10 Canvas LMS Time-Saving Features for Educators

If you’re an educator on the hunt for ways to save time and improve your workflows within the Canvas learning management system (LMS), look no further!

Innovation and pedagogy meet in Canvas, so you can maximize student potential while helping educators save time every day with essential LMS tools. Here’s a guide to 10 time-saving Canvas features that can save you hours each semester without costing you course quality.

1) Work smarter with AI-powered tools

IgniteAI brings efficiency to workflows faculty actually use right into the LMS: rubric creation, question authoring assistance, bulk updates, discussion insights, and so much more. Discussion summaries offer key points and questions from discussion threads to support large-scale course management. The option to translate Inbox messages and discussions into 100+ languages helps you reach students in their native language.

With Canvas, educators can also quickly and easily locate course materials using advanced AI and semantic algorithms. And when you want more, easily integrate with partner apps like Gemini and Pria within our ecosystem.

2) Simplify your quiz-building process

Collectively tackle assessment creation, sharing, and grading workflows that eat away at your time with features in New Quizzes. Item bank migration simplifies moving question banks from classic quizzes, and Canvas Commons enables the sharing of assessment materials across institutions or consortia. Additionally, new quizzes offer an exportable student analysis report, providing instructors with valuable data on student comprehension.

3) Collaborate with educators through Canvas Commons

Canvas Commons offers an unrivaled collaborative teacher community with users worldwide who share ideas, knowledge, and change management for the greater good of education. And when you’re eager to learn best practices or Canvas hacks from other educators, Canvas Community is another go-to for collaboration. The best part? These resources are open and available to all.

“Having access to the broad community of users and developers through the industry’s leader will turbocharge our efforts.”

– Michael Greene, Associate Director of Learning Technology Services and Strategy, Duke University

4) Make the most of built-in accessibility features

From the Accessibility Checker to the auto-captioning in the new media player that automatically generates captions for all media, Canvas LMS makes it easy to build accessible courses with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in focus. Built-in accessibility features save educators the time and effort of manually creating and uploading captions for video content, making their courses more accessible to a wider range of students.

5) Create and share rubrics 

Develop enhanced rubrics with drag-and-drop criteria that can be uploaded or downloaded in CSV format. This feature makes way for efficient creation and collaboration on rubric criteria, and easy alignment between rubrics and outcomes. For example, rubrics can be shared across courses, reducing the time required to spin up multiple courses with similar learning outcomes. You can also download rubric results directly from the Canvas gradebook, simplifying the review and analysis of student performance. 

6) Get more done with SpeedGrader

Grading within Canvas LMS has never been easier. First, there’s SpeedGrader, a tool educators can use to quickly evaluate individual and group assignments. Account-level default grading schemes allow you to set institution-wide grading schemes, eliminating the need for manual setup at lower levels. Another useful grading feature is Screen Capture with Audio. Requested by Canvas users, this feature allows you to provide learners with visual feedback on assignments by simply recording a screen capture with audio. The video can then be shared with students directly from SpeedGrader.   

“Canvas has been extraordinarily stable, easy to build upon, and it’s worked well for our needs."

– Erik J. Froelich, Associate Director, Platforms and Technologies, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

7) Communicate with Message Students Who

Foster strong student connections and save time? It’s possible! With faculty-friendly LMS features, educators can manage coursework, classwork, and student communications. With the Message Students Who feature, communication is easy.

Students and administrators can be included within the same message, and each recipient will receive it in their Canvas inbox, as well as a notification in the method they’ve previously selected. Plus, you can add attachments and media to make messages more accessible.

8) Use pre-built templates & Block Editor

Jumpstart course design using pre-built templates within the Block Editor that can be quickly previewed and then fully customized to fit your specific learning objectives. This feature lets users design visually appealing and engaging learning environments.

Course design is also easier with the Canvas Block Editor. No more designing pages from scratch. Without any coding knowledge, you can quickly create engaging learning environments, adding various elements like text, images, icons, and even embedded quiz questions through the knowledge check option. These features are currently in Beta and ready for you to try!

9) Create a consistent experience across your tools

Canvas LMS centralizes groundbreaking teacher-facing tools in a single hub, simplifying administrators' discovery, evaluation, and implementation of external resources. This hub provides secure use of certified tools, promotes safe edtech exploration, increases visibility into our partners, and makes data sharing permissions granted for specific tools easy to find. 

10) Avoid educator fatigue with Blueprint Courses

Imagine creating a course once and sharing it with other educators teaching the same course across a single campus or an entire system. That’s what a blueprint course is – a course that houses content you want to share with any number of associated courses. Updates to these courses can be pushed to individual courses or groups of courses, not only saving educators time but also fostering collaboration among instructors who want to build coursework together. Blueprint courses help produce a consistent student experience across multiple courses by standardizing content, policies, and course structure. 

By working collaboratively, we have overcome challenges and hurdles along the way that has made the Canvas product more robust and enabled us to provide a top-notch student experience.” 

– Renee Pfeifer-Luckett, Director, Teaching & Learning Technology, University of Wisconsin System

Put it into action

With an ever-expanding amount of teaching and learning tools and increasing time constraints, even a few of these hacks can save you time. Free up valuable hours for tasks you’re more passionate about, like giving individual students the support they need, or imagining up new and innovative teaching strategies.