Update on the Block Editor

[AllisonHowell]

I’m excited to provide an update on the much-anticipated new feature in Canvas: the Block Editor!

What's the Block Editor?

The Block Editor is a powerful new tool available to all Canvas LMS users at no additional cost. This new experience allows instructors, instructional designers, and other content creators to create well-designed, responsive content without relying on HTML, using a simple and familiar block interface. It will help educators deliver high-quality content to learners, resulting in a more consistent and engaging educational experience.

Our product vision for the Block Editor is straightforward: we want to streamline content creation for engaging courses, ensuring a consistent, high-quality learning experience for all.

Alpha Group Feedback

Throughout the development of the Block Editor, we’ve collaborated with institutions from around the globe and across various sectors. They participated in one-on-one interviews, completed surveys, reviewed designs, explored early iterations and prototypes, and provided written and video feedback. This partnership has helped us narrow down to the three most important goals we aim to achieve with the Block Editor:

• Save educators time by helping them build engaging courses without requiring HTML knowledge.
• Prevent educators from creating inaccessible content by defaulting to accessibility best practices.
• Equip administrators with the tools needed to ensure consistent, high-quality content across their institutions.

Our Approach

A common approach when developing new products and features is to focus on the outcomes for actual users, ensuring we stay aligned with our ultimate goal: a great user experience. For the Block Editor, we sought to define UX outcomes before building specific features. We asked:

• “If we successfully deliver a new content creation experience, how will we improve educators’ lives?”
• “If we successfully deliver a new content creation experience, how will we improve administrators’ lives?”

The ideas generated from these questions have informed the foundation of the Block Editor and guided us, alongside our Alpha group, in determining the features for our initial release. We’ve established that by delivering a great new content creation experience:  

• We'll improve educators’ lives by providing quick page templates designed by our in-house Content and Design Services team.
• We’ll improve instructional designers’ lives by offering the most commonly used interactive block types.
• We’ll improve administrators’ lives by ensuring content is responsive and more accessible.
• We’ll improve learners’ lives by helping educators create engaging learning experiences.

While this doesn’t cover every detail, it highlights our focus on three main areas: templating and layouts, common block types (such as tabs and buttons), and easy, responsive design for all screen sizes.

Below are a few screenshots to give you a sneak preview of what’s to come:

A visual of the main landing page for the Block Editor

When users select the Block Editor to create a new page, they’ll be prompted to create a blank page or choose from a variety of templates created by our Content and Design Services team.

A visual of the button toolbar options

Context-specific toolbars for different block types make it easy to make changes.

A visual of the preview function that shows desktop, tablet, and mobile views

Users will put content into responsive blocks and will be able to preview their content on different screen sizes.

Timeline and Enablement

We know that timing is crucial for your planning. Here is our current timeline:

• Closed Beta: From now until the end of November, we will be in a closed beta. We are keeping this phase closed as we are actively developing and working with institutions committed to testing changes as they are released.
• Open Beta: At the end of November (exact date TBD), we will move to open beta, allowing any institution interested to try the Block Editor in their beta instance.
• Feature Preview Release: We plan to go into production on January 18 as a Feature Preview, meaning we will remain in active development and continue iterating to create a comprehensive Canvas feature set. The Feature Preview will also be optional, allowing institutions to opt in as it meets their needs.

*Please note that if we uncover any significant issues during the beta, the production release date may shift.

What’s Next

I hope you’re as excited as I am about the opportunities presented by the Block Editor, and I cannot wait to see how it transforms your content-building experience in Canvas! In the short term, we’ll continue to iterate based on feedback from our closed beta group. After the release, we’ll focus on addressing less common use cases that are important for moving out of Feature Preview. While it’s too early to prioritize or finalize additional roadmap features, we are considering popular requests, such as institutional templates, custom blocks, institutional branding, and locking templates.

As we approach the launch date, I’ll share more details about how the Block Editor will function and let you see what it looks like for yourself!