Feature Q&A: Canvas Deploy Notes (2024-08-14)

[InstContentTeam]

Looking to discuss these features from the 2024-08-14 Deploy Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

Interface Updates

• Authentication: Auto Confirming Email Addresses Checkbox [Added 2024-11-22]
• Courses: Sub-Account Specific Term Filter
• Courses: Course Setting End Dates
• Discussions: Disallow Threaded Replies
• Discussions: Line Separation Between Posts
• Gradebook: Message Student Who Updates
• Navigation: Sections Added to Course Tray
• External Apps: Migration Progress Modal
• Terms: Course Links

Account Settings

• Courses: Show Sections in Course Tray Setting [Added 2024-08-13]

Other Updates

• Permissions: Manage App List Button Permission

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

[stimme]

@InstContentTeam "Navigation: Sections Added to Course Tray" would be more welcome if it were optional. With the recent additions of SIS ID & Term name to this tray, the details about each course are extensive. For anyone enrolled in more than two sections, the courses tray looks very cluttered.

I can imagine that some institutions' naming conventions make their course names vague. But the course naming convention we use includes the section and term already for all SIS Import created courses. All of the added fields are redundant clutter for us.

I think this feature would be improved if the courses tray had a secondary display control (similar to the name column in the gradebook) where a user could toggle which fields they'd like to see in addition to the course name.

[chriscas]

I have to agree with @stimme on the "Sections Added to Course Tray" update.  While this may be okay for courses without many sections, there are a lot of situations (hello crosslisting) where teachers may be enrolled in tons of sections, and that display becomes unruly...  Here's an example of a real course here (screenshot from beta).  look how much space this one course in the menu eats up now, yikes!

For our naming schemes, even the sis_id is somewhat useless info.  If admins could configure what is displayer there, it could be really helpful.  I know some SISes don't allow much naming flexibility and these updates are great for users of those systems.  For an institution like ours that did custom integrations and had things set up perfectly for our instance, these updates have been problematic.

For anyone interested, I do have a line of custom CSS to hide everything but the course title/name from that menu if you're interested, but I really don't feel we should have to resort to custom CSS for something like this.

-Chris

[Chris_Hofer]

I also agree with the comments made by @stimme and @chriscas.  Back in June 2024, I had expressed my concern about displaying the SIS ID underneath the course name when people click on the "Courses" button in the global nav.  We have really long, random strings of characters for our SIS IDs, and they wouldn't make sense to really anyone when displayed in Canvas.  You can see my comment listed here: Feature Q&A: Canvas Deploy Notes (2024-06-18) - Instructure Community - 605642 (canvaslms.com).

Now a new "Section" area is being added under the course name as well.  I don't think our cross-listed courses will appear as long as the ones shown by @chriscas, but here are some examples from our own Canvas environment:

So, for our courses, we put the semester name and year at the start of our course name.  Then, as you can see, the section name also has the semester name and year.  And finally, the "Term:" also displays the semester and year...in this case, "FALL 2024".

If we take a look at the course I've highlighted in the green box, we have two courses that are cross-listed together:

• FALL 2024 INTRO COMMUNICATION DESIGN I (DGD-211-B)
• FALL 2024 CONCEPTS AND CAMPAIGNS (DAD-235-A)

Our system cross-lists these two courses together and creates a new course called:

• FALL 2024 INTRO COMMUNICATION DESIGN I (DGD-211-B, DAD-235-A)

In this course are two sections that have identical names to what is shown by the first two bullet points above.

If a student registered for the DAD-235-A course, that student would see something like this in Canvas:

FALL 2024 INTRO COMMUNICATION DESIGN I (DGD-211-B, DAD-235-A)
FALL 2024 CONCEPTS AND CAMPAIGNS (DAD-235-A)
SIS ID: 0c9b2c69-a44b-... | Term: FALL 2024

I could see how this might be a bit confusing for a student to see two different names for the same course.

[rmartini]

I just wanted to echo what many of these comments have pointed out about the update to the sections being added to the course tray. At our institution, we aren’t as likely to have users added to more than two course sections (though there will of course be outliers). However, this update is really cluttering up the course tray.

When our courses are created, the course title already includes the relevant information: semester, the rubric (“ACCY 201” as an example), the name of the course, and any sections associated with it. Teachers are enrolled in their own section which, by default, is the title of their course so this is now duplicating information:

Comparison of current courses tray with the tray after update

For courses that have multiple sections, it looks more cluttered and it's hard to distinguish where the sections end/begin:

What I like most about the tray is it provides quick access to the most important courses. In the current view, I could easily see links to 9 courses without having to scroll at all (on an average laptop screen). In Beta, I’m now only able to see 4 or 5 without needing to scroll. Like others have pointed out, our SIS IDs are not helpful to non-admins and looks like a bunch of random numbers. It didn’t feel necessary to include this before, but one line wasn’t entirely bothersome. This new text makes the tray feel significantly more cluttered and it's hard to distinguish the different sets of information now (partially because it all looks like jumbled numbers and letters but the font is also thin and harder to read). Additionally, the most important part of that extra information (the term) was at the START of the gray text and is now moved to the end.

[ellen_peters]

I also think that

1. the course navigation is not the place to add all these course details (the All courses overview is perhaps a better place); and
2. it should be configurable for an admin if SIS ID, Term and Sections should be visible.

In our situation, the term is already part of the course name and SIS ID. And next academic year a student will probably be in approximately five sections in each course so each course will take up a lot of space in the course navigation tray.

[dbrace]

This is going to sound like a broken record but I also do not agree with adding section names. For our SIS extracts and imports into the LMS, we do not intentionally create sections for course shells. The only sections that we intentionally create are if they have been officially cross-listed together in our SIS. However, even the default sections that are created based on the name of the course appear in the courses menu. This means: (1) the name of the course appears in bigger text that is the color of our theme and as a clickable link and (2) the name of the section appears below it, even if the name of the section is exactly the same as the name of the course.

Please reconsider doing this or provide a toggle.

[dbrace]

Thank you for adding a setting for sections in the "Courses" area!

[dbrace]

I am looking in beta. When will the "Show sections in Course Tray" be available?

[dbrace]

I am not sure when but the "Show Sections in Course Tray" option is now available.

Thank you!

[leward]

There was an undocumented change in the Aug 14 Deploy.  In the Authentication tool, an autoconfirm toggle was added to the email field.  Shouldn't this be added to the release notes?

[oinge]

Yes, please please please please PLEASE either remove this "feature" or add an option to toggle off. I have crosslisted courses and now have to scroll down or do an extra click to get to the 6+ courses I update on a regular basis. I honestly don't see how this feature is useful, when for most of us, section name is not editable, only course title (and some of the section names are arduously long). This feels more like a bug or a regression than an "improvement".

[dbrace]

@oinge, I am not sure if you are an LMS administrator or a faculty member but a setting does exist at the account level.

Account Settings > Courses > Show Sections in Course Tray Setting

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Releases/Canvas-Deploy-Notes-2024-08-14/ta-p/610769#toc-hI...

 

[louie_walt]

• Discussions: Disallow Threaded Replies

I found that on all my Canvas shells in the Discussions module, "Disallow Threaded Replies" was checked on.  This was not the case in previous semesters and I did not want this turned on.  Students have been submitting their discussion comments and could not Reply to other student posts, which was the whole point of having a Discussion assignment.  This has been a very labor intensive for me to go through each discussion assignment in the 5 sections I'm teaching and manually uncheck this default setting. Not sure why this change was made, and wanted to know how to disable this across the courses without having to click and edit each assignment.