Navigating Our First Fall with Canvas Together: Successes, Hiccups, and Moving Forward
Dear Faculty,
Welcome to the start of the Fall 2026 semester! We know that the beginning of any academic year brings a mix of excitement and anxiety, and going through a major technological transition only adds to the weight on your shoulders. Fall 2026 marks a major milestone for our campus, as it is the first semester in which the majority of our courses are delivered through Canvas.
We want to take a moment to express our deep appreciation for your patience and dedication as we navigate this transition together. To help keep you informed, we want to share a look at the growth we’ve achieved, acknowledge the hurdles we encountered, and review the familiar technical hurdles that always pop up this time of year.
The Growth and Wins We’ve Accomplished
Opening week gave us a fantastic sense of what our new platform can handle, and the scale of your hard work is truly impressive. Eight days into the semester, Canvas successfully supported 3,094 active courses, accommodating 216,534 student enrollments and 37,272 unique students.
Here are a few of the immediate improvements we’ve seen:
- Instant Access for Students: Canvas now receives event-driven updates directly from Banner. When a student registers or swaps a class, their enrollment updates immediately instead of waiting for an overnight batch process. This closes the gap we used to experience under Blackboard, meaning fewer confused emails from students wondering why they can’t see their course materials.
- Proactive Course Merging: Cross-listing is now heavily automated. In the first eight days alone, 477 courses were merged automatically before instructors even had to open them.
- Streamlined Grading: A new “Export Grades” item in the Canvas course menu now allows you to send midterm and final grades directly to Banner, turning an end-of-semester chore into a few simple clicks.
- New Integrations: We’ve expanded our toolkit with new LTI integrations like ALEKS, Enflux, ClassRanked, and Labflow, while upgrading tools like ExamSoft and iThenticate.
Navigating the Hiccups
Transitioning to a new system means adjusting to new logic, and we know that caused some friction.
Moving students into their courses is the most sensitive part of this integration, and while adding students in a timely manner worked as expected, peak enrollment volume revealed a technical hurdle. The Banner system, which is shared across all three University of Illinois campuses, was under heavy load during add/drop shifts, exposing a software bug that caused individual student drops to be missed in some courses. With nearly 20,000 enrollment drops at UIC alone over the last two weeks, LTS quickly responded by running custom enrollment audits to identify and reconcile those cases. We are continuing to monitor system performance closely and are actively working with Ellucian to resolve the underlying software defect.
Alongside enrollment syncs, the other primary pain point we heard in week one revolved around how sections are grouped.
Because Banner acts as our system of record, courses that are cross-listed in Banner arrive in Canvas already merged. Under our current integration, Banner-combined sections cannot be split apart. We know this disrupted plans for instructors who wished to group their sections differently. Our team has been actively fielding these requests, manually creating custom sections where possible. We recommend considering the Canvas Blueprint feature to help maintain consistent content across multiple sections or courses. However, it’s important to schedule an appointment with an LTS instructional designer to determine if this approach is the best fit for your needs. If you are planning customized groupings in the future, we highly recommend starting with your college’s instructional designer to ensure the merges behave as you expect
Familiar Start-of-Year Challenges
Every term opens with a predictable list of challenges, regardless of the platform. This semester was no exception:
- Course Visibility: We received familiar questions about why a course wasn’t visible. Usually, this resolves once the instructor of record is officially assigned in Banner or the course shell is published for students.
- User Access: Students who couldn’t access a course were almost always encountering an unpublished shell or had not yet activated their NetID. Similarly, adding teaching assistants or guest users requires them to have an active NetID before they can be added to the system.
- Classroom Media: We saw a steady share of routine requests for media support, including scheduling Echo360 lecture capture, provisioning Panopto folders, and setting up Zoom integrations.
- Browser Glitches: A surprising number of technical roadblocks—such as login loops, blank screens, missing submit buttons, or Panopto access errors—were traced back to browser security settings. Safari’s third-party cookie restrictions were a particularly frequent culprit.
Overall, our ticket numbers for August have decreased, which is a positive sign for what we can expect in the spring. We appreciate the patience of faculty who faced challenges at the beginning of this term, as we continue working on solutions that best meet our campus’s needs. We are truly grateful for your partnership as we strive to create a more connected and responsive digital learning environment.
Learning Technology Solutions