Right now, in beta, you can turn off the new gradebook. As long as a course hasn't used features that require the new gradebook (like late policies) you can go back to the old one. The beta instance is for you to play around with so you can prepare yourself for what's coming up before it actually gets here. There are some other uses for it, but that's the principal one. The beta instance is mostly isolated from your production site (there may be some issues with LTIs in beta pulling data from the production site).
You don't have to turn on anything in beta. You don't have to go into beta at all. That is not to say it's not useful for testing and if you're doing any development or have custom CSS and JavaScript, then it's highly, highly, recommended. We normally turn new features on in beta for a few of our users to play with and then turn on the major ones between semesters after we've had a chance to prepare ourselves.
Think of beta as a Canvas sandbox or playground where you can try things out without worrying about messing the real thing up.
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