Make Lucid activities copy-safe in Canvas Templates, Blueprint courses, and anchor course shells built by non-instructor

The problem

Higher education institutions rarely build every Canvas course directly in the live term shell, particularly for online or hybrid courses.

Instructional designers, curriculum teams, and online learning staff typically develop courses in an anchor, template, or Blueprint course. That course is then copied or synced into the Canvas shells where faculty and students actually teach and learn.

Currently, Lucid activities and embedded Lucid resources do not reliably support this workflow.

An instructional designer may build a complete course containing Lucid activities, templates, collaborative boards, diagrams, or assignments, but when that course is copied into a new Canvas shell, the Lucid connections may need to be recreated, re-embedded, or manually relinked before they are usable, often as an unsurmountable burden on instructors.

This means institutions cannot confidently make Lucid part of their standard course-design templates or offerings.

Requested functionality

Please make Lucid content portable with the Canvas course so that Lucid activities created in a source course can be copied, imported, templated, or Blueprinted into another Canvas course and remain immediately usable regardless of who created it within the institution.

Ideally, when Canvas creates the destination course, Lucid would recognize that a new course context has been created and automatically establish the appropriate Lucid resource for that new context.

For example:

Anchor Course → Fall 2026 Course

A designer creates a Lucid activity in the Anchor Course shell.

When the Anchor Course is copied into the Fall 2026 course, Lucid automatically creates or associates a fresh instance of that activity with the new Canvas course.

The instructor should not have to delete the activity, recreate it, select the Lucid document again, or know anything about how the Lucid integration is configured.

Workflows this should support

This would ideally work with the major ways institutions deploy Canvas courses:

• Canvas course copy/import
• Canvas Templates
• Canvas Blueprint courses
• Copying modules or assignments between courses
• Institutionally maintained anchor course shells
• Recurring semester or term course creation
• Instructors sharing Canvas content with colleagues

The copied Lucid activity should preserve its instructional design and configuration while creating the appropriate new course-level or student-level Lucid instances.

Why this matters

This is especially important for institutions with centralized instructional design teams.

A faculty member building one Lucid activity in one live course can work around a broken copy manually.

An instructional design team maintaining dozens or hundreds of courses cannot.

Without copy-safe Lucid activities, designers have to choose between:

1. excluding Lucid from intentionally built anchor courses and department templates,
2. requiring faculty to rebuild Lucid activities every term, or
3. documenting a manual repair process for every copied course.

All three significantly reduce the likelihood that Lucid will be adopted as a standard instructional tool.

With this functionality, an institution could instead build Lucid into its official course templates, learning activities, faculty-developed courses, and online programs. Faculty could receive a new course shell with the Lucid experiences already designed and ready for students.

What success would look like

Build once → copy or Blueprint → teach.

An instructional designer should be able to create a Canvas course containing Lucid activities once, have that course replicated into future term shells, and know that the Lucid activities will work for the new instructor and students without manual reconstruction.

This would turn Lucid from a tool individual instructors can add to a course into a tool institutions can confidently build into their course-design infrastructure.