Canvas LMS connector

Use your Canvas LMS data for reporting, automation and AI.

Data Panda brings your Canvas LMS courses, enrollments, assignments and grades into the same warehouse as your student information system, finance and CRM data. From one place we turn it into dashboards, automations, AI workflows and custom apps that programme directors, registrars and student-success teams use during the term, not only at the end of it.

About Canvas LMS

The learning management system behind half of North American higher ed.

Canvas is the learning management system built by Instructure, founded in 2008 by Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley while they were graduate students at Brigham Young University. Canvas itself launched in 2011 and grew into the dominant LMS at the top of the higher-ed market: Instructure reports more than thirty million users worldwide, fifty percent of North American college and university students on the platform, and every Ivy League institution using it. Instructure is headquartered in Salt Lake City, with offices in London and Quezon City. The company went private with Thoma Bravo in 2020, listed on the NYSE in 2021 under ticker INST, and was taken private again by KKR in 2024.

The platform centres on a few familiar object types: accounts and sub-accounts at the top, then courses, sections, enrollments, users, assignments, submissions, grades, modules, pages, files, discussions, quizzes, rubrics and outcomes underneath. Around that core sit Canvas Catalog for course discovery, Canvas Studio for video, Canvas Credentials for badging, Mastery Connect for K-12 assessment, and Parchment for verified credentials, all acquired or built into the same family. Canvas exposes a REST API and supports LTI 1.3 for the long tail of plugged-in tools, and Instructure ships Canvas Data 2 (the Data Access Platform) for raw, table-level exports of the institutional dataset. Pulled into a warehouse next to the SIS, the CRM and the finance system, that data finally answers questions that span teaching, recruitment, retention and finance without three reports that disagree on the enrolled-student number.

What your Canvas LMS data is for

What you get once Canvas LMS is connected.

Teaching and learning reporting

Enrollments, engagement, gradebook drift and learning outcomes on one page across every programme and term.

Course engagement and login frequency per cohort and programme
At-risk early-warning on missed submissions and grade slippage
Outcome attainment per rubric, course and qualification framework

Process automation

Turn Canvas events into the downstream work the rest of the institution expects, without a manual handoff.

Push final grades from the Canvas gradebook into the SIS of record
Trigger a study-coach outreach when a student misses two consecutive submissions
Sync new enrollments with the library, IT helpdesk and CRM the day they start

AI workflows

Put coursework, submissions, gradebook history and discussion data behind AI that sees the whole learner journey, not one course at a time.

At-risk scoring on submission patterns, login decay and prior-term grades
Natural-language Q&A across course content, assignments and rubrics
Cohort-level summaries of which modules are dragging completion down

Custom apps on your data

Lightweight tools on Canvas data for programme directors and student-success staff who should not need a Canvas admin seat to read their own cohort.

Programme-director cockpit with engagement, grade distribution and drop signals
Study-coach worklist of students slipping behind their cohort this week
Outcome-attainment view per qualification, used by accreditation prep teams

Use cases

Use cases we deliver with Canvas LMS data.

A list of concrete reports, automations and AI features we have built on Canvas LMS data. Pick the one that matches your situation.

Course engagement per cohortLogins, page views and submission frequency per course, cohort and programme.

At-risk early-warningStudents missing submissions or showing grade slippage, flagged before mid-term.

Gradebook drift across sectionsGrade distribution per section and instructor, with outliers surfaced for the chair.

Outcome attainment per rubricLearning outcome results per rubric, course and qualification framework.

Submission timelinessOn-time, late and missing submissions per assignment, course and student cohort.

Discussion participationDiscussion posts and replies per student, used as a soft engagement signal.

Quiz item analysisItem-level quiz performance and distractor analysis per course and term.

Course-design quality scanModule completeness, page coverage and rubric alignment across the catalogue.

Drop and withdrawal patternsEnrollment changes during add/drop and through the term, joined to SIS demographics.

LTI tool usageWhich third-party LTI tools courses lean on, and which sit unused on the licence.

Accreditation evidence packOutcome-attainment, syllabus and assessment artefacts pulled per programme for accreditation cycles.

Instructor workload viewSections taught, enrolment counts and grading volume per instructor and term.

Real business questions

Answers you will finally get.

Which programmes are losing students between week three and the drop deadline?

Enrollment movement during the add/drop window and through the term, joined to SIS demographics, prior GPA and Canvas engagement signals like login decay and missed submissions. The dean of students sees which programme lost twelve percent of its first-years and which course inside it carried the heaviest drop, before the next term's intake plan is locked.

Are grade distributions consistent across sections of the same course?

Mean, median and pass-rate per section of the same course code, by instructor and term. The chair of the department sees which section gives B's to the work other sections grade C's on, and can have the conversation with concrete numbers before the cohort hits the next gateway course.

Which learning outcomes are we attaining at the qualification level?

Outcome attainment rolled up from rubric scores in Canvas to the qualification framework the accreditor reads, per programme and graduating cohort. The accreditation lead sees which outcomes carry the evidence and which need a course revision before the next site visit.

Value for everyone in the organisation

Where each function gets value.

For finance leaders

Tuition revenue per programme tied to live enrolment and pass-rate trends, not last term's snapshot. The CFO sees which programmes are funding which, where the drop curve is hitting tuition, and which cost lines (instructional FTE, room block, LTI licences) are running ahead of plan in the same view.

For sales leaders

Recruitment and admissions teams see prospect-to-applicant-to-enrolled-to-active conversion in one funnel, with the Canvas signal of week-three engagement appended. Yield campaigns target the prospects who log in once the term starts, not the ones who registered and never engaged.

