas’s native quiz tool is what’s hard. Click a question type, then a text box, then another text box, then select your correct answer, then wash-rinse-repeat forty more times for a Week 2 exam. Teachers already wrote the quiz in Word, where they write everything else, but Canvas makes them write it again, one click at a time. ...

When Canvas Goes Dark, Your .imscc File Is Worthless

On May 7, 2026, faculty and students across the country opened Canvas and got a ransom note from ShinyHunters, a cybercriminal extortion group, telling thousands of institutions to negotiate or watch their data get leaked. Canvas login pages at roughly 330 schools were defaced. The platform went into maintenance mode. Finals week for a lot of institutions were inaccessible. This was actually the second hit. Instructure had confirmed a breach on May 1, said it was contained by May 2, and by May 7 ShinyHunters was back on the login page explaining, in their words, that Instructure had “ignored us and did some ‘security patches’” instead of negotiating. The whole thing ended with Instructure paying the ransom on May 12 and receiving what the group described as “shred logs” – digital confirmation that the data was destroyed. ...

The Canvas Insider Grows Up

I started this blog in 2022 because I had information to share about Canvas and no place to say it. Back then COVID was on the decline, but Canvas LMS was everywhere. Accelerated adoption had outpaced what most schools were ready for, and support staff were mostly invisible. Faculty had questions about their courses. Departments had problems with outcomes and assessments of learning. And through no fault of anyone, knowledge and experiential skill about Canvas got pushed to the side. ...

Vibing With Gemini - Bulk Suspend Guest Accounts

Based on recent events, there may be questions posed about guest accounts in your Canvas LMS, and whether they should be suspended after a given time. Canvas Admins can pull a “Last User Access” report in their settings and sort oldest login date to newest. There also will be a column called “User ID” which is normally a unique seven-digit number in the user account’s URL. I wanted to see if I could bulk-suspend, not delete, guest accounts that haven’t signed into my Canvas instance in over six years. So I had a conversation with an AI agent. ...

Vibing with Gemini - Print and Export Quizzes

If you are using New Quizzes in Canvas, you’re familiar with the option to print your quiz with the answer key or print a blank quiz with no answers shown. If you are still using Classic quizzes, your printout may not be…nicely formatted. I recently had a conversation with AI, and was able to create a web “bookmarklet” that contains some javascript to print a Classic Quiz. Nicely formatted. This proof-of-concept video was done with a Mozilla Firefox. You might want to view this at full screen size to see the little content: ...

Vibing with Gemini - Popup Notification for specific assignment

For years I have supported my faculty clients in restoring balance to their course gradebook after discovering they edited the Roll Call Attendance assignment points from 100 to something else. Recently I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they got a popup recommendation when editing the Roll Call assignment’s settings page?” So I had a conversation with an AI agent and was able to accomplish this by appending my Canvas theme with some javascript and css. Proof of concept video for you here…might want to view this at fullscreen to see the small text as I go clicky-clicky around the browser window: ...

Vibing with Gemini - Convert DOCX to Canvas Quiz

Instructure recently sent notifications about upcoming changes to its login user interface. It had little impact to those at my university accessing our Canvas LMS, but there was one significant area that was affected. A software application I’ve used for years to convert properly-formatted Word .docx files into Canvas quizzes gave me error messages after I changed the “New Canvas Login UI” settings. Nerdy background info: I use a Mac Mini as my daily driver for work. The quiz conversion software I use is only made for Windows. For years I have relied on Parallels for macOS to let me use a Windows11 virtual machine solely for this software as a way to provide a service for my faculty clients. This week I discovered my software stopped working, and a faculty client needed a Word document converted to a quiz for later this week. ...

Can AI Do That? SpeedGrader Submission Previews

When a teacher can’t see their student essay submissions in SpeedGrader, can AI help troubleshoot the issue? I had a conversation with Instructure’s IgniteAI Agent to find out. Couple of things: 1 - I used Canvas Beta for this video recording which has IgniteAI Agent enabled. I don’t have any AI tools enabled in my university’s live “Production” Canvas environment. Yet. 2 - You might want to view this video on a large monitor full-screen to see the details. ...

Can AI Do That? ...maybe

In the educational technology timeline, the end of February 2026 will be remembered as the debut a new product named for a famous theoretical physicist. It will also be remembered for the week a large number of educators and edtech support personnel lost their collective minds. ...

Can AI Do That?

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. ...