What’s changing?
Canvas is the original open LMS, purpose-built from the start with openness and flexibility at its core. The new Canvas Apps experience makes this even more of a reality. Canvas Apps streamlines the entire process of discovering, vetting, managing, and monitoring integrated apps.
Why?
On average, there are 50+ LTI apps installed per Canvas account and 30+ million LTI app launches occur daily via the LMS. That’s a lot to manage! Not only do admins need to find the most up to date tools using modern authentication methods and vet them to ensure the privacy, security, and accessibility learners require, but also they need to analyze usage to ensure they are only investing in tools which instructors and learners actually use. We wanted to simplify this experience and save admins time by putting all of the relevant information in one easy-to-find location within Canvas.
What to expect?
Canvas Apps is available to root account admins with the permission for “LTI Registrations - manage.” The educator and subaccount administrator experiences have not changed. The Canvas Apps experience can be accessed directly from account navigation, and can be easily navigated via 3 pages, described in detail below.
Discover
The Canvas Apps Discover page is your new hub for app discovery and simple installation. This feature allows administrators to view all of the apps in our ecosystem - especially LTI 1.3 apps!
We also provide a simple way for app providers to share their accessibility documentation, terms of service, and privacy policies. For LTI 1.3 apps which have provided us with configuration information, there will also be a simple click-through installation process to reduce copying and pasting between Canvas and the app provider.
Administrators will also find some Apps which have earned the Canvas Certified Integration Badge. These apps have been reviewed by Instructure’s Developer Relations team for their use of integration best practices as related to LTI 1.3 compliance, user experience, and transparency around data privacy and accessibility information.
Manage
The Manage page is the home of all LTI 1.3 app configurations. This page will ultimately replace the LTI keys on the Developer Keys page, but both will work in tandem for now to ensure a smooth transition. This page has improved responsiveness and searchability compared to the Developer Keys page.
Our admin participants indicated that data around who installed and updated an app, and when, is often critical in their troubleshooting and app management processes. As such, we have begun tracking that information and making it available. Additionally we added the concept of an app “nickname” for administrators so that if you have the same app configured multiple times for different purposes, it’s easy to distinguish between them.
We are looking forward to continuing to expand in this area, with our next major milestone being to provide centralized root administrator control over which subaccounts and courses should be able to use a given app.
Monitor
One of the pain points that we heard over and over from our admins was that getting data about LTI app usage was extremely difficult and time consuming. Administrators have said that this data helps them to ensure that they’re investing in the right apps which educators and students actually use.
To address this, we have created the Monitor page. The Monitor page provides information about total launches and unique users of the most commonly used LTI apps, as well as usage broken out by subaccount and course level. This information can easily be exported to share with a wider audience as needed.
A note for Impact customers: If you have Impact, you will have advanced functionality to help you drive effective usage and adoption across your organization. At the moment this includes: a quick view of champions and the ability to launch campaigns to selected users based on the data. The next milestones under development now for the Monitor tab include: ability to view and analyze 100% of LTI apps through custom grouping, low usage alerts, and saved filtering criteria.
What’s next?
We want to give a HUGE thank you to the almost 100 institutions and 120 users who participated in this co-creation process. Their insights and time were invaluable in making this release the best it can be. We’re looking forward to continuing to build out this area in collaboration with our users. If you are a Canvas Root Admin who is passionate about Canvas Apps and all things LTI, please let us know to be considered for future early adopter programs! We will continue to provide updates as new features become available.
The Discover page will ultimately replace Edu App Center, but we do not have a deprecation date for it yet. We are exploring additional features which may be required before determining that timeline, such as managing teachers’ app access options.
In the meantime, we encourage you to explore these exciting new features! Should you encounter any bugs, please report them via Canvas Support. For feature suggestions, we invite you to submit them to the user group. You may also review the current features' documentation if you have any questions about how to use the available functionality.
