Feature Q&A: Canvas Deploy Notes (2024-11-06)

[InstContentTeam]

Looking to discuss these features from the 2024-11-06 Deploy Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

Interface Updates

• Announcements: Notification Option for Announcements in Blueprint Courses

Account Settings

• Settings: Limit Name Pronunciation Editing by User Role
• User Settings: Pronouns Removed When Setting is Disabled

Other Updates

• Assignments: Preserve Group Category Name During Assignment Copy [Delayed as of 2024-11-04]
• Discussions: Save Sorting Preferences
• Rich Content Editor: SourceCodeEditor Update

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

[JuliaDohr]

ad. Notification Option for Announcements in Blueprint Courses
I don't quite understand what's going to change from the current status quo. I was under the impression that an announcement sent via a Blueprint course in associated courses would also trigger notifications for the students there, if the students had enabled notifications for announcements. As I understand it, this change does exactly the same thing. Or is it that potential notifications could be suppressed if the checkbox is not ticked? 

[Andy_Kalin]

The 2024-11-06 Deploy Notes Change Log contains inaccurate information. Unfortunately this is happening more frequently over the last year, making it challenging to anticipate and track announced changes.

In this case, the 2024-11-06 Deploy Notes Change Log lists "2024-11-04 Updated Assignments: Preserve Group Set During Assignment Copy to a Feature Option" but that change does not appear to actually involve a Feature Option. Is this accurate? If not, I infer that whomever posted the change meant to post the change listed in the 2024-11-26 Release Notes, "2024-11-04 Changed Discussions: Multiple Due Dates for Discussions to a Feature Option," but copied and pasted the wrong change into the wrong notes. If that is the case then someone needs to delete entry that from the 2024-11-06 Deploy Notes Change Log.

A second issue in the 2024-11-06 Deploy Notes Change Log is "2024-11-04 Delayed Assignments: Preserve Group Set During Assignment Copy- See the Canvas Release Notes (2024-11-16)" which seems to relate to the change that immediately follows in the Change Log, "2024-11-04 Delayed Assignments: Preserve Group Category Name During Assignment Copy- See the Canvas Release Notes (2024-11-16)." This is confusing. Is "Preserve Group Set" the same functionality as "Preserve Group Category Name"? Only the former is a change listed in the 2024-11-06 Deploy Notes, and if they mean the same thing, then it would help if the Change Log notes were more clear and concise. For example,

"Delayed 'Assignments: Preserve Group Set During Assignment Copy' to 2024-11-16 and renamed to 'Assignments: Preserve Group Category Name During Assignment Copy. See the Canvas Release Notes (2024-11-16)'

would more clearly describe that change.

The overall issue though is that Canvas Release and Deploy notes have become less and less accurate over the past year, making it more challenging to accurately communicate changes to our end users. It seems like proofreading the release notes, the deploy notes, and the change logs prior to publishing them could help resolve miscommunications.

[kroeninm]

Thanks for mentioning this, some clarity in the deploys would be nice, I read through and did testing for the group copy functionality with no luck as the tiny footnote at the bottom in the Change Log I didn't see, and even though I see it now, I'm not sure how to interpret it.  Perhaps just a big strikethrough when it's pushed back and delayed 🙂 would be easier.  

Melanie

[phanley]

We started getting reports this morning from Support people (who have the Act-As permission active) that Masquerading is not working for them (e.g. the masquerade button is no longer present on a user's profile) -- has anyone else seeing a problem with that feature as of today (11-7-2024)?

[phanley]

It ended up being that the non-Account Admin support people hadn't been given the new "Manage Differentiated Tags" permissions that Teachers have, which is both a course & account level permission, so anyone with an Act-As permission has to be granted the Account level "Manage Differentiated Tags" permission to be able to Masquerade.

edit: to be clear about why I posted the url below, the new permission set that seems to have caused our problem was added ~3 weeks ago, and it's not clear what it does

https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/commit/d2aaa754b33bac8d1b850ec67c25d8428a9728d3

[jon_mason]

Thanks @phanley, just discovered the same issue and came to the same conclusion about the cause, but good to have it confirmed. And yes, no idea what this does, but clearly something Groups-related. 

I suppose it makes sense that only "Account admin" of the account roles has had this permission switched on by default, because it's the only one that exists by default, but pretty poor implementation on Instructure's part to not have thought about this or warned anyone about it. 

[audra_agnelly]

I was trying to test the Blueprint update. I'm not seeing the option to "Enable New Item Notifications" in the sync screen. I also think this wording may be confusing with the existing option "Send Notification" which I understand to be a notification to the instructors that content has been synced vs. enabling notifications for students. And to clarify does "Enable new item notification" mean that students who choose to receive Course Content notifications will also receive alerts when this is selected? And if this does apply to Course Content and they have that set to Notify Immediately would they receive individual emails for every new item created or modified by the blueprint sync?

[KarenLillywhite]

For

• Pronouns Removed When Setting is Disabled

When you have custom values in the list of personal pronouns,When the Enable Personal Pronouns account setting is disabled and then re-enabled, the list of available pronouns is reset to the default values of She/Her, He/Him and They/Them.   Users who had selected a custom item from the list do retain that custom value.

Our institution has put a lot of work into an expanded more inclusive list of pronouns.  Whilst we have no intention to disable the pronouns, if it were  to be cahnged accidentally, the loss of the list would be a significant issue for us.