Your Canvas Experience is About to Get an Upgrade: What's Coming to Canvas in 2026

Submitted by Maureen Walters on

As we look ahead to 2026, we, in Instructional Technologies, are getting ready to roll out some great new features in Canvas that will make your teaching life easier and give you some new ways to approach your classroom. If you've ever felt frustrated with rubric limitations, wished that Turnitin could do just a little more, or wanted to get a better overall sense of conversations on discussion forums quickly get ready for some exciting news!

Enhanced Rubrics: The Upgrade We've Been Waiting For

Remember the frustration of creating detailed rubrics only to find they don't quite work the way you need them to? Or having a really awesome rubric but you have to constantly click and scroll around to use it in Speedgrader? Canvas Enhanced Rubrics is here to change that, and it's going to be ready for everyone starting in the spring semester!

What Makes Enhanced Rubrics So Exciting?

  • Drag-and-drop functionality lets you reorder criteria and ratings more easily. 
  • Customizable ordering allows you to choose between "low to high" or "high to low" arrangements.
  • Dude, where’s my rubric? View exactly where each rubric is used across your Canvas classes.
  • Save rubrics as drafts and complete them when you're ready.
  • Sharing is caring. Import and export rubrics via CSV to manage them across multiple courses or use the new "Copy To" feature to share rubrics between courses with just a few clicks.
  • Enhanced interface with vertical, horizontal, and traditional views. Perfect for grading on tablets or smaller screens…or just grading in general.
  • Comment boxes are now directly below each criterion (no more extra clicks!).
  • Student self-assessment now empowers students to evaluate their own work using your rubrics.
  • Existing rubrics transfer. Great news: No migration needed! Your existing rubrics automatically update to the new interface. Everything you've built stays intact while gaining all the new bells and whistles.

You can read more about Enhanced Rubrics at How do I manage rubrics in a course using Enhanced Rubrics?

Turnitin: Old Tool, New Look  

Turnitin has launched the next generation of Turnitin Feedback Studio, a new redesign of the platform based on feedback the company received from educators. This update should help you as you assess students’ work and deliver feedback.The new Feedback Studio consolidates all assessment tools into a single, intuitive workspace. Educators can now access the enhanced Similarity Report, AI writing detection, and grading tools from one location, so you won’t have to bounce between multiple screens anymore. The redesign of the platform introduces some new features that will aid in getting feedback quicker to students.

What Makes the Turnitin Update So Exciting?

  • Improved Similarity Report: New match categories and enhanced color coding make it easier to identify potential integrity issues. You can view AI writing scores directly in the submission alongside Similarity scores instead of it being two separate pages that you would have to go between. 
  • Advanced Feedback Options: In-margin comments feedback directly alongside student work, while pinned feedback helps you to focus the student on the most important guidance.  
  • AI Detection Capabilities: The new feedback studio integrates better features for detecting AI. It identifies likely AI-generated content and includes AI bypasser detection, which recognizes text that may have been modified using humanizer tools. The AI writing report provides detailed breakdowns of both AI-generated content and AI-paraphrased text, giving you a better picture of how AI might have been used in a text. 

You can read more about these updates in the Turnitin Educator Guide- Understanding the Next Generation of Turnitin Feedback Studio or look over information that you can provide to your students about Turnitin Student Guide- Understanding the Next Generation of Turnitin Feedback Studio. 

IgniteAI Discussion Forum Summaries: Stay Connected to Your Students' Conversations  

Have you been interested in dipping your feet into AI but are overwhelmed or not sure? Now you have a chance to look and see how AI can be used in Canvas to help you with looking at the big picture or specifics within your discussion forums. Canvas has now started rolling out Ignite AI, Canvas’ artificial intelligence assistant, designed to help instructors work more efficiently while maintaining the quality of student engagement. One of its features is the ability to generate summaries of discussion forum threads, giving you insights into how your students are interacting on the forums and the ability to focus in on bigger themes showing up. So how does it work?  

Ignite AI's discussion summary feature analyzes entire forum threads and generates comprehensive overviews that picks out: 

  • Main themes and topics discussed by students 
  • Key points and arguments presented throughout the conversation 
  • Areas of consensus and disagreement among participants 
  • Notable insights or perspectives that emerged from the discussion. This gives you the big picture at a glance so you can decide where to take the conversation.  

What Makes IgniteAI Discussion Summaries So Exciting? 

