Auto Save in Rich Content Editor

[snugent]

This is badly needed. We have had several people lost content they were writing in discussion posts and it would be useful when creating pages as well. Even here in the community Jive has this feature and I love it. Canvas needs it too!!

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through Canvas Release Notes (2020-03-21) 

[christine_mckeo]

In addition to an auto-save feature, it would also be helpful if Canvas warned you before navigating away from unsaved content. Chrome, Safari and Firefox display a confirmation dialog when you try to leave a screen with unsaved content, but only when editing Pages. It's too easy to navigate away from unsaved content when editing the Syllabus Description, Assignments, Quizzes, etc...

[clong]

I'm sure every teacher that uses Canvas has had the unfortunate experience of adding some thoughtful comments or content only to have it unexpectedly blown away. Even worse is when this happens to our students. If Canvas is a cloud native LMS it have cloud like utility features like auto save. So many times I'll suggest teachers or students startup a Google Doc or Word Doc then paste it in just to make sure they don't loose their work. Canvas should be better in this aspect.

[johnpj]

This feature would be most useful for us in the assignments tool; as we often get comments from students that have spent hours working on an assignment only to realize their session has timed out and they have lost their work.

[dlyons]

I don't know how difficult autosave functionality everywhere would be to implement, but I like this suggestion, too. I went ahead and turned it into it's own feature idea so it can be voted on independently. 🙂

[christine_mckeo]

Thanks  @dlyons ​!! Great idea -- I voted on it there.

[corey_jeffers]

Google is setting the tone here again because many districts and universities are going GAFE. People aren't used to saving their work anymore... I am noticing that there is an auto-save feature at the bottom of this rich text editor I'm typing in right now. I think the LMS deserves the same attention as the community.

[caryn]

This would be very useful throughout a Canvas course - this type of auto-save could help instructors and students retain in-progress work in virtually all parts of a Canvas course space. This is a medium priority for the UC Irvine community.

[csalazar]

After some preliminary research, it looks like the recent upgrade in TinyMCE has a plugin that will support auto save functionality. I asked the developer who did the most recent upgrade to take a look at the plugin to help us estimate the effort required to implement it. I will update the forum when I have an update.

[Renee_Carney]

This is excellent news Deactivated user​.  Thank you for the update!

[corey_jeffers]

Awesome! After the Google delay, this will be an excellent consolation. This will really help people to feel more secure with putting more content in Canvas more often.