In this production release (10/18), students can rest assured when a quiz score is not complete, especially when a quiz contains a manually graded question. All users can set notifications to copy messages in Conversations, and instructors receive a session expiration warning in Crocodoc before they lose all their annotated hard work. Several other feature areas in Canvas have been improved with usability and cosmetic enhancements.
The production notes also include updates to existing Canvas features and fixed bugs.
Instructure has announced the next software release, and I'm pleased to announce that there will be no major changes for instructors or students! The full release notes are on the Instructure site.
A small change affecting instructors who use groups and SpeedGrader:
SpeedGrader™ Groups View
Instructors can view one submission for group projects within SpeedGrader™ and assign all students within the group the same grade. This feature applies when instructors do not select the “assign grades individually” option while creating the group assignment. Instead of individual student names, the SpeedGrader drop-down menu will display the name of each group. Any comments made on the assignment are also sent to all students in the group.
A new text Chat feature is available. With this tool (already in your courses) allows you to talk instantly with anyone present. Contact me if you're interested in learning more about this new feature.
Take attendance
An Attendance tool is also now available. This is especially useful for inperson and ITV courses. You can use the tool to take attendance, setup a setting chart to help learn students names, and include attendance as part of the grade. The Canvas Guides - starting with this guide and several following it, has more details. Contact eLearning to learn more!
App Center
Extend your teaching capabilities with new apps the plug directly into your Canvas course. Available soon, these third-party services can be added to your course or at the department level for several courses (eLearning can also add them to all courses at CCC).
The LTI/External Tools tab in Settings (if you were familiar with it) will now be called "Apps". The video after the image gives a nice overview if you're interested in learning more.
An example of an app being used in CCC's Canvas is the YouTube, Khan Academy, and Ted Talks buttons in the Rich Content Editor:
And remember, you can hide any of these tools you're not interested in. Anything on the left in black text is viewable by your students, so hiding unused tools helps them find your course content as well! This guide will show you how.
Regular Release Notes
The next release (which will occur this Saturday, July 13) shouldn't change the way you use Canvas or any of the tools in a major way. Last release, Jordan talked about big changes to the Discussion board. If you missed it, be sure to review the previous post.
For this release we'll see a few new features added to Discussions, Quizzes, LTI/Apps, Profiles, and some admin changes. Watch or read on to learn more.
The new update has created some issues for faculty who use Discussions extensively in their course.
Jennifer Dalby from Lake Washington Tech has some good design suggestions to work around this issue for now.
"For my course, which is actually a faculty learning community, I created a Module, added text headers to sort the topic categories, and added the topics I wanted to feature."
Conferences are now arranged by New and Concluded.
Conferences Recording Feature
You may see this in Instructure's notes. This isn't available at CCC yet. I'll announce as soon as I know though!
Discussions Interface
The Discussions tool also received a revamp. You will noticed Pinned Discussions (which allow you to display some discussions topics at the top of your students' lists), Discussions (for normal discussions), and Closed for Comments (which are locked discussions that students can view, but no longer participate in).
Students and instructors can also mark all messages as read.
People Interface
People received a revamp too. CCC manages enrollments through Banner (or SIS) so some features listed are not available to instructors.
For the instructors and students, the roster is easier to read though. Please contact elearning if your list of students does not match those found in Banner/Web4 (your official roster).
Students can upload unlimited files to submit an assignment.
Course Settings
All user management tasks have been moved to the People page. The Course Settings User tab no longer includes user information. To help direct administrators, the User tab has a link to the People page.
Personal Settings
Users will see a warning pop-up notification when they change their settings to a crowd-sourced language. This notification applies to language changes made in course, account, and profile settings.
Quizzes
Question Icons
Icons in the quiz sidebar have been added to help students identify the state of each question. Unanswered questions are indicated by a question mark, while completed questions are indicated by a checkmark.
Quiz Statistics
The Quiz statistics .csv file loads faster to better accommodate large courses.
Rich Content Editor
The default padding around Canvas images in the Rich Content Editor is now 5 pixels instead of 0 pixels.
