# Flag at-risk students in Canvas before they fall behind

> Every weekday at 7am, your active courses are checked for missing work, silent logins, and slipping grades, with a ranked list sent to your advising channel.

- Workflow type: agent
- Services: Canvas, Google Sheets, Slack Bot
- Categories: Operations
- Published: 2026-08-04

## What it does

- Checks each of your active courses every weekday morning and gathers participation, missing work, and recent grade movement for every student.
- Sorts students into risk tiers using thresholds you control, then writes a one-line plain-English reason for each student it flags.
- Appends one row per flagged student to a shared tracking sheet, so advisors keep a running history across the term.
- Posts a digest to your advising channel sorted by severity and capped at fifteen students, and only re-raises a student when their reason has changed.

## What you'll need

- A Canvas account at your institution covering the courses you want monitored. This is Instructure Canvas, the learning management system, not the Canva design tool.
- Instructor or advisor level visibility in Canvas, since student progress data is only available to staff who can already see those students' work.
- A Google account and a spreadsheet you want to use as the advisor tracking log.
- A Slack workspace and the channel where your advising team wants the morning digest.

## Prompt

Every weekday at 7am, check my active Canvas courses and flag students who are slipping before it becomes a crisis. Use a cron trigger for this.

Start with Canvas List Courses to get my active courses. For each course, gather three signals: Get Course-Level Student Summaries for participation and page view counts, List Missing Submissions for past-due unsubmitted work, and Get Student-in-Course Assignment Analytics for recent grade trends on the students who look questionable from the first two signals.

Weigh those signals into a short risk tier per student: high, medium, or low. As a starting point, treat each of these as a risk signal: no login or participation in the last 7 days, two or more missing assignments, or a recent grade drop of more than 10 percent. A student hitting several signals should tier higher than one hitting a single signal. For every flagged student, write a one-line plain-English reason, for example "No login in 9 days and 3 assignments missing in BIO 210". Keep each reason specific enough that an advisor can act on it without opening Canvas.

Before posting anything, read the existing rows from the tracking tab with Google Sheets Get Values so you know what was flagged on previous runs. Only include a student in today's output if they are newly flagged or their reason has changed since the last time they appeared. If a student's reason is effectively the same as their most recent row, skip them, so the advising channel does not get the same names every morning.

For each student you are flagging today, append one row to the Google Sheets tracking tab with Append Values. Include the run date, course name, student name, risk tier, and the one-line reason, one row per flagged student, so advisors keep a running history across the term.

Then post a grouped digest to the advising channel with Slack Bot Send a Message. Group by risk tier with the most severe first, show the student name, course, and reason on each line, and cap the message at the top 15 students. If more than 15 qualify, note how many additional students were flagged and point to the tracking sheet. If nobody is new or changed since the previous run, post a short note saying there are no new or changed flags today rather than staying silent.

The audience is instructors, advisors, and student success staff, so write the digest in plain language and keep technical detail out of it.

## How to customize

- Change the timing. Seven in the morning on weekdays suits most advising teams, but you can move it later or run it only on Mondays and Thursdays.
- Tune the thresholds. The days without logging in, the number of missing assignments, and the size of the grade drop are all yours to set.
- Adjust the digest. Raise or lower the fifteen student cap, route different courses to different channels, or group by advisor instead of by severity.

## Example output

Daily student risk check, Tuesday 4 August

High risk
1. Maya R. (BIO 210): No login in 9 days, 3 missing assignments.
2. Daniel O. (CHEM 101): Quiz average dropped 14 percent over the last two weeks.

Medium risk
3. Priya S. (BIO 210): 2 missing assignments, participation down sharply this week.
4. Alex T. (HIST 240): No login in 7 days, all work submitted so far.

Low risk
5. Jordan K. (CHEM 101): One missing assignment, otherwise on track.

3 students unchanged since the last run and not repeated here. Full history in the advisor tracking sheet.

## FAQ

### Is this Canvas the learning platform or Canva the design tool?

This works with Instructure Canvas, the learning management system schools use for courses, assignments, and grades. It has no connection to Canva, the graphic design tool.

### Will students know they have been flagged?

No. Everything is written to your private tracking sheet and posted to your internal advising channel. Nothing is sent to students and nothing appears inside their course.

### Why doesn't the same student appear every single day?

The workflow remembers why each student was flagged and only raises them again when that reason changes. A student with the same two missing assignments will not be repeated tomorrow, but if they pick up a third or their grade slips further, they come back to the top of the list.

### What if I teach or advise on more than one course?

All of your active courses are checked in the same run, and the digest is grouped so you can scan the course you care about first.

### Can I change what counts as at risk?

Yes. The starting rules are no login for seven days, two or more missing assignments, or a recent grade drop over ten percent, and all three are adjustable.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/flag-at-risk-students-in-canvas-before-they-fall-behind