All Duke University and Duke Kunshan University (DKU) instructors have access to Canvas for their learning management system (LMS) needs.

Note: Prior to the university-wide transition, the Duke University School of Medicine and Duke's Fuqua School of Business had already established their own instances of Canvas and continue to use them.

About the Transition from Sakai to Canvas

After careful consideration and evaluation by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) – then Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education – and the Office of Information Technology (OIT), it was announced in December 2022 that Duke University and Duke Kunshan University would move from Sakai to the Canvas platform. The reasons for this change included a shrinking support community for Sakai (an open-source platform), decreasing external tools available to integrate to the platform, and an unsustainable increase on the capacity required of Duke to build new features for Sakai.

A project team of representatives from CTL and OIT was selected to investigate and propose a platform by December 2022. Observing that many universities had already moved to the Canvas platform – the largest LMS provider in higher education – the team began its evaluation by focusing on whether Canvas would meet Duke’s and DKU’s needs. The evaluation process included independent research, consultations with peers at other universities who had switched from Sakai to Canvas, meetings with representatives at Instructure (the company that owns and operates Canvas), and inviting input from various campus stakeholders, including a Functional Stakeholder group of volunteer faculty, staff and students. The team identified several features and functions of Canvas that would be valuable to the Duke and DKU community and determined that Canvas would serve Duke’s needs. See the timeline for details about the transition.

Sakai Materials Retained for Five Years

Though user access to Sakai was disabled on June 1, 2025, Canvas at Duke administrators are retaining Sakai records for a period of five years after the completion of the term a course took place in Sakai as dictated by university policy. Courses older than five years old will be permanently deleted by the vendor. Learn more and request content from old Sakai course sites here.

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Duke's Migration Tool Is Available for Use at Other Universities

During our transition from Sakai to Canvas, our team was not satisfied with the available commercial or open-source options in transferring data between platforms, so we built the LMS Data Transfer tool to migrate content from Sakai to our new Canvas environment. We are pleased to share this tool with other institutions transitioning from Sakai to Canvas at no cost.

Learn More

Getting Help with Canvas at Duke

In addition to the documentation and other materials available on this website, users who need help learning and using Canvas can get help in the following ways:

  1. Canvas provides a robust collection of up-to-date documentation for using Canvas through their Canvas Guides.
  2. Canvas Support is available 24/7, and a representative should connect with you within five minutes for phone and chat requests. To do so, while logged into Canvas, click “Help” in the bottom left corner of your navigation menu, click "Get Help with Canvas" at the top, and scroll to the bottom of the pop-up window. There you will see the options for getting direct support.
  3. A Duke-based Canvas Analyst is available to help via canvas@duke.edu and in 25-minute one-on-one virtual appointments. 
  4. If you have questions about teaching with Canvas – such as best practices for organizing your site for student success – contact the CTL at ctl@duke.edu or stop by the CTL’s open online office hours.

Changes to Canvas

The Canvas LMS is hosted and developed by Instructure, Inc. A team of administrators and consultants within the Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education (LILE) team administer and support Canvas locally for Duke University and Duke-Kunshan University (DKU) users. LILE administrators can make certain setting changes and adjustments to Canvas; however the main interface, feature availability and settings are controlled by Instructure. 

Instructure maintains a consistent release schedule for new features, bug fixes and other changes. LILE administrators will advertise major changes to users but many small tweaks to Canvas may not be advertised widely. As such, users interested in reading about all Canvas changes may do so on the Canvas Releases webpage.

Canvas Current Status

Historically Instructure has provided >99.99% uptime for the Canvas platform. In the event of a planned or unplanned downtime, Instructure will make a post on their Canvas status webpage. Duke & DKU users may review this status page if they encounter an issue accessing Canvas. Users may also reach Duke's Canvas administrators at canvas@duke.edu to report an issue with Canvas.