When to turn on this enhancement for a new school

[DavidSchlater]

I'm struggling to know when to turn on this tool for our school. We are new to Canvas and will be using it in full production in Jan 2022 - is it best to turn it on and lock it down at the start of 2022 so that all students and instructors have the same experience going forward, or wait till summer when the feature may be more ready for prime time? Instructors are learning Canvas now, and building for Spring this semester... What must-have assignment features are still missing, and when will they be encorporated?

[SusanNiemeyer]

Hi David,

I teach ESL at a community college, and I've already turned on the Enhanced Assignments for my courses. It works really well and it is a definite improvement over the older Assignments. I would go ahead it and enable it for Spring 2022. There is nothing that your instructors need to do differently, and my students have reported no issues with it.

[sharon_kitching]

We have had it on for approx ~2000 courses for the past few months (mid-year 2021) and relatively few issues. Students seem to be finding it easier in general and being able to see their 'submission' helps stop the 'uploaded the wrong/empty/half a file' issue.

Having said that  - we've started to have issues in the last 36 hours 🙂 

[jsailor]

@sharon_kitching, just to confirm, are the issues that your users have experienced recently from the bug that was reported and fixed (detailed in your post here)? Or are there other issues that we need to look into? 

[sharon_kitching]

No that was the first major bug. in general I think the assignment enhancement has worked well for students. Being able to 'see' their submission lowers their anxiety about submitting. 

[jsailor]

Thank you for your quick response, @sharon_kitching. I am glad to hear that there are no other issues and that things are working well for your students.  

[Gina_Hutchens]

Are they any directions that any of you have that shows the new features for student submissions?

[jsailor]

Hi, @Gina_Hutchens,

You can reference the release document that provides a summary of the enhancements here. You can also see guides focused on using the assignment enhancements feature preview in the knowledge base here.