Release Update - January 2026

Course Central is a major upgrade to the faculty dashboard and the first step in expanding Insights into a complete hub for course review, coordinator workflows, and faculty reflection. This release introduces a new Course Coordinator role, structured reflection workflows, course review cycles, enhanced data collection options, and expanded user-management tools — all designed to make assessment more reliable, transparent, and collaborative.

New Course Coordinator Role & User Setup Enhancements

Course Central introduces a dedicated Course Coordinator role to redistribute workload and support structured course review.
Key updates include:

• New permissions for Assessment and Program Coordinators to manage faculty, coordinators, and course assignments.
• Improved user setup with filtering by role and department, plus a streamlined modal for editing roles, subjects, and newly added Coordinated Courses settings.
• Course Coordinators can be assigned to courses they teach, and Program Coordinators can modify users and courses within their subject scope.

These updates make managing large faculty teams and multi-department review cycles smoother and more transparent.

Reflection Templates

Reflection Templates bring structure and clarity to faculty reflections, ensuring more consistent inputs during course review.
Key features include:

• Assessment and Program Coordinators can create templates with a name, active duration, and department associations.
• Departments can be assigned one template at a time, preventing overlapping or conflicting templates.
• Templates include multiple sections with prompts and optional rich-text instructions.
• Reflection templates cascade by logic: course-level template → department template → untemplated reflection.

This helps faculty provide more meaningful reflections and makes review cycles more actionable.

Course Review Cycles

Course Review Cycles define when reviews start and how long each cycle lasts. Program and Assessment Coordinators can now:

• Configure cycles from the Course Central page (formerly the Outcomes page) via a new “Manage Course Review Cycles” button.
• Assign cycles to multiple courses at once using familiar filtering tools.
• Attach reflection templates to a cycle to standardize faculty reflections within that period.
• Activate review cycles so Course Coordinators see their assigned courses directly on their dashboards.

Only active cycles allow course review actions, keeping activity aligned with institutional timelines.

Faculty Score Upload

Faculty now have a new way to contribute scores directly to Insights via CSV upload.
Now faculty can:

• Select outcomes and mapping scales, choose an assignment name, and download a section-specific template.
• Upload scores for each student/outcome combination in bulk.
• Rely on Insights to auto-calculate mastery and percentages.
• Receive validation prompts for incorrect scores.

Uploaded results are stored with the appropriate metadata for accuracy and longitudinal tracking.

Harvest Scores at End of Term (Finalization Workflow)

Insights now supports score finalization, offering faculty and coordinators a clear, reliable way to “lock in” assessment data at a chosen moment in time. The workflow also gives faculty a clear sense of when their part of the process is complete.
Users can choose to finalize results using:

• A Canvas assignment,
• Learning Mastery Gradebook (LMG) calculated results, or
• Uploaded files from the new score-upload workflow.

Finalized scores remain stable even if Canvas calculation methods or assessment data change later, providing consistency for longitudinal reports and curriculum maps.

If Learning Mastery Gradebook is selected, users will be asked to choose a rounding rule – Round Half Up or Round Down –to align with mastery expectations. This is necessary because mastery may only be achieved (or not) at integral values along the rating scale. Insights recommends that Round Half Up be applied for measuring Course Performance, where the benefit of the doubt is given to mastery having been achieved at least once by a student for an outcome. For Student benchmarks, Round Down applies a more rigorous criteria for mastery.

Reflections & Actions in Course Review

Course Coordinators can now compile, revise, and summarize faculty reflections and actions within the Course Review workflow.
New features include:

• Filters by term and author for easier navigation.
• Ability to pull individual reflections and actions into an editor window for revisions.
• A rich-text area for Course Coordinators to write a summary.
• Validation preventing multiple actions of the same action type.

Drafts can be saved and revised until the coordinator is ready to publish.

Publish Course Review

Once reflections, actions, and results are ready, Course Coordinators can publish a complete course review.

Key features include:

• Reviews can be Saved as Draft or Published.
• Drafts appear in the Course Reviews Status page for continued editing.
• Published reviews appear in a dedicated “Published Course Reviews” section.
• Each published review generates a public URL for easy sharing with stakeholders.

Publishing finalizes the review — no changes can be made afterward.

What’s Coming Next

We’ve scheduled six Lunch & Learn sessions in January 2026 to review these new features in depth with customers. If you did not receive an invitation, please reach out to your CSM.

Read our Knowledge Base articles with tips and step-by-step instructions how to use these new features:

• New Course Coordinator Role & User Setup Enhancements
• Reflection Templates
• Course Review Cycles
• Faculty Score Upload
• Harvest Scores at End of Term (Finalization Workflow)
• Reflections & Actions in Course Review
• Publish Course Review

In the next major phase, Course Central will expand to include:

• Course evaluation
• Round-trip integrations with Coursedog and CourseLeaf,
  furthering our mission to connect Canvas with your broader academic toolkit.