  • Quick Weekly Check-ins. Start your week by reviewing AI-generated summaries of ongoing discussions. This allows you to identify which threads need your attention most urgently and where students might be struggling with concepts. 
  • Identifying Learning Gaps by using Summaries to reveal patterns in student understanding or misunderstanding. If multiple students are struggling with the same concept, you can now spot and can address it proactively through announcements or providing resources. 
  • Facilitating Deeper Conversations since you’ll have a clear overview of what's already been discussed, you can craft more meaningful follow-up questions that push your prompt further or introducing new perspectives that students haven't considered. 

Using AI Summaries can be helpful to you, but don’t forget that it will work best when it is used thoughtfully. AI summaries are good for overview and being aware of things emerging in the discussions, but important discussions still benefit from your direct reading and personal touch and verifying key points. Students can tell when an instructor is genuinely engaged, so use summaries to engage more strategically, not to disengage entirely. The key is finding the right balance with using AI as a powerful assistant while maintaining the value of your expertise and presence in your class. 

You can read a little more about using the Discussion Summary at Feature Preview Overview: Discussion Summaries. 

What’s New in New Quizzes   

Although New Quizzes aren’t necessarily “new” to us (we started the process of converting to New Quizzes this past spring), there are new features that are being released as Canvas works on making New Quizzes easier to use and providing all the things that instructors want to use. One of these is surveys. If you have been using surveys in Classic Quizzes, they will be available in New Quizzes for your spring classes. This will allow you to get a quick poll, provide an exit assignment in a synchronous or traditional class setting, or just give students a few extra points by responding. You can find out more about using surveys at Surveys are coming to New Quizzes!  

If you aren’t familiar with New Quizzes or have been a little hesitant about making the shift, please be sure that you check out all of the resources (including webinars) about this transition from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes: New Quizzes Transition.  

The current plan is for everyone to transition fully to New Quizzes by May 26th, 2026; however, we are planning on extending the deadline. More to come on this in the new year, so watch for this information. In the meantime, you will want to start transitioning your quizzes, but we are here to support you throughout this process if you need help. 

Lightboard: Here to Light Up Your Classes 

In case you missed the grand opening celebration in September, we wanted to remind you that the Lightboard Studio on main campus is available for you! To see a demonstration of the Lightboard, be sure that you watch the video at the top of this blog post. This is the kind of tool that can be useful for anyone who might want to make an announcement video, short lecture, or just to jazz up some current content in your course.  

You can find out more about the Lightboard Studio including some more examples and the sign-up form at Lightboard Studio, or feel free to stop by office 219 in building 9 during business hours to check it out and get a tour! 

On the Horizon: Other Exciting Features Coming in 2026 

While all of the tools and products covered in the first part of this post will be available to you right away in spring semester, we do have a few other things to get excited for that will be coming later in spring 2026.  

Khanmigo: This is a dashboard full of tools and possibilities that will be available within Canvas. You can start reading more about it at AI-Teaching Assistant Khanmigo  Now Available in Canvas: Trusted AI to Streamline Prep Right Inside Your LMS  Khanmigo has also put out a video specifically showing how this tool might be useful to instructors in higher education in Video Overview  Look for this to be available soon!  

FunDAI: Instructional Technologies will soon relaunch Fundamentals of Digital Accessibility for Instructors  (FunDAI), updated for Canvas and Office 365. If you're unfamiliar with this workshop, it is a two-week, self-paced online training designed to help you build the fundamental skills to begin creating content that is usable by all, whether you’re creating that content in Word, PowerPoint, or Canvas. Upon completion, you will have the knowledge to begin creating online materials that are accessible to all learners and compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. If you have done FunDAI in the past, this is still a great chance to see what’s new with accessibility and review and update the information you learned in the past. We encourage everyone to sign up when we announce it is ready.  

Online Courses Review Checklist and Webinars: We hope that you have been joining us for the first part of the series in fall semester, but it is never too late to jump in! This series of webinars has been going through the different parts of the Online Course Review Checklist and you can view any of them that you missed (and still receive credit!) by viewing them at Canvas Special Topics (on-demand webinars) You’ll see the recordings for parts 1 through 4, along with many other useful videos. We’ll be wrapping up this series in spring with the focus on Assessment and Feedback in February, Technology and Tools in March, and Course Design and Accessibility in April. Look also for more detailed information about the Online Course Review Checklist in Instructor Resources in Canvas soon! 

The new year is shaping up to be an exciting one for Canvas! Some great updates are ready for you to dive into right away, and even more features and opportunities will roll out as the year goes on. Keep an eye out; you’ll have plenty of new tools to explore that we hope make teaching and learning easier and more engaging. We can’t wait for you to try them! 

Have questions about these new features? Interested in learning more? Seen a tool that you would like to see used? Contact us at canvashelp@durhamtech.edu