Demo: Canvas for Vocational Education

Welcome to Canvas. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at how Canvas is built for vocational education, making training simpler, more collaborative, and smarter while ensuring compliance and recognising learner achievement through badging and credentialing. So let's take a look at some of our new features we're releasing using AI in 2026 to help support your institutions. The first tool is the auto grading tool. This is going to allow us to automatically grade submissions based off a rubric, which is going to assess the student's submission against each category, providing an initial score as well as a comment. And we can override these as a teacher using our own expertise.

This saves a lot of time as we're grading and gives us a starting point for our individualised feedback. But those rubrics can be quite lengthy to develop. Our second tool, the rubric generator, is going to allow us to create rubrics using those assignment descriptions. We can define the grade level as well as the number of criteria and ratings, and on top of that, generate additional insights to the tool around our outcome focuses, or we can ask the tool simply to be lenient for our students. Hitting generate is going to create this first pass of our rubric, and again always keeping the human in the loop as we as a teacher can apply our expertise to modify, change, and edit these submissions before we push them into our assessments and then use them in our auto grading.

This is an incredibly powerful way for us to build out these rubrics as a first pass. Again, make our edits as necessary, remove categories, and adjust our point scales before saving that criterion. The next tool we're gonna look at is around discussions. So discussions can be quite lengthy, especially in large courses where we have a multitude of students engaging at the same time. The first tool that we have created to support this is discussion summaries.

This is going to use AI to summarise what is occurring within our discussion boards, and we can custom prompt the tool to locate specific pieces of information that's important to us. Here I've asked if our students are struggling and it's let us know that based on the discussion it does not appear that any students are struggling, the overall tone is positive. This is a great summary from a teacher's perspective without having to read through a couple of hundred comments. But we can take this even further. Discussion insights is actually going to check to make sure that students are responding to the discussion topic that we set up earlier.

So Kevin Anderson, our demo student here, his reply directly addresses the topic by expressing interest in engaging children in outdoor activities. However, Marshall King, his reply is brief and lacks detail about the poster's background. This is flagging to us as a teacher that we might need to review Marshall's comment, and the tool is gonna facilitate us to both view what Marshall wrote, give him individualised feedback, and we can pop his reply up in context and respond to it, prompting Marshall to reengage with that specific discussion. On top of there, we can also utilise these tools for content generation. If we need to build out large amounts of quizzes, we can actually build quiz questions using AI from the front end UI.

We can either select a piece of content from our course, so an assessment page, etcetera, that we have existing. We can upload text directly that I've just copied previously, or we can upload a file, PDF, Word documents, etc. We can also set additional topic focuses if necessary and apply some additional rules around which learning outcomes we want aligned, the depth of knowledge if we're applying Bloom's taxonomy, and we can also set the number of questions and point values. Again, this is always going to keep the human in the loop. So once these questions are generated, as a teacher, we can come back into this flow.

We can modify them, change them up, change those point scores before we're happy with them to submit directly into our courses. So we can see our quiz question that was generated here. Simply hitting edit and review is going to allow me to make those modifications before I submit and insert this directly into my quiz. Very powerful. Canvas makes learning collaborative.

Learners can share ideas and perspectives through discussions, while peer reviews can foster critical feedback and reflection, a key skill for workplace learning. Students can fill out a rubric similar to an instructor based off another student's answers, and these could be set up as anonymous grade posting to automate this process for you entirely. These features bring together students and trainers in a dynamic, engaging learning environment. And with the Canvas mobile app, collaboration continues on the go, allowing learners to participate in discussions, comments, and stay connected from anywhere. We all know compliance isn't negotiable in vocational training.

It underpins funding, standards, and quality assurance. With Canvas, you're always audit ready. Every action from submission to assessor feedback is automatically tracked and reportable. The Ask Your Data feature makes it easy to query insights like showing me all learners' outcomes, pulling results from a single student across multiple courses, It makes it really easy for us to compile the information we need, convert these into the charts that we want to see, such as our student names and our outcome scores, and then saving this into a centralised dashboard to repeat and replicate this function as well as share it to other users within the system. We can also find students in need of attention, identifying students in the platform who might be at risk of failing their courses, locating them, and intervening in one panel.

We can find those students, message them using Canvas inboxes with a series of variables, and send them a message centrally across multiple courses at the same time. All of this data is logged and recorded, so we can also check the history of our changes. So things like the mark book and our individual pages, we can review history of what changes were applied by who, and we can use this for our audit trails as well. In the VET sector, evidence of workplace competency is everything. Canvas makes that process seamless.

Learners can capture photos, videos, or documents straight from the workplace and upload them directly into their courses. Accessors validate the evidence in platform, link it to specific units or outcomes, ensuring traceability and alignment to outcomes and mastery of skill sets. These mastery elements will then be compiled for your teaching staff, showcasing students who achieved mastery, scoring above or below specific mastery thresholds, and identifying students at risk of not proving mastery in specific areas. This functionality extends to our mobile applications where students can submit audio recordings, camera recordings, and upload files from their library or their files repository directly into the application from their mobile devices. Achievement deserves recognition and Canvas brings that to life through digital badging and micro credentialing.

As a learner progresses, badges can be automatically issued for milestones or completions, and these badges can be shared externally to the market, downloaded to a user's personal profile, or put up on their social media. These badges can also align to wider pathways of completion, showing our users how the completion of multiple courses or components of courses leads to wider macro qualifications in their area or field. These recognitions build learner motivation while allowing our assessors to automate this process through the automatic issuing of badges based off certain components of our course completions, whether that's module assessments or individual completions of courses. And we can gamify these elements, setting up leaderboards for our students to compete with each other to earn the most badges and potentially content that might not be mandatory completion. With Canvas, RTOs can deliver quality, compliant training with confidence, powered by AI backed with audit ready data and designed to recognise every learner's growth and achievements. It's one connected platform that makes teaching, assessing, and evidence based learning simpler for everyone involved.