Cadence

For instructors who teach in a room

Your LMS is a filing cabinet. Your classroom runs on a clock.

Canvas is where the course lives — syllabus, submissions, grades. But at 9:05 on a Tuesday you don't need a content tree. You need to know what happens in the next 75 minutes, who's behind, and what you're putting on screen first.

Connect your Canvas coursesSee the approach

Cadence reads your real Canvas courses and enrollments. Canvas stays the system of record — Cadence never writes grades back.

The shape of the problem

An LMS is a content management system with a gradebook bolted on

That is not an insult — it is the job it was built for, and it does it well. But look at when those two things happen. Publishing content is before class. Scoring submissions is after class. The seventy-five minutes in between is the part you were actually hired to do, and it is the part no LMS models at all.

What the LMS optimizes for

  • Publishing content students read on their own time
  • Collecting submissions and attaching a score
  • Institutional records, audit trails, and compliance
  • Asynchronous, self-paced, any-time-any-where study

What a live class needs

  • What happens in this session, in what order, for how long
  • What goes on screen next — and the note you wrote yourself about it
  • Whether the room actually understood the last idea, right now
  • Who is behind before they fail, not after the gradebook says so

So instructors improvise. The real lesson plan lives in a Word document. The agenda lives on an index card. Attendance lives in a spreadsheet. The check-for-understanding lives in raised hands you cannot record. None of it is in the system that supposedly runs the course.

The buried primitive

The calendar matters most and sits deepest

For an in-person course the calendar is the course. When do we meet, which room, what day is the test, when does the guest speaker come, what happens after the break. In an LMS the calendar is a secondary view — somewhere between an afterthought and completely buried — and it does not show your schedule. It shows due dates that happen to hang off content objects.

Finding when the midterm is
  1. 01Dashboard
  2. 02Course — OPMT 301
  3. 03Modules
  4. 04Week 6 — Inventory
  5. 05Assignment — Midterm Exam

Due Oct 14, 11:59 PM

Five clicks deep, and 11:59 PM is not a class time. It is a submission deadline wearing a schedule's clothes. The exam is at 9:05 in Schulze 401, and the LMS never asked.

Cadence, on open

Mon

13

9:05

Lecture

Tue

14

9:05

Midterm

Wed

15

Thu

16

9:05

Lecture

Fri

17

2:15

Lab

Zero clicks

The week you are teaching, with real Canvas events and your own sessions on the same grid — start times, rooms, and the test in the place your brain already looks for it.

The Cadence approach

Leave Canvas as the system of record. Add the layer it never had.

Replacing an LMS is a multi-year committee project, and it is the wrong fight anyway. Canvas is genuinely good at being the record: enrollments, submissions, official grades, institutional memory. Cadence does not compete with any of that. It reads from Canvas, respects what Canvas says about who you are, and adds a teaching surface on top.

Calendar first

The week is the home screen

Cadence opens on the week you are teaching. Real Canvas assignments and events sit on the same grid as the sessions you plan yourself, so the schedule and the coursework stop living in two different places.

  • Pulls live courses, events, and due dates from Canvas
  • Week navigation that starts on today, not on a term overview
  • Your own lectures with start time, end time, and room

Classroom tools

The part the LMS skipped

A session in Cadence is a real object: a timed agenda, the deck you are presenting, the notes you wrote for yourself, and the questions you plan to ask the room. It is the index card, promoted to a first-class citizen.

  • Timed agenda items that add up to your actual class length
  • Slide decks with speaker notes only you can see
  • Live polls with one response per student and instant tallies
  • Planned, Ready, and Live states so nothing half-written goes out

AI support

Help with the parts that scale badly

Writing the fourth version of the same feedback comment does not get better with practice, it just takes longer. Cadence drafts against your real submissions and leaves every judgement call to you.

  • Draft feedback and a proposed score on real Canvas submissions
  • An assistant with separate teaching and grading modes
  • Course context passed in, so suggestions match what you actually teach
  • Every draft stays a draft until you act on it

What Cadence does not do

A tool that sits next to the system of record has to be trustworthy about its limits. These are enforced in the software, not promised in a policy.

  • It never writes grades to Canvas

    Grading in Cadence produces drafts, held in Cadence. Nothing is posted to the Canvas gradebook and no comment is sent to a student. When you are happy with a draft, you enter it in Canvas yourself.

  • It never invents your roster

    Permissions come from your Canvas enrollments — teacher, TA, designer, student — resolved per course. The same person can run the console in a course they teach and see the student view in a course they take.

  • Students only see what you publish

    A session stays private until you mark it Ready. Speaker notes are stripped on the server for anyone who is not an instructor, so they are genuinely absent rather than hidden in the page.

Bring your own Canvas course. Teach from the week.

Connect with a Canvas access token and Cadence loads the courses you already have. No migration, no admin install, and nothing to undo in Canvas if you stop using it.

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