This page will highlight some of the Canvas updates that occur each semester.
Spring 2026
Canvas has updated the Rubrics interface to provide a more streamlined experience for instructors. These enhancements are designed to save you time and provide more flexibility in how you assess student work.
Key Benefits & Features:
- Intuitive Redesign: Enjoy a more user-friendly, full-page interface for building and editing rubrics.
- Easier Management: A new Rubrics index page allows you to search, sort, and filter your rubrics.
- Duplicate & Archive: On the Rubrics index page, quickly duplicate existing rubrics to make adjustments for new assignments, or archive old ones to keep your list organized without losing historical data.
- Flexible Formatting: Easily drag and drop to rearrange criteria and ratings. You can also switch between "Scale" (traditional) and "Written Feedback" (comments only) modes more fluidly.
- Improved Bulk Actions: The update includes better support for importing and exporting rubric assessments, simplifying data management in your course.
- Ability to Preview: Preview exactly how your rubric will look to students before you save or publish it.
How do I get started? The new interface is now active in all courses. For more details, view How do I manage rubrics in a course using Enhanced Rubrics?
Fall 2025
Differentiation Tags let instructors create hidden, custom sets of students inside a Canvas course, making it easy to target content or communication without changing sections or adding students to groups when they are not working together as a group.
- View the New Feature Launch: Canvas Differentiation Tags to learn more and access step-by-step guides.
Summer 2025
You can now create a signature that will be automatically added to your Canvas inbox messages and can set an auto-reply message for when you are out of the office.
- View Inbox Signature Block & Auto-Reply for more details.
Your Canvas Files page has been redesigned. Changes include the ability to bulk select files for more streamlined management.
- View the announcement of the change in the Canvas Community for more details.
New Analytics, which allows instructors and students to track data related to course grades, activity, and communication, has been renamed Course Analytics. This is the only update to this feature at this time.

