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.
macOS 14 or later · Free · Read-only & private
| Risk | Student | Why |
|---|---|---|
| At Risk | Jordan |
4 of 51 assignments missing — 18% of the grade Missing: Final Project, Reading Quiz 7 +2 more Current score 38% (below 70%) |
| Watch | Sam |
1 assignment missing — 9% of the grade Low time in course (13h vs 40h median) |
| Watch | Priya | Quiet 12 days longer than the class |
| Marcus | Nothing stood out | |
| Ava | Nothing stood out |
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 course at a glance
EarlyARC opens to a dashboard — one card per course with “10 of 26 flagged”, the assignment the class is missing most, a two-week trend line, who slipped or improved since last time, and the follow-ups still open. Click a card to land in that roster, or point the dashboard at any nearby quarter.
Trends, split by level
Open a course and its last two weeks draw as three small lines — At Risk, Concern, Watch — each ending on today’s count. A steady total can hide students sliding toward At Risk; this is where it shows.
A panel you choose
Beside the trend, pick the course-level read you check first: the most-missed assignments (click one to select exactly those students), the outreach loop, or the whole class by level. Your choice sticks.
Taps your shoulder
Opt in, and a scoring pass that finds students newly slipping posts one quiet notification — counts and course names only, never a student's name, even on a shared screen. Click it and land on the course.
Writes the retention report
Export any roster — or a whole term — as CSV or Markdown: every flag and its reasons, when you reached out, and what happened since. The paperwork your college asks for, from what EarlyARC already knows.
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.
Which work went undone
The roster turned sideways: every assignment, most-missed first. Fifteen students missing the same lab is rarely fifteen struggling students — it is usually one assignment with a problem. Pick it and the roster selects exactly who missed it.
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.
Settings that follow you
Turn on iCloud sync and your thresholds, appearance, and course icons follow you to your other Mac — plus the anonymous per-course counts that draw the trend lines, so they read the same on each. Never your token, never a student's name, grade, or record.
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.
Your accent color
System follows your macOS accent, or pick one of six — the selected course, buttons, and highlights follow. Warm reds, oranges, and yellows are left out on purpose: those mean risk here.
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
Any nearby quarter's counts at a glance — the current one by default, or pick the term each widget shows. 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.
The term, not just today
Select a student and see their term so far — a dot for each day you looked, at the level EarlyARC gave them, with a plain sentence beneath: started Watch, now Concern, worst At Risk.
Counts the open loops
Wrote to a student a week ago and nothing improved? The roster says so, right beside the contact date, and totals them above the list. Students who improved are left in peace.
Never quietly out of date
When EarlyARC refreshes a course while you are reading it, a Newer Data button appears — it never reorders the roster underneath you, and never leaves you reading a list it already knows is stale. Hover a student’s arrow to see when it last thought differently.
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.
See who
The roster opens worst-first, one line per student. A whole class on one screen, not five rows at a time.
See why
Missing work weighted by what it is worth, a slipping score, going quiet — spelled out in plain language, never a mystery number.
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.
Know if it helped
EarlyARC records that you wrote — the course and the date, nothing else — then tells you what happened since: improved, no change, or worse. A week with no change, and the roster reminds you.
Getting started
Connected in a minute.
No account to create. No server to trust. Just your Canvas and your Mac.
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.
Open a course
The dashboard greets you with a card per course; your courses also sit in the sidebar, grouped by term. Click either to see a roster, or click a whole term to combine every flagged student.
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 dashboard: six cards, one per sample course in Fall 2026. Each card carries a large flagged count with its class size — CS 101 reads “10 of 26 flagged” — the breakdown beneath it in the risk colors, the movement line “↑4 · ↓1 · 1 awaiting follow-up”, a line naming the course’s most-missed assignment (“Most missed: Homework 5 — 20 students”), and a small two-week trend line ending in a dot at today. Above the cards, a term menu reading “Automatic (Fall 2026)” and the headline “37 flagged across 6 courses · 116 students”; a ? button opens a key to what the cards show. A Dashboard row sits selected at the top of the sidebar; the footer reads “20 courses · 11 terms”.
A course page for a sample class of twenty-six students. Under the title, “26 students · 10 flagged · updated 4:06 PM · Since last time: 3 slipped · 1 newly flagged · 1 improved · 1 awaiting follow-up”. A band titled “Flagged over the last two weeks” draws three small trend lines — At Risk rising to 3, Concern steady at 2, Watch rising to 5 — each in its own color with the count at its end. Beside it, a “Most missed” panel lists Homework 5 missed by 20 (its bar orange, marking a class-wide miss), Homework 6 by 8, and Homework 2 by 3, with a View all 14 link. Below, the roster lists students worst-first — At Risk, then Concern, then Watch — each with grade, last activity, time in course, missing count, the reason in plain language, and when they were last contacted.
A sheet titled Missing work by assignment, listing a sample course's fourteen assignments most-missed first, each with a bar showing the share of the class and a count beside it. Homework 5 is drawn in orange at 20 of 26 students; the rest are blue, from 8 of 26 down to 1 of 26. A Show Students button selects whoever missed the chosen assignment.
A whole term combined into one list: thirty-six students needing attention across six courses, all visible at once, each row naming its course beside the student. The sidebar lists the six newest terms, its footer reading “13 courses · 6 of 11 terms”.
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.
The Privacy pane of EarlyARC’s settings. It opens by saying names, grades, and submissions are never saved and that rosters are held in memory and gone when you quit, with two exceptions — who you have written to, and what EarlyARC itself said about a student — both holding ids, dates, and EarlyARC’s own verdict, never a name or a grade. Below that, “What is kept on this Mac” takes each item in turn: the access token in the Keychain, your settings (synced through iCloud only if you turn that on), your message templates, the note of who you have written to, the note of what EarlyARC said about a student before, and the numbers the widgets show. Each note says it is forgotten after a year and can be switched off or deleted.
The small desktop widget: a large red 36 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 thirty-six students needing attention on the left, and on the right the term with per-level counts — five At Risk, eighteen Concern, thirteen Watch — and the time it was last updated.
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, and a line noting three more courses are in the app.
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.
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 — no account, no analytics, and no student names, grades, or records in any cloud, ever.
- Rosters are held in memory and gone when you quit — no cache, no file of student work. EarlyARC keeps two small notes so it can tell you what changed: who you have written to, and the risk level it gave a student. Ids, dates, and its own verdict — never a name, grade, or score. Both can be switched off and deleted.
- Your access token lives in the macOS Keychain, never in a file or a log.
- The only server it contacts is your own Canvas — and iCloud, only if you turn on sync, and then only for your preferences and the anonymous per-course counts behind the trend lines. No analytics, no telemetry.
- Sync is off by default and carries a short, fixed list: thresholds, appearance, text size, course icons — and the per-course flagged counts that draw the dashboard's trend lines, which name no one. Your access token, and every note that identifies a student, never sync; one button removes everything from iCloud again.
- 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.
Questions, ideas, or something not working? Email Bruce — EarlyARC is built by one instructor, and hearing from another is the best part.