Turning Learning Evidence into Institutional Improvement

How Canvas and Insights by eLumen Help Institutions Measure What Matters By eLumen

Higher education is facing a growing demand for evidence. Students and families want to know that their investment is leading to meaningful learning and career readiness. Institutional leaders need confidence that academic programs are delivering on their promises. Stakeholders increasingly expect institutions to demonstrate that evidence of student learning is being used to inform decisions and drive improvement. 

At the same time, faculty are being asked to do more than ever. New technologies, changing student expectations, enrollment pressures, and evolving accountability requirements have stretched resources across campuses nationwide. 

Against this backdrop, many institutions are asking important questions: How can we gather meaningful evidence of student learning without creating more work? And how can that evidence help our students and institution? 

The answers may already be sitting inside the learning management system. 

Every day, students submit assignments, complete projects, demonstrate competencies, engage in discussions, and receive feedback in Canvas. Together, these activities create a rich body of evidence about what students know, what they can do, and where they may need additional support. 

The challenge isn't a lack of evidence. It's connecting that evidence to program and institutional improvement. 

When Learning Data Stays in the Classroom 

Most colleges and universities have invested significant time and effort into assessment initiatives. Competencies have been defined. Alignments have been drawn to standards and workforce development. Curricula have been mapped. Assessment plans have been created. Yet many institutions still struggle to bridge the gap between classroom activity and institutional decision-making. 

Faculty often evaluate student work within individual courses, while program reviews and institutional assessment processes occur elsewhere. As a result, valuable evidence of student learning can become fragmented across systems, departments, and reporting processes. This disconnect creates challenges for everyone involved. 

Faculty may perceive assessment as a separate administrative activity rather than an extension of teaching and learning. Coordinators spend valuable time collecting information from multiple sources. Institutional leaders may wait months, or even years, to gain a complete picture of student achievement across programs. 

Most importantly, opportunities for improvement can be harder to identify and act upon. The institutions making the greatest progress today are finding ways to bring learning evidence and institutional improvement closer together. 

Better Together: Connecting Canvas to Institutional Effectiveness 

Assessment is most effective when it happens where learning happens. That's why more institutions are looking for ways to extend the value of their Canvas investment beyond course delivery and grading. 

Canvas serves as the central hub for teaching, learning, feedback, and student engagement. It captures authentic evidence of student achievement through assignments, rubrics, outcomes, discussions, projects, portfolios, and other learning activities. 

When that evidence can flow directly into institutional assessment and curriculum management processes, institutions gain a more complete understanding of student learning without requiring faculty to duplicate their work. Together, Canvas and Insights by eLumen create a connected ecosystem that transforms daily classroom activity into actionable institutional intelligence. 

Faculty continue working in the environment they know and use every day. Meanwhile, assessment leaders, department chairs, and deans gain visibility into curriculum effectiveness, program performance, and continuous improvement efforts. 

The result is a more sustainable approach to assessment—one that supports institutional effectiveness while keeping student learning at the center. 

The Future Is Evidence-Based 

The higher education landscape continues to evolve, and institutions are watching closely as conversations about accountability, accreditation, and educational quality continue to develop. 

While the long-term impact of ongoing policy discussions remains uncertain, one trend is becoming increasingly clear: institutions are expected to demonstrate student outcomes with evidence. Assessment has always involved documentation, but today's standards place growing emphasis on evidence of student learning, continuous improvement, and institutional effectiveness. 

Increasingly, institutions are being expected to answer questions such as: 

• How do you know students are learning the competencies they need to be successful? 
• Do those competencies align with today’s demands in the workforce? 
• Is our curriculum coherent and driving student outcomes? 
• What evidence supports those conclusions? 
• What actions were taken based on findings? 
• How did those actions improve learning or program quality or graduation rates? 

At their core, these are questions about evidence. Answering them requires more than producing reports every few years. It requires ongoing visibility into student achievement, stronger connections between assessment findings and decision-making, and assessment processes that can be sustained over time. 

In other words, institutions need systems that help them move beyond compliance and toward continuous improvement. 

Measuring What Matters

Some of the most important learning experiences in higher education are also the most difficult to assess. Consider a student teacher completing a classroom placement. A nursing student participating in clinical experiences. An engineering student presenting a capstone project. An art student compiling a portfolio. A business student delivering a team-based consulting project. 

These experiences often provide the richest evidence of student learning because they require students to apply knowledge in authentic settings. Yet evaluating this work consistently across programs, departments, and institutions can be challenging. 

