Feature Q&A: Canvas Deploy Notes (2024-07-17)

[InstContentTeam]

Looking to discuss these features from the 2024-07-17 Deploy Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

Interface Updates

• Authentication: SMS Multi-Factor Authentication Update (MFA) [Added 2024-07-15]
• SpeedGrader: Comment Drafts
• Settings: Course Import and Cross-List Section Update
• Course: Course Status Update
• Course: Sort by Course Status
• People: List Sections in Alphabetical Order
• User Settings: Contact Information Modal Update [Added 2024-07-15]

Account Settings

• Profiles: Group Profile Settings

Feature Previews

• Discussions: Discussion Summaries
• Navigation: Smart Search

Change Logs Updates

• Discussion/Announcements Redesign

ADD FEEDBACK FOR THESE FEATURES IN Q&A TOPIC

• This topic is for feature discussion only—Please share use cases, best practices, questions, clarifications, etc. regarding this feature.
• Please thread replies as possible to keep posts organized. This will help everyone to track discussions and to participate.

ADDITIONAL FEEDBACK—WHERE TO POST IDEA SUGGESTIONS AND SUBMIT BUG REPORTS

• Idea requests for the Product Team to consider should be submitted in ideas.canvaslms.com . This is the best way to ask for additional or alternative functionality than what is included in the release. Linking to the related idea here so others can find it is encouraged!
• Bug reports should be submitted to Canvas Support. This way, cases can be connected and uniform updates can be provided to those involved. Bugs will not be triaged in this thread

[chriscas]

Hi Instructure Team,

We are not seeing the feature options for Smart Search or Discussion Summaries as we expected, since this deploy was yesterday.  Were these feature previews delayed, or was there an issue with the deploy?

-Chris

[JuliaDohr]

ad. Interface Update | Course: Course Status Update
I was sorry to learn, that only hard-concluded courses will be counted as "concluded". In our institution 99,9% of all courses are automatically concluded with the end of a term. All those are presented with the regular icon for published courses. Thus, for us this improvement is useless 😪

[chriscas]

Can information about the change to some account reports mentioned on this GitHub commit be added to the deploy notes?  This change is going to impact a lot of people who may have scripts or manual processes which use the report data for prior terms.  Without adjustments, this change could break these processes, as it did for me, causing me a lot of headaches at the end of last week and today trying to figure out what happened.  Canvas Support seemed totally unaware of the change as well, so I think having it properly documented is a needed step to help both users and support.

-Chris

[mbmacdonald]

The screenshot of the US User Multi-Factor Authentication Modal is unfamiliar to me. I have never seen it before. Would this be in place only for instances that do *NOT* use SSO? What types of configurations does this update affect? Thanks!

[kailey]

While testing Smart Search in Beta, I found that search results will display unpublished content to students. Any sort of unpublished content, or content with a future release date, should not be displayed in the results to students. 

To reproduce this:

1. Create an announcement with a future release date (include a very specific, unique word to make it easy to reproduce this bug)
2. Act as a student or use Student View
3. Go to Smart Search
4. Search for that specific term term.
5. See that the result includes the entire paragraph of the unpublished content to the student.

Upon clicking on the link to the announcement, there's an error message indicating that the announcement is not available to the student. This must be fixed before our institution can enable this feature to our users. 

[dbrace]

@kailey, have you reported this Smart Search experience to Canvas Support? What have they said?

[kailey]

@dbrace Yes, I reported this to Instructure on 7/22/24. The ticket is with engineering but no ETA as to when this will be fixed. The good thing is that it's a feature option, so it can be disabled until a fix is in place.