For operations

Registrar, IT and student-success staff work from the same enrolment, course and engagement record. The provost's office sees which sections are oversubscribed, which LTI tools the catalogue uses, and where the at-risk worklist for advisors is, on one page rather than five Canvas reports.

Ideas

What you can automate with Canvas LMS.

Pair with Salesforce

Tie admissions pipeline to live Canvas engagement

New enrollments, course access and week-three engagement signals from Canvas flow back to the Salesforce Education Cloud record of each prospect-turned-student. Recruitment and student-success teams see which admitted students never logged in, which logged in once, and which are already submitting on time, so retention outreach starts the week the issue shows up rather than after the first transcript drop.

Pair with HubSpot

Sync Canvas course completion with HubSpot for non-degree programmes

For continuing-ed, professional certificates and corporate training run on Canvas, completion and grade events flow to the HubSpot CRM record of each learner. Marketing and account managers see which alumni finished which programme and which left at the halfway mark, so renewal and upsell campaigns reach the right segment instead of the whole list.

Pair with Slack

Alert advisors in Slack when a student crosses an at-risk threshold

When a student misses two consecutive submissions, drops below a configured grade threshold, or stops logging in for a defined window, the assigned advisor gets a Slack message with the cohort, course and the last-known engagement timestamp. Outreach happens the same day instead of three weeks later when the mid-term report runs.

Pair with monday.com

Run accreditation prep on a monday.com board fed by Canvas

Outcome attainment, syllabus artefacts and assessment evidence pulled from Canvas land on a monday.com board structured per programme and per accreditation criterion. The accreditation lead sees which evidence is gathered, which is missing and who owns the gap, instead of chasing screenshots and exports the week before the visit.

Pair with HiBob

Match HiBob employee learning to Canvas course completion

For organisations using Canvas for internal training, completion and certification events from Canvas flow back to the employee record in HiBob. People ops sees which mandatory courses each cohort finished, which certifications expire next quarter, and which managers carry the most overdue completions, without rebuilding a tracker spreadsheet.

Pair with Exact Online

Reconcile training revenue in Exact Online with Canvas enrolments

For training providers and corporate academies invoicing through Exact Online, paid enrolments and course completion in Canvas line up with sales invoices and revenue recognition per cohort and programme. Finance sees the gap between billed seats and active learners, and the deferred-revenue release follows the cohorts that started rather than the contracts that were signed.

Your existing tools

Your data lands in a warehouse. Your BI tools read from it.

You keep the reporting tool you already have. We connect it to the warehouse where your Canvas LMS data lives.

Power BI Microsoft

Fabric Microsoft

Snowflake Data warehouse

BigQuery Google

Tableau Visualisation

Excel Sheets & pivots

Three steps

From Canvas LMS to answers in three steps.

Connect securely

OAuth authentication. Read-only by default. We sign a DPA and your admin keeps the keys.

Land in your warehouse

Data flows into your warehouse on your schedule. Near real time or nightly, your call. You own the data.

Reporting, automation, AI

We build the first dashboard, workflow or AI feature with you, then hand over the keys. Or we stay on for ongoing delivery.

Two ways to work with us

Pick the track that fits how you work.

Track 01

Self-serve

We set up the foundation. Your team builds on top.

Canvas LMS connector configured and running
Warehouse set up in your cloud account
Clean access for your Power BI, Fabric or Tableau team
Documentation on what's in the data model
Sync monitoring so you're warned before reports break

Best fit Teams that already have a BI analyst or data engineer and want to own the build.

Track 02

Done for you

We build the whole thing, end to end.

Everything in Self-serve
Dashboards built to the questions your team actually asks
Automations between your systems
AI workflows scoped to real tasks your team runs
Custom apps where a dashboard does not cut it
Ongoing delivery at a pace that fits your team

Best fit Teams without in-house BI or dev capacity. You tell us what you need and we deliver it.

Before you book

Frequently asked questions.

Who owns the data?

You do. It lands in your warehouse, on your cloud account. We don't resell or aggregate it. If you stop working with us, the warehouse stays yours and keeps running.

How fresh is the data?

Near real time for most operational systems. For heavier sources we schedule hourly or nightly. You pick based on what the reports need.

Do I need a warehouse already?

No. If you don't have one, we help you pick one and set it up as part of the first delivery. Common starting points are Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, or a small Postgres start.

Does the connector use the Canvas REST API or Canvas Data 2?

Both, depending on the use. Canvas Data 2 (the Data Access Platform, also called DAP) is the supported path for full table-level exports of the institutional dataset, in CSV, JSON, JSONL or Parquet, and is the right backbone for warehouse-grade reporting. The Canvas REST API covers per-resource reads and writes that operate on a single course or user record, useful for triggers and back-pushes. We typically combine both: DAP for the warehouse landing, REST for the operational handoffs.

Which Canvas tables and namespaces does the connector typically land?

On the Canvas Data 2 side, the connector lands the canvas namespace tables that drive most reporting: courses, sections, enrollments, users, assignments, submissions, scores, modules, pages, files, discussion topics, quizzes, quiz submissions, rubrics and outcomes. The canvas_logs namespace, with web_logs, can be added when you need page-level engagement signals beyond the rolled-up activity counts.

What about the LTI tools plugged into Canvas?

Canvas supports LTI 1.3 and the Instructure ecosystem includes more than a thousand external tools, from Turnitin to Zoom to publisher courseware. The connector reads which LTI tools are installed and which courses use them, so you can see the spread of third-party tools across the catalogue and which licences are sitting unused. Per-tool usage data from each LTI vendor itself is a separate connector, on the vendor's own API.

GDPR-compliant

Data stays in the EU

You own the warehouse

A first deliverable live in four to six weeks.

We review your Canvas LMS setup and the systems around it. Together we pick the first thing worth building.

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