Feature Q&A: Canvas Release Notes (2022-12-17)

[InstContentTeam]

Looking to discuss these features from the 2022-12-17 Release Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

Updated Features

• Grades: Student Feedback Visibility Update
• Permissions: Manage Course Content Granularity

Feature Options

• New Quizzes: Rich Content Editor in New Quizzes [Feature Delayed as of 2023-01-10]
• New Quizzes: Blueprint Courses Support New Quiz Locking
• New Quizzes: Allow Clearing Selection of Multiple Choice Question Answers
• New Quizzes: Fill in the Blank with Multiple Word Bank Improvements
• Pages: Schedule Page Publication Default Status Update
  
  

Updated Features

• Inbox: Improved Inbox Functionality [Added 2022-11-22] [Feature Delayed as of 2022-12-08]

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

[audra_agnelly]

Very exciting release notes!!! The lack of the media recorder in New Quizzes has been a huge barrier for many of my teachers, so this RCE update will really help us move towards broader adoption of the New Quizzes platform. Kudos!

I'm also loving the Feedback popout, I think it's much easier to read that the inline comments we see now. Is there any plan to parallel this functionality in the C4E interface? Right now, kids see "View Feedback" which takes them to the submission page instead of just focusing the teacher comments. (The C4E grades tab also does not show any indicator of rubric grading which I think is an important indicator to show).

[jsailor]

Hi, @audra_agnelly! Yes, we do plan to parallel this functionality in the C4E interface. We'll update with more information on timing when we have it available.

[audra_agnelly]

@jsailor will rubric visibility also be part of this feedback enhancement for C4E? From the C4E grades screen, the only way for parents to get to the submission screen from grades is by clicking View Feedback (clicking the assignment title takes you to the assignment description) where they can click View Rubric. If a teacher uses a rubric but makes no comment the Feedback link is not available and it is near impossible for them to find the rubric scoring and most parents would probably not even know that a rubric was used. I received this from a parent today who went through a lot of hoops to find the rubric scoring:

"In the "Grades" section of canvas, it just shows a copy of a blank rubric without scores for each task graded. [she's describing the regular assignment details screen] At conferences, the teacher was easily able to see the graded rubric from her view in Canvas. She was not aware that parents and or students may not be able to see the graded rubric.

Just today, I was able to access the graded rubric for a project. A copy of a graded rubric can be found in the subject's "Schedule" tab on Canvas. First, a parent has to go to the "Grades" tab to see that a project was graded with a score; the parent also needs to note the date the assignment should have been turned in. Then the parent needs to go back to French and click on the "Schedule" tab. In the schedule tab, the parent needs to click back to previous weeks to find the date of the assignment (in this case Le Monster Project was turned in Nov. 4). You click on the Project assignment when located on the correct date in the schedule. Then, you can see a tab in the top right corner that says "Show Rubric."

[mpfaff1]

Some feedback on the Schedule Page Publication:

1. It would really help to have a tooltip here, or some text alongside the field, that explains why this is disabled, i.e. "This Page is already published." or "You cannot schedule a Page that's already published." or "Unpublish this page before you can schedule it." It took me a minute to figure out why it wasn't working. Instructors might assume this behaves like "Availability"/"Lock" dates (which work regardless of whether something is already published). I'd also add a similar tooltip to the "Save and Publish" button when it's disabled/grayed-out because a Page is scheduled.
   
    
2. Add a "Published" status to the top right corner of the Page Details/Settings/Edit page like there is for Assignments. An instructor may mistakenly think a Page is unpublished and, again, be confused why they can't schedule it.
   

    

3. Ideally, adding a publish/unpublish/schedule button to the Page Details/Settings/Edit page would be great.
   
   
4. Do links to scheduled Pages show up in the Link Validator tool as linking to unpublished content? (It should, I just haven't tested it.)
   
   
5. Everything else related to item visibility (publishing, unpublishing, requirements, locking/availability dates, etc.) are all available from the Modules page. To be consistent, scheduling the Publish Date belongs there too. Publish Date is comparable to Lock/Availability dates, but it's not on the "Edit Assignment Dates" page for faculty to quickly schedule all their dates at the same time, making it harder to update at the start of a new semester.
   
   You could improve the workflow a lot by doing one of these: 1. On the Modules Page, click the three dots, click Edit, and add the "Publish At" date selector to the popup that appears. 2. Or have the existing "Publication Options" popup appear any time you hit the publish button on a Page, (like what already happens for Files). 3. Or add a Schedule Publish Date option to the three dots menu in the Modules.
   (I'd add this option to the Pages page for people who don't use Modules.)

