Improving the Student Experience: Key Findings from the Student Modules Early Adopter Program

[ZoeLubitz1]

We are happy to share the findings from our recent “Course Progression for Modules” Early Adopter Program (EAP). At Canvas, we believe that the best products are built collaboratively, and the feedback gathered from our community has been invaluable as we move toward releasing an improved Modules experience for students. A huge thank you to everyone who participated in this critical process!

The objective of this EAP was to test a new, modernized approach to the Modules page. In 2025, we have focused on enhancing the end-to-end learner experience in Canvas by modernizing content organization to be more streamlined. The existing Modules page is one of the most visited pages in Canvas, but hasn’t been updated recently. Students and teachers alike have let us know they have issues with slow load times for larger courses and dislike scrolling too much to find what they need. There have also been consistent requests for progress tracking so it’s easier to see where you are in the context of your course material. We redesigned the Modules page to solve these core problems. The EAP was an amazing opportunity to get the new page in front of real students, but there is still work to do. Our findings revealed a core tension: the difficulty in balancing a modern aesthetic and faster performance with the need for “at-a-glance” information provided by the previous version of the Modules page.

Current Modules Page

New Modules Page

EAP Participation: A Foundation of Feedback

The response to the Student Modules EAP was strong, demonstrating our community’s commitment to shaping the future of Canvas.

• 79 institutions signed up for the program.
• The feature flag for the new Modules page was enabled across 112 courses.
• We received over 200 survey responses.

What We Heard

Room for Improvement in Efficiency and Navigation

Some students seemed to have reservations about the new design. The top usability complaint centered on what we are calling "Too Many Clicks." Students voiced a strong desire to see all module items simultaneously. The new design attempted to optimize the page for larger courses, where we had heard complaints about “too much scrolling.” The new design fell short and instead, introduced a new inefficiency. 

What Students Liked

Students newer to Canvas generally offered neutral or positive feedback. These students found the new layout to be clean and organized. New users found the system easy to follow and well-organized. Some participants, even those who were initially hesitant, noted that there might simply be an adjustment period required for acclimation.

Next Steps: Incorporating Your Feedback

We have listened carefully to the feedback, especially regarding efficiency and navigation, and we are planning immediate next steps to address these concerns. We are now exploring solutions like offering a more compact view to see more content at once and adding a new navigation menu to help everyone find specific content more easily. We will also reconsider behaviors like collapsing/expanding all content and pagination, which resulted in more clicks during the EAP.

We have already begun to implement small changes based on feedback from the EAP. For those courses that continue to use the new modules page, you will see these updates roll out incrementally soon.

Looking Ahead

We are currently working to partner with a few institutions to dive deeper into remaining open questions, such as how progress bars were perceived and what specific aesthetic changes could win over those who were frustrated with the new page design.

We are excited to take all this comprehensive feedback and incorporate it into our next steps. Canvas customers can expect that we will release an improved version of the Modules page for students early next year, reflecting the essential insights gathered from the Early Adopter Program.

Thank you again to all participants for helping us make the student experience in Canvas better!

[NickChevalierUT]

This is an interesting one, and I have the perspective of both an active student and a Canvas admin with experience in LMS admin and course design. The difficult part about redesigning what's essentially the core of the Canvas student experience is that each course is different, and each instructor (in theory) designs their courses differently from the next. (To be clear, neither I nor my institution were involved in this EAP.)

Was any data collected from this EAP in terms of how the courses were designed? I'd be interested to see how the student experience might differ with the new Modules page in a course where the instructor designed their course more on the conservative side (combining text pages and videos onto a single page within a module, for example, instead of having the content spread across three separate module pages, which might then trigger the pagination or "too much scrolling") versus a course where the instructor loads up their modules with a ton of items. At that point, is the design of the modules UI the problem, or is it the design of the course content itself that's getting in the students' way?

It sounds like A/B testing might lead to more fruitful data, but I understand that's hard to capture in a live course environment.

[dkpst5]

I'm very glad to hear the feedback was clear that 'everything loading at once on one page' is seen as a feature and not something to design around. So I'll repeat it:

Any modules redesign that doesn't load everything all at once in a single page is doing it wrong. The screenshot of the test showing pagination gave me shivers for just how bad an experience it would be.

And this is following on the heels of the Files page redesign that also added pagination (and a really low number per page at that) as a major part of its regression in functionality. And that is still not resolved -- it's still only showing 25 things per page; faculty I work with almost unanimously prefer the old page to the new one. It's not just familiarity: It's functionality.

Thank you for sharing your findings. I am glad to hear that the feedback seems to be sending you back to the drawing board.

[notmichaeljfox]

It is quite surprising that you did not consider the effects that pagination would have on teaching and learning. I would politely suggest that you reconsider internal processes to ensure that errors like that are not made again.

Kudos on admitting it though. 

[hesspe]

Here is a design idea for pagination taken from the Panopto interface:

It would be less straightforward to implement with modules since individual modules differ in length, but it does empower the user to determine what sort of experience they will have.

Apropos of the previous comment about the new Files interface, I much prefer the new interface and don't find pagination to be a problem.  Any disadvantage that pagination introduced is more than mitigated for me by the ability to search and sort.  For modules, regardless of the ultimate decision about pagination, I think adding a word search to the interface would also be a nice enhancement (and Boolean search would be even better, but of course that's too much to hope for).

[dkpst5]

I get so many support request for Panopto because of that pagination. Allowing an per-user change on it helps, but it isn't really helpful when that change doesn't persist, and when the default is too low.

[dkpst5]

Unrelated to pagination: Was the course navigation menu intentionally hidden for the EAP test screenshot of modules, or was that the default behavior of that tested design?