K-12 and higher ed institutions invest heavily in Canvas, but creating high-quality courses takes time, and the student experience can vary significantly from one course to the next. Instructional designers have limited capacity. Faculty have limited time. And building engaging, accessible, well-structured courses can require technical skills many users don’t have.
The result?
By making course design faster and easier, Cidi Labs DesignPLUS helps you move beyond one-off course improvements by turning effective Canvas course design practices into faster, repeatable workflows. Instructional designers can support more courses, faculty can create better learning experiences, and institutions can scale quality and consistency across Canvas.
Canvas is the foundation. DesignPLUS helps you get more from it by making high-quality course design faster, easier to scale, and more sustainable.
The value extends across the institution:
Save Time
Build, transform, and update Canvas content faster with tools that reduce repetitive setup, formatting, and clicking.
Using the Canvas API, the Multi-Tool creates all patterned module elements in one step, helping your teams move from blank courses to fully structured ones in minutes instead of hours. Many instructional designers describe first using the Multi-Tool as the moment they stopped building courses the hard way.
“The [DesignPLUS] Multi-Tool is such an amazing timesaver for creating course content in Canvas. It saves hours of tedious clicking and can make updates in seconds.”
The ROI of DesignPLUS isn’t limited to one course or one designer. Across your institution, time saved on everyday course-building tasks can add up across hundreds of instructors and thousands of courses. DesignPLUS:
“Cidi Labs helps our small team perform like a bigger one by allowing us to complete complex design tasks in a shorter amount of time.”
Great individual Canvas courses are valuable. A repeatable approach to quality can have institution-wide impact. DesignPLUS helps:
“The tool set is invaluable in allowing my team to scale and meet our demand.”
Canvas courses are built around content, but learning doesn’t happen through consumption alone.
DesignPLUS helps instructors move beyond pages of static content by creating structured, accessible, and interactive learning experiences directly within Canvas. Institutions can:
Interactive Exercises are included with DesignPLUS. No separate student-facing tool or additional license is required.
“Cidi Labs makes our Canvas pages so much cleaner and easier to navigate, saving time and mental space for all of our educators!”
ROI:
Time savings | Efficiency | Quality at scale
ROI:
Faster development | Consistency | Faculty adoption
ROI:
Quality at scale | Ease of use | Sustainability
ROI:
Student engagement | Affordability | Accessibility
ROI:
Time savings | Adoption | Ease of use
The ROI of DesignPLUS isn’t just about how much time it saves today. It’s also about avoiding the maintenance, rework, and technical debt that create more work tomorrow.
Maintainable by Design
DesignPLUS helps your institution build Canvas course experiences that remain easier to manage and improve over time.
Cidi Labs maintains the underlying code as Canvas evolves, so you can focus on teaching, learning, and improving the student experience.
Proven Experience. Faster Results.
DesignPLUS is built on more than a decade of real-world experience solving course design challenges in Canvas. Instead of starting from scratch or relying on trial and error, institutions can put proven approaches to work from the start.
The result: faster progress, less risk, and a more sustainable path to high-quality Canvas courses.
Citations:
1 Kahlow & Sarraj, 2025
2 Scutelnicu et al., 2019
3 Mootispaw, 2022
4 Hunn & Hughes, 2014
Description