Many institutions rely on external or juried assessment processes that involve multiple reviewers evaluating student work against established criteria. These approaches provide a more comprehensive view of learning but can become difficult to manage at scale,especially when they occur outside the LMS. 

As institutions place greater emphasis on authentic assessment and demonstration of competencies, the ability to collect, organize, evaluate, and analyze complex evidence becomes increasingly important. 

To support these efforts, Insights by eLumen is introducing a significant expansion of its juried assessment capabilities this summer, including the ability to route evidence to groups of raters, manage evidence produced outside of Canvas, and sample evidence based on specific selection criteria. 

These enhancements help institutions evaluate complex student work more efficiently while maintaining consistency and rigor. 

For Canvas institutions seeking to assess portfolios, capstones, clinical experiences, performances, and other forms of authentic learning, these capabilities create one of the most comprehensive juried assessment environments available while maintaining a direct connection to learning outcomes and student evidence. 

Reducing Burden Without Sacrificing Quality 

One of the greatest barriers to effective assessment is not a lack of commitment. It's a lack of time. Faculty care deeply about student learning, but what they often lack is capacity for additional administrative work. And many institutions do not have the resources to hire more administrators to help with that work. 

When assessment requires duplicate data entry, disconnected systems, or manual reporting processes, faculty participation becomes more difficult to sustain, and administrators spend time chasing down data. 

This summer's release introduces several enhancements to Insights by eLumen designed to support coordinators throughout long-term assessment activities such as course reviews, program reviews, and accreditation efforts. 

New capabilities include: 

• Set due dates for measures, findings, and recommendations so people assigned know when they are due 
• Ability to send reminders for upcoming and overdue assessment activities so staff and faculty know when to engage
• Enhanced guidance and instructions within assessment plans to help participants engage meaningfully 
• Participation tracking that allows coordinators to see where activities are in progress in assessment plans 
• Ability for coordinators to bulk finalize results for faculty who were not part of an assessment plan or who did not finalize their scores, so assessment activities remain on schedule 
• Better support for course copy to prevent duplicate outcomes in sections 
• Generate professional looking reports and increased ways to selecting and presenting data in assessment plan results 

Individually, these may seem like small workflow improvements. Collectively, they help institutions create a more structured and sustainable assessment process—one that supports faculty participation while reducing administrative overhead. 

Building Visibility Across the Assessment Process 

Assessment often involves dozens—or even hundreds—of contributors working across departments, programs, and campuses. Without clear visibility into progress, coordinators can spend significant time tracking status updates, following up with participants, and gathering information needed for reports and reviews. 

A sustainable assessment culture requires transparency. Faculty need clarity about expectations and deadlines. Coordinators need insight into what has been completed and what still requires attention. Leaders need confidence that assessment activities are producing meaningful results. 

To support these goals, the latest Insights by eLumen enhancements provide expanded tracking and reporting capabilities, including status monitoring within assessment plans, visibility into changes over time, participation reporting, course review progress tracking, and more flexible options for analyzing and presenting results. 

These improvements help institutions spend less time managing processes and more time interpreting findings and acting on what they learn. 

Turning Evidence Into Action 

Collecting evidence is only the beginning. The true value of assessment lies in how institutions use that evidence to improve learning. When assessment data is connected to curriculum review, program improvement, and institutional decision-making, it becomes a powerful tool for change. 

Faculty can identify areas where students may need additional support. Departments can evaluate curriculum alignment. Academic leaders can better understand strengths and opportunities across programs. Institutions can demonstrate accountability while continuously improving the student experience. 

This is where the partnership between Canvas and Insights by eLumen creates meaningful value. Canvas captures the evidence. Insights eLumen helps institutions organize, analyze, and act on it. Together, they help colleges and universities move beyond collecting data and toward using that data to support student success. 

See What's Next at InstructureCon 

As expectations for accountability, accreditation, and student success continue to evolve, institutions need assessment approaches that are both rigorous and sustainable. 

By connecting learning evidence generated in Canvas with institution-wide assessment and continuous improvement processes, Canvas and Insights by eLumen help institutions measure what matters, reduce administrative burden, and focus on the ultimate goal: improving student learning. 

If you'll be attending InstructureCon, stop by the eLumen booth to learn more about these new capabilities in Insights by eLumen and see how institutions are using Canvas and Insights by eLumen together to strengthen assessment, accreditation, and curriculum management. 

You can also join our August webinar, Beyond Compliance: Building Sustainable Assessment, where we'll demonstrate these new evidence-management enhancements and discuss strategies for creating more effective, evidence-driven assessment practices. 

Register here. 

Or reach out to us at insights@elumenconnect.com to schedule a personalized demonstration.