Reclaim Your Time: 10 Time-Saving Features Every Canvas LMS Educator Should Know

If you’re an educator on the hunt for ways to optimize your workflows within the Canvas learning management system (LMS), look no further. Your LMS is packed with tools designed to help you streamline tasks, save valuable time, and support what truly matters: your students. Here’s a guide to 10 time-saving features that can save you hours each semester without costing you course quality.

1) Work Smarter with AI-Powered Tools

Streamline your day-to-day workflows with AI features deeply embedded within Canvas to improve upon functionality you’re already familiar with. Discussion summaries offer key points and questions from discussion threads to assist with large 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 locate course materials simply and quickly 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 the process of moving question banks from classic quizzes, and Canvas Commons enables sharing of assessment materials across institutions or consortiums. 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 serves as a one-stop shop for educators around the world to find and share resources. This learning object repository is where your best ideas can be freely shared. And when you’re eager to learn best practices or Canvas hacks from other educators, the 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) Leverage 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. Built-in accessibility features save educators the time and effort required to manually create and upload captions for video content, making their courses more accessible to a wider range of students.
 

5) Create and Share Rubrics with Ease 

Develop enhanced rubrics with drag and drop criterion that can be uploaded or downloaded in CSV format. This feature not only allows for efficient creation and collaboration on rubric criteria, but also makes it easier to align rubrics to outcomes. For example, rubrics can be shared across different courses, reducing the time it takes to spin up multiple courses with similar learning outcomes. You can also download rubric results directly from the Canvas gradebook, simplifying the process of reviewing and analyzing 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 evaluate individual student assignments and group assignments quickly. 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 Seamlessly with Message Students Who

Finding time to message students about progress on classwork can be a challenge for busy educators and administrators. With the Message Students Who feature, communicating and collaborating is seamless. 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 recordings for more accessible messages.
 

8) Take Advantage of 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 enables users to 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 the installation and management of LTI tools within a single hub, simplifying the process for administrators to discover, evaluate, and implement 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 one time and being able to share it with other educators teaching the same course across one 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 in these courses can be pushed to individual courses or groups of courses, not only saving educators time but also fostering collaboration among instructors wanting 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 tools for teaching and learning, and increasing constraints on your time, leveraging even a few of these hacks can save you time. Free up valuable hours for tasks you’re more passionate about, like personalized student support and innovative teaching strategies.