    

   

    

[r_v_jones]

Has Permissions: Manage Course Content Granularity been released on Beta ? I can't find it on our environment . Thanks

[r_v_jones]

Hi All

Seasons greeting to you 😊

I’ve been looking at the Manage Course Content Granularity permissions, testing is proving interesting - I created an account based on a teacher but with no deleting rights. It’s proved to be interesting and I wondered if anyone else has been looking at it?

I guess my confusion is what it counts as Content

So with these setting it allows me to delete

• Discussion boards
• Pages
• Announcements
• files uploaded and used in a Page

It does not allow me to delete

• Modules
• assignments
• quizzes

Any thoughts welcome. I accept I might be getting something wrong here. Been a long week.

[jpoulos]

@r_v_jones Thanks for the question, and for poking at this. You should see a fairly detailed description of what this does if you click on the permissions title. We tried to be as comprehensive as possible in this. I agree, the definition of Content is a bit convoluted. However, for the examples where you've mentioned where you can still delete certain content, despite being restricted, they have their own permissions sets already, so it does not make sense to bundle them under "Course Content".

Discussions: This has its own permissions already.
Pages: This has its own granular permission, "Manage Pages"
Announcements: This one may be misbehaving so I am looking into this with my team.
Files: this has its own granular permission under "Manage Course Files"

A good general rule of thumb is probably to assume that, unless it's managed by its own permission, it probably belongs under the general "Course Content" permission; however, rely on the sidebar explainer text under "What it does" for each permission.

Thanks again for looking, I hope this helps.
Jesse Poulos
Sr. Product Manager, Instructure Inc.

[r_v_jones]

Thanks @jpoulos for getting back to me on this. 
We have some potential use cases for this upgrade. 

[audra_agnelly]

In the grades screen update in Beta, the columns Score and Out Of are now just one column "out of." This is a problem, because the bottom of the score column currently shows the percent average for each assignment group while the Out Of column shows the point totals (ex 120/135). In Beta I am now only seeing the percentage at the bottom of the out of column. Those percent totals are really important for transparency around grades and as an admin I use them to answer questions that come (like I was doing today when when I discovered the points missing).

Production:

Beta:

 

 

[mpfaff1]

Adding my voice to this: We're not thrilled that this change came right at the end of the Fall semester when grades are due, and now faculty have come to us asking where to find the point totals they used to use on the student Grades page. I like the feedback buttons (which makes getting feedback clearer for students), but I'm not sure why the point totals had to be taken away with this update (which makes grades less clear). 

Please consider putting point totals back in so that faculty and students can have a clearer understanding of their grades. What's the alternative way to see student point totals without being and instructor and having to download a CSV file?

[audra_agnelly]

When can we expect the relevant New Quizzes Guides be updated with the changes in this release? I'd like to link to those in my staff newsletter.

[w0677765]

In changing the grading page for students, the points for grading categories are no longer visible. I use this feature to track students' fieldwork hours and use contract grading, so I need them to be able to see this information. I would like those category points totals to be visible or at least have the option to make them visible for my students. While we're on the topic, I wish the gradebook was more flexible in general. Contract grading is used by many of my colleagues and we have to jump through hoops and tie ourselves in knots to make it work in Canvas.

I also would like to share that it seems problematic to implement changes to grading systems and features when the semester is not technically over. We're still grading finals and working on final grades.

[James]

The decision to use the flyout for the grades page feedback is a bad one. I had been directing students there to check for comments because it was one of the few places in the web interface where the comments retained the line breaks. Now that is gone.

I have a lot of complete/incomplete assignments and leave lengthy feedback about what needs to be fixed. It makes very little sense when ran together. Plus, I tell my students to use paragraphs and then it looks like I don't follow my own advice.

At the end of the last term, I did an analysis of student behavior in the course and how it tied to their final course grades. We found that looking at the grades page was one of the items that showed a high correlation with final score. I thought it was because students who check their grades are conscientious about things, but this reminds me that I had told them the grades page was the place to go to be able to read my comments in an understandable manner. Maybe it's because the students who checked the grades page were able to understand the feedback.

If you do not allow us to enter HTML into submission comments, then you need to display it in a way that what little formatting we can provide is retained instead of running it all together.

[Anya_]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems with the Fill in the Blank word bank that the options presented are always the order of the correct answers in the statement plus any distractors added onto the end. Therefore, any student who ever reads these forums could cotton this out and basically game the quizzes. Is there a way for us to change the order of options in the word bank? 

[Sylvia_Ami]

I just discovered that students will have a hard time finding video comments left by their instructor. Any media comments (video or audio) do not appear in the Feedback Tray (see image below). How will the student know they have a video comment or where to find it? I leave video comments and then in the text comment area, I say, "Please watch the video for more feedback from me." But then the student looking at the Feedback Tray won't see the video comment and they won't know how to get it. The student would have to know to click on the assignment title (see image below). That is not intuitive.

Are there any plans to add media comments in the Feedback Tray?