On November 13, 2025, the “Differentiation Tags” feature in Canvas will be enabled at UW-Green Bay. This feature allows instructors to create custom tags to categorize students for differentiated instruction without the restrictions and added complexity introduced by Canvas Groups. Differentiation Tags provide a flexible way to organize students based on learning needs, performance levels, or any other criteria you choose.
Creating and Assigning Tags
Differentiation Tags can be created and managed from the People page in your Canvas course. The “Manage tags” button opens a menu where you can create and edit tags and tag sets, sets of tags meant to be mutually exclusive. You can use the checkboxes next to student names on the People page with the “Tag as” button to assign these tags to students. You can create as many tags as needed and assign multiple tags to individual students, which allows you to use tags to categorize students across multiple dimensions. Tags are only seen by instructors, so students won’t be aware of the tags they’ve been assigned.
The Many Uses for Differentiation Tags
After you’ve created tags and assigned them to students, you can use these tags in several ways. The first way is to create differentiated assignments and course content with “Assign to” boxes. When setting up an assignment, page, discussion, module, or quiz, you can select one or more tags in that item’s “Assign to” box to make that content available to only students with the selected tags. This allows you to create variations of the same assignment tailored to different tags. Use it to tailor content based off of learning preferences, areas of interest, and academic needs.
You can also use tags to assign different due dates to different sets of students for the same assignment by adding multiple “assign to” boxes to your assignment and using a different tag with each box. This can be helpful when managing multiple students needing accommodations or cohorts who meet or present on different dates.
Differentiation Tags also appear in your gradebook as a filter option. Filtering the gradebook by tags lets you quickly view and grade specific student groups. This filtering can be handy, especially if you use tags to create and assign different versions of an assignment to different sets of students.
One more way that tags can be used is to address Canvas Inbox messages. Creating a tag for students who struggled early on in a course and using it to keep in touch with them with Inbox messages is an easy way to check in and show your support. If students are working on different versions of an assignment, using tags to address your Inbox messages and announcements can ensure students get messages that are customized and relevant.
Tags can be updated throughout the term as students’ needs change; however, be careful about removing tags that have been used to create differentiated assignments. If you remove a tag from a student, and that tag was previously used to assign work they have already completed, their score for that work will be removed from the gradebook. Thankfully, you can restore any score you accidentally removed by adding the student back into an “Assign to” box for the assignment, either individually or through a different tag.
Why Use Tags and Not Groups?
Why not use tried and true Canvas Groups instead of this new tags feature? One of the major advantages of Differentiation Tags is that they can group students without creating a shared Groups space for those students, which can introduce complexity that is often unneeded. A major limitation of Canvas Groups is that they can only be used to differentiate group assignments, which makes it difficult to set up and assign alternate versions of assignments where students submit individually instead of as a group. The Differentiation Tags feature solves this problem by being usable with non-group assignments. Unlike with groups, which are visible to students, students do not see how they are tagged and do not see which other students share a tag with them. This instructor-only visibility makes tags appropriate for organizing students by private traits like accommodations or achievement, which should not be done with groups.
Give Tags a Try!
Differentiation Tags are a powerful and flexible tool that instructors can use to meet a variety of needs in their courses. Whether you plan to use them to simply label students for your own reference or to facilitate customized learning paths, if you’d like to meet with a member of the CATL team to discuss strategies for effective differentiation and course management, please reach out to catl@uwgb.edu or request a consultation!
Image Credits
The images in this blog post were sourced from the official Canvas Instructor Guide and used unmodified under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.