A Canvas production update will occur on Saturday, April 18, 2020. Here are the full release notes. Production updates occur on third Saturday of each month, and the next planned update is Saturday, May 16, 2020. Updates in the current release include:
Mute Notifications by Course
Users will now be allowed to mute all notifications from a specific course in which they are enrolled. Each Course Home Page displays a View Course Notifications button.
The toggle button displays the current status of the notifications for notifications for the course: enabled or disabled. Course notifications are enabled by default, so you will still continue receiving the same notifications based on your personal Notification Settings page until you disable notifications for a course.
Please note, more granular course notification settings are expected in the future.
Limited Submission Attempts
This new feature allows instructors to limit submission attempts for students for an Assignment, replacing the unlimited number of times that currently can be limited only by assignment availability dates. Instructors can choose to limit the number of attempts a student can make for an assignment by using the Submission Attempts option found in the Assignment settings:
Please note there is no moderation option as there is in a Canvas quiz. If limited attempts are set, additional attempts must be added for all assignees.
When an assignment is limited in attempts, students see the number of attempts made as well as the number of allowed attempts. Once students have no more attempts, the Re-Submit Assignment button is disabled.
To use the Limited Submission Attempts feature option in your Assignments, you must enable it in course Settings. Click the Feature Options tab.
Move the Assignment Allowed Attempts toggle to on. The toggle should turn green and display a checkmark.
Assignment Bulk Editing
This change allows assignment dates to be adjusted at one time in the same location, and supports editing all assignment, discussion, and quiz dates in a single page. Please note that only dates can be adjusted, not times. The utility is only available in the Assignments tool and can be found in Assignment Settings menu. Select the option to Edit Assignment Dates.
The utility displays all existing assignments in a single page arranged by due date. Assignments with the same due date are listed in alphabetical order. The full name of an assignment is included in the hover text for the assignment.
For assignments with multiple due dates, all due dates display below the Everyone Else date, and the student, section, or group is right-aligned in the assignment name column. Only due dates and availability dates can be edited in this page—details such as changing the specific group or section assigned to the assignment must be edited directly within the assignment.
Once all dates have been adjusted, changes must be saved via the Save button. The status of the page updates can be viewed in the status percentage bar, which displays the percentage of changes saved to the page.
The saving date process also validates availability dates, due dates, and course and term dates. Any errors are displayed in the page to be corrected so the dates can be saved again.
Some Other Recent Changes
Given the current situation, Canvas has been in rapid deploy mode making other changes through the production update schedule. So since our last update on March 21, you may have noticed a few small changes.
- SpeedGrader in Grades: The SpeedGrader option has returned to the assignment menu options to access SpeedGrader for the assignment instead of using the Grade Detail Tray.
- New Analytics Chart Tabs: The New Analytics chart viewing options have been changed from drop-down menus to page tabs. Users can click the tabs to navigate between options. No other functionality within the page has been affected.
- Moderated Quiz Attempts and Zero Points: If you use the Moderate this Quiz tool, you may have noticed that after you saved changes, the student score displayed as 0 in the moderate page. The score did not appear in the gradebook. Moderating a quiz does no longer affects the score column.
For more information, browse the Canvas Release Notes to find updated features or bug fixes that apply to you based on your Canvas usage. If you have any questions about the changes or about how to use Canvas effectively, IT Academic Technology Services staff is always available at the Faculty Commons (116 Pearson Hall) or you can send your questions to canvas-info@udel.edu.
