Starting April 25, 2020, Instructure will deploy a set of “Ready Releases” to Canvas. To provide more immediate support for instructors teaching online, Ready Releases introduce new and updated features or adjusted user functionality every week. This is temporary and in-response to COVID-19 so instructors and institutions can receive changes faster than regularly-scheduled monthly updates from Instructure.
Upcoming Changes
- Student Notifications When Comments are Left in DocViewer
- User Course Access Logging (Administrators Only)
- Publish Status on Dashboard and Courses List (Delayed until late May 2020)
Student Notifications When Comments are Left in DocViewer
Students with the Submission Comment option enabled in Notifications will get a message when an instructor or teaching assistant comments on a submission in SpeedGrader.
Previously…
To view comments, students needed to view their submission from the Submission Details page.
What’s new?
If enabled by students, they will be notified when an assignment comment is made.
How can this affect teaching and learning?
Students can now choose to be told when assignments are commented on, which can help student engagement.
If your course relies on students receiving notifications, be sure to ask your students to enable notifications for your course, and to set-up their preferences for receiving notifications.
User Course Access Logging (Administrators Only)
Administrators with access to reports can now generate a CSV report summarizing course activity by students.
Previously…
Student engagement information needed to be gathered on a course-by-course basis.
What’s new?
The User Course Access Logging report can be created by department or by school/college.
How can this affect teaching and learning?
This data can help departments evaluate the engagement of students, and identify at-risk students to help them succeed.
Institution Admins, Support Admins and Reporting Admins have access to this new report.
Publish Status on Dashboard and Courses List (Delayed until late May 2020)
Note: this feature will be turned on after the end of the Spring 2020 semester to minimize disruption to instructors and students.
For instructors and others with permission to publish a course, the Dashboard, the Courses page, and the Canvas side navigation will show whether a course is published or not.
Previously…
Instructors needed to visit a courses homepage to determine if a course was published.
What’s new?
On the Dashboard, course cards will appear under the Published and Unpublished headings. Unpublished courses will show a Publish button. In other places, headings or labels will be used to denote whether a course is published or not.
How can this affect teaching and learning?
This change makes it easier for instructors to determine if a course is published, and makes it easier to publish a course, which can help eliminate confusion by students and instructors.
Additional changes
A number of minor changes and bug fixes are being made with this update. Review the Canvas deploy notes to learn more about these changes.
Learn more
To learn more about this Canvas update, and to see how the changes may affect instructors’ and students’ work, refer to the audience-specific release note links.
- Canvas Ready Release Summary for Students – Students, guests, and student academic support professionals
- Canvas Ready Release Summary for Instructors – Faculty, teaching staff, teaching assistants, graders, and instructional designers
- Canvas Ready Release Summary for Administrators – Campus, school and college support professionals; administrators and IT professionals
- Comprehensive Ready Release Notes – Contains all information for all audiences related to this release