EarlyARC app icon

Catch struggling
students early.

Early Academic Retention Check

EarlyARC reads your Canvas courses and tells you which students need attention — and says, in plain language, exactly why.

Download for Mac How it works

macOS 14 or later  ·  Free  ·  Read-only & private

What it does

The students who need you, first.

Pick a course and EarlyARC shows the roster worst-first — with the evidence beside every flag, not a mystery score.

Every flag says why

Missing work, a slipping grade, going quiet — each reason is spelled out in plain language. No black box to second-guess.

A class on one screen

One line per student, worst first. Select anyone and a details pane shows their full picture — every reason, every missing assignment, each a link into Canvas.

Missing work that counts

Weighted by its share of the final grade, so 18% of the grade reads differently from a missed practice quiz.

Judged against the class

Inactivity and time-in-course are measured against classmates, not the calendar — so a quiet holiday doesn't flag everyone.

Thresholds per course

Decide what passing means and how long quiet is normal — sensible defaults, overridable for any single course. A five-week summer course isn't a fifteen-week fall one.

Message in your words

Copy a ready-to-send note built from your own templates. EarlyARC fills in the specifics; the voice stays yours.

One click into Canvas

Every name, assignment, and score links straight to the right page in Canvas, because acting on it still happens there.

Read-only by design

EarlyARC can only ever read. There is no code path that changes a course, a grade, or a student.

Courses you can spot

Every course carries an icon in the sidebar, chosen from its name — code brackets for programming, a flask for a lab science. Right-click to pick your own, or give it a colour.

Widgets on your desktop

The current quarter's counts at a glance, in small, medium, and large — per course, tappable into the app. Counts only, never names, even on a shared screen.

Remembers who you told

Copy a message and EarlyARC notes that you did — the course and the date, never the words. So the quiet student who already heard from you is not chased again.

Updates itself

Signed, notarized updates arrive in-app, and every release's notes live in Help ▸ What's New.

The loop

Nobody slips, nobody gets chased twice.

EarlyARC is not classroom management software. It takes no attendance, tracks no behaviour, and changes nothing in Canvas. It answers one question, every week: who needs you, and why.

1

See who

The roster opens worst-first, one line per student. A whole class on one screen, not five rows at a time.

2

See why

Missing work weighted by what it is worth, a slipping score, going quiet — spelled out in plain language, never a mystery number.

3

Say something

Copy a note built from your own templates, in your own voice. Several students at once if that is the week you are having.

4

Remember you did

EarlyARC records that you wrote — the course and the date, nothing else. Next time you look, you can see who has already heard from you.

Getting started

Connected in a minute.

No account to create. No server to trust. Just your Canvas and your Mac.

1

Connect to Canvas

Paste a personal access token you generate in Canvas. It is stored in your Mac's Keychain and only ever used to read.

2

Open a course

Your courses appear grouped by term. Click one to see its roster, or click a whole term to combine every flagged student.

3

See who needs a nudge

The students worth a look rise to the top, each with a plain reason. Reach out in a click, and EarlyARC remembers you did.

On the roadmap: institutional sign-in. A future version will support Canvas's standard OAuth2 authorization, enabled once by your Canvas administrator through a developer key — you'd sign in with your regular Canvas account, with read-only scoped access your institution can grant or revoke centrally, and no personal token to create.

Screenshots

See it for yourself.

Light and Dark Mode throughout — these pictures follow the mode you're reading in. None of the data shown is real: every student, course, grade, and date is invented by the app's built-in sample mode.

The EarlyARC roster for a sample course of twelve students, one line each, listed worst-first. Two are At Risk, one is Concern, one is Watch, each with the headline reason beside their name. A details pane on the right shows the selected student in full: their grade, missing count and time in course, every reason they were flagged, and every missing assignment. The sidebar lists the quarter's courses, each with an icon taken from its name and a few tinted by the instructor.
The roster: worst-first, every flag explained, every name and assignment one click from Canvas.
A whole term combined into one list: twenty-one students needing attention across six courses, all visible at once, each row naming its course beside the student. The details pane on the right shows the selected student in full.
Click a term instead of a course, and every flagged student across the quarter lands in one list.
Message settings with three editable templates — Email, Short Message, and Referral Summary — and the list of placeholders EarlyARC fills in per student, such as first name, course, score, and the missing assignments.
Your templates, your voice — EarlyARC fills in the specifics per student.
Privacy settings spelling out what is kept on this Mac — the access token in the Keychain, your settings, your message templates, and an optional note of who you have written to — and what is never kept: student records and identifying logs.
The privacy pane says exactly what is kept, and what never is.
The small desktop widget: a large red 7 over the words students need attention, with the term name and a colored At Risk, Concern, and Watch breakdown beneath.
The medium attention widget: the count of seven students needing attention on the left, and on the right the term with per-level counts — three At Risk, one Concern, three Watch — and the time the numbers were last refreshed.
The medium courses widget: four current-quarter courses, each on its own row with colored At Risk, Concern, and Watch counts beside it, and a line noting how many more are in the app.
The small courses widget: three course codes, each with the number of students flagged there.
The large courses widget: a full quarter of courses, each with its name on one line and its At Risk, Concern, and Watch counts beneath.
The large attention widget: the term, a very large count of students needing attention, and the At Risk, Concern, and Watch breakdown listed beneath it.

The desktop widgets: your quarter at a glance, in counts only — a widget never sees a student's name. Both come in all three sizes.
Upgrading from an earlier version? macOS records a widget's available sizes when you place it and does not revisit them when an app updates, so a widget added before 1.4 still offers only its old sizes. Remove it and add it again to get the full set.

Captured from EarlyARC's built-in sample data with no Canvas account connected — the students, courses, grades, and dates are fictional, and no real student record was involved in any way.

Accessibility

Readable by design.

Built from native macOS controls, tested with the assistive tech teachers actually use.

Scales to 200%

The whole window grows from 80% to 200% — a slider in Settings, or ⌘+ and ⌘− like everywhere else.

VoiceOver, properly

Every control names itself with its units, evidence reads as sentences, and every link in a row is individually reachable.

Never color alone

Risk levels are words, not just colors. Dark Mode, system contrast, and system fonts throughout.

Privacy first

Student data never leaves your Mac.

EarlyARC is built for people who take FERPA seriously. It reads from Canvas, draws the screen, and forgets — there is no cloud, no account, and no analytics.

  • Rosters are held in memory and gone when you quit — no cache, no database of student work.
  • Your access token lives in the macOS Keychain, never in a file or a log.
  • The only server it contacts is your own Canvas. No analytics, no telemetry.
  • Signed and notarized by Apple, and sandboxed.

EarlyARC displays identifiable student records, so your institution's rules govern how you use it. Keeping the data on your Mac is not the same as having permission to view it.

Download

Try it with your own courses.

Free, notarized, and ready in a minute.

EarlyARC app icon
Download EarlyARC 1.5
macOS 14+ 1.6 MB · disk image Notarized by Apple

Questions, ideas, or something not working? Email Bruce — EarlyARC is built by one instructor, and hearing from another is the best part.