Canvas Product Updates

Happy New Year! Some quick updates to pass along regarding the newest Canvas product update which will be released this Saturday, along with a few other important notifications we would like to share as concisely as possible.

Product Release: The latest 3-week product sprint (update) will be released on Saturday, January 9^th. This is a feature-packed update. New features in this release are listed in detail below. They include updates and improvements to Grades, Assignments, People, and several other components. You’ll also see the new interface updates scheduled to be turned on in the summer.

January 9^th  Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

Canvas Tips/Tricks: Start of Semester

A reminder that Canvas doesn’t work quite the way Blackboard worked regarding how courses open. Canvas courses are managed using Terms. We’ve set the Spring 2016 Term Start Date to be January 15^th. (Courses officially start January 20^th.) So, if you plan to open your course early, you can simply “Publish” any time after January 15^th. However, if you plan to open the course earlier than the 15^th, you’ll need to manually adjust the Course Availability Dates and override the Term Start. (Course Settings > Starts/Ends > and check “Users can only participate in the course between these dates.”) Otherwise, students will not have access to the course despite Publishing. Moreover, you cannot Email them in advance.

Turn It In

Remember that the TII integration has changed significantly. If you’ve set up plagiarism detection in your assignments prior to copying the course, you’ll need to return to those assignments and set it back up again using the new LTI integration. (For reference, TII settings do not copy from term to term. A peril of a third party integration.) We encourage you to reach out to Mark Summey (x5387), Anna Catterson (x5107), or Joe Kern (x5316) who can walk you through these changes. We've shared this video before, but here it is again: