Features Q&A: Canvas Release Notes (2024-07-20)

[InstContentTeam]

Looking to discuss these features from the 2024-07-20 Release Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

New Features

• Discussions: Ungraded Discussions Assign To
• Navigation: Analytics Hub
• Inbox: Add Signature to Messages
• Inbox: Add Auto Response to Messages
• Intelligent Insights: Analytics and AI
• Modules: Module and Assignment Differentiation
• Pages: Assign To Feature Available

Updated Features

• Assignments: Assign To Interface Update

Feature Options

• Admin Analytics: Navigation Updates
• Navigation: Removal of Legacy Account Analytics [Added 2024-07-09]

Feature Previews

• Rubrics: Enhanced Rubrics

Other Updates

• Analytics: Admin Analytics and Course Analytics migration to Data Access Platform (DAP) [Course Analytics migration Delayed as of 2024-07-19]
• Announcements and Discussions: Enforcement of Discussion/Announcement Redesign
• Discussions: Create and Edit Page is updated to InstUI
• Navigation: Removal of Legacy Account Analytics [Delayed as of 2024-07-19]
• New Analytics: Enforcement of New Course and User Analytics Feature Option [Delayed as of 2024-07-19]

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 · Accepted solution]

I'll start by saying that I'm very excited to finally have the option to assign modules, pages to individual students or sections. We have some use cases where this will really benefit our staff.

That said, I see 2 areas where we're going to get pushback:

1) the time fields have changed from a customizable entry to a drop-down that limits selections to on the half hour. Those limitations are not in alignment with our bell schedule or school day and staff should not be forced to use specific times.

2) On the assignment screen, staff need to click the Manage Assign To link to open the assign to panel. In most settings, an assignment's due date is a required entry, it populates the assignment on student's Canvas calendars and To-Do lists, it determines placement in a grading period, and it drives the behavior for "missing" and "late" statuses. With this update "due date" is a hidden field on the Assignment Settings screen and users have to click a link to see/update those fields. The interface needs to be updated back to a workflow where the default "assign to: Everyone" and the due date field is clearly visible to the instructor, maybe that means auto-launching the new sidebar. At our institution, we already run into numerous issues caused by instructors forgetting to add assignment due dates. Hiding that field on the assignment screen will only exacerbate those problems.

[AllisonHowell]

@audra_agnelly I think you're aware based on your activity in the blog post that we are updating designs based on the excellent points you and others brought up about the design on the assignment edit page. We will document in the community when that update is going out. 

Regarding your first point, you are able to type in the exact time, but I take your point that it doesn't appear like that's possible. I'm sharing that feedback with our team that designs these components. I'm curious if it would be helpful in the interim to adjust the drop-down selections to smaller increments? 

[PallaviJalakam]

I share similar concerns regarding the hidden fields, especially Due Dates, under the Manage Assign To link. While it may seem obvious that the Manage Assign To link is clickable, many instructors might overlook it.

Although I liked the slide-out tray, the previous design was more user-friendly since it required no extra clicks to access the Assign To and Dates fields.

I liked having the "Assign To" shortcut on the Assignments/Discussions/Quizzes screen without needing to enter the edit screen. This streamlined the process of setting different due dates for individual students or sections later in the semester.

I encountered a blip with the module unlock dates that I found frustrating.

when I try to lock a module or schedule a release date for a module, it defaults to the current time instead of 12:00 AM.

I understand the quick solution and the flexibility to schedule module releases/unlocks. However, in similar fields such as the Availability from setting for Assignments/Discussions/Quizzes and the Start Date in Course Settings, the default availability date is set at 12:00 AM. While adjusting the time is convenient, it introduces an extra step that was previously unnecessary.

Thanks!
P Jalakam

[vinoluac]

I also am having the issue where it defaults to the current time when adding a module unlock time, and it is maddening! No, I do not want this module to open at 4:19pm!

[AllisonHowell]

PallaviJalakam Thanks for this feedback! I think you'll like the change we are making to the edit pages that will get rid of the extra click when editing a due date from the edit page. Regarding the lock until time for modules, we can look into that. 

[PallaviJalakam]

Thank you @AllisonHowell ! Just checked the Manage Due Dates for pages and that's what I would imaging while setting lock until time for modules. 12 AM Default is much better than current time as default. One less extra click. 🙂

Also, noticed the name change of Manage Assign To to Manage Due Dates and Assign To in our beta version. This label at least will indicate that there are Due Dates fields within this link. (From a usability point, a tooltip would be more helpful!)

However, the error message that appears in the Manage Due Dates and Assign To tray when editing a copied assignment with a due date before the course start is still not visible until you click the Manage Due Dates and Assign To link and the assignment fails to save.

It would be beneficial to display this error message outside the Manage Due Dates and Assign To tray. In the older UI, the error message below the Due Date/Available from fields made sense because these options were on a single screen. With the new interface requiring an additional click to access due dates, the error message is not noticeable and could frustrate faculty who have difficulty identifying the issue.

[brendaa]

I reported to support the problem with error messages in Due Dates/Availability Dates not showing unless you click the Manage Assign To button. They replied it is a known issue (despite not appearing on the Known Issue list) and added my ticket to an issue they are tracking. They could not provide any ETA on a fix.  This is frustrating for faculty who have no idea why they can't save an assignment.

[clpatter]

I spent half an hour this morning trying to figure out why one of our instructors couldn't save.  And now I find out Canvas has known about the problem since at least 7/31, but haven't bothered to let anyone know.  Things like this make a busy beginning of semester time even more stressful for everyone involved.

[montgjoa]

I tried typing in my own time and it was very finicky. It kept deleting the time. I eventually got it to work, but I'm not sure what I did differently to make it work. Also, I noticed that 12:00am changes to 11:59pm. So if a teacher did want something to be due at 12am, they might not notice that the assignment automatically changes the due date to be 24 hours later. 

[AllisonHowell]

Thanks for testing this! The 12:00 am change to 11:59 is something that has always existed in Canvas so we elected not to change this functionality. 

[emg0039]

I would like to second the concerns in point 2 here. 

Every single assignment and quiz I create for my classes has a due date, and one of the things that faculty at my institution are asked to do in pretty much every teaching focused faculty development workshop is to put the due dates in Canvas so that our students can benefit from the to-do list.  Requiring instructors to go through extra click-links and wait for a side-bar to open in order to set the due date and time is actually very burdensome.  It adds at least 30 seconds of unnecessary (and new) work to the creation or modification of every single quiz/assignment.  When we have hundreds of these each semester, this adds up to significant frustration and not a trivial amount of time lost.  

One of the key things we teach our undergraduate students in engineering is to identify ways to streamline a process and remove barriers for the system user to accomplish their required tasks.  Hiding the assignment due date menu does the exact opposite and adds a barrier that, in it's least-bad case adds work time and frustration to instructors trying to use the platform, but as the original author noted may also cause some instructors to leave off this information entirely which is a great disservice to students in most cases.

[tchilt]

I'll also second number 2 here. Please don't hide the due date fields behind a link. It makes the interface less usable.

[MitchellHarris]

I asked the Canvas Chat help about how to change due dates because they weren't where I expected.

The 'Assign To' button works great but... I would never in a million years have wanted to click on the button in order to do -anything- with dates. 

Change the label to 'Due Dates' or 'Dates' or -something- short that'll give a clue about ... dates.

[henricksen_6]

I'm suggesting "Due dates and Assign to" so those looking for just due dates know where to go and those looking to differentiate in terms of who know as well. 

[AllisonHowell]

Thank you all for your input here! Based on feedback from you and others we are restoring the previous user interface. Engineers are working on that now and we will let everyone know once that has been updated. 

[sara_weaver]

Can we get more information on what "restoring the previous user interface" means? This seems like a really big change that, once again, is hidden in the comment section of a discussion post of release notes (insert dizzy emoji here). 

[MeazellOUHSC]

Spot on here, Sara.  It's just ridiculous we have to chase discussion posts and try to keep up when something like this should be an announcement sent out by Canvas.  Not when the site is down but when they have a big issue and it's going to be addressed.  This just does not give me confidence at all.

[vinoluac]

What do you mean by restoring previous interface? And when will that change take place? We are very quickly moving toward fall semester and we want to make sure we are communicating any potential changes to faculty in a timely manner.

[AllisonHowell]

Hi all, apologies for hiding that news in this Q&A! We are prepping a blog post now with more details and so that we have one centralized place to ask questions and address feedback. Stay tuned for that very soon!

The only design we are working to change is the "Manage Assign To" pop out. We are working to add back the ability to more easily see "due dates" and "availability dates", as you could prior to Saturday's release.

While I can't commit on an exact date, we are doing our best to address this quickly because we want to minimize the impact back to school at institutions (acknowledging that for some it's already happened).

I've attached a screenshot to indicate what this will look like when it's back. Again, more details forthcoming in a blog post shortly! 

[AllisonHowell]

Blog post is here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/The-Product-Blog/Updates-to-the-Assign-To-Interface/ba-p/610506 

[rachelssm]

Hi, I was advised by @chris Hofer in the community to post my feedback here. This is what I shared with him:

Hi, I've been teaching with Canvas for about 10 years and the recent changes to the interface are a huge downgrade in functionality. I don't like them, my students are complaining, formatting is routinely getting messed up, and my colleagues are also bemoaning the difficulties these changes are introducing. Is there any way to give feedback to the Canvas people or to revert back (permanently!) to the old version?

I'm referring to the changes to discussions, mostly, that rolled out with the change in design, perhaps sometime in June. It's no longer possible to fully compress discussions (so that no text is shown; just the name and heading), and newest discussions are now shown at the top of the page rather than at the bottom, so that an ongoing discussion can't be read chronologically from top to bottom. It's also not possible to sort by all "unread" discussions the way we were able to with the previous version.

The other main issue is that with Firefox, there are huge spacing gaps when text is copied and pasted, and I'm not sure if this is browser-specific, but today I got a random large text letter showing up in one of my announcements.

[celiaecc]

Hi, I would like to add to this as we have been receiving feedback too from instructors that they and their students are frustrated with this latest update to discussions. We have had the feature preview enabled since it as first included in the options. That is common practice for us so we can figure out what works and doesn't for our courses and we appreciate Canvas providing this. What we were not expecting was for more features to be included in the update than we had with the preview. The first is that the redesign did not automatically hide all responses. If a student wants to verify one of their posts or respond to something specific, they have to open all responses. It also does not allow students to review all posts in an easy way and allow them to view multiple discussions in a quick and easy way before responding and expanding on the discussion. This has also made it difficult for instructors to do the same, creating more one-sided discussions. That's a lot of time and effort for someone to take especially in larger classes, to click every unread post. 

The second is the change with the "assign to" functionality which has already been highlighted and expressed in the same way that describes the issues we're having. 

The main reason for coming to the community is to express frustration as Canvas has done well with providing feature previews to avoid surprises. We typically turn them on so we can try things out and get used to new functionality and "looks'. This latest update seemed to move away from that practice a bit with some additional, unpleasant changes making their way into full deployments that we were not prepared for. 

[Lpicsmith]

I agree with your assessment of the issue and I would add another.  Because now defining the due date is a separate window that requires instructors select 'apply' to confirm the due date, it creates the illusion that this 'apply' feature confirms the assignment submission.  It does NOT.  On my screen 'apply' hides the submission button(I sort of get why this would be but it causes another layer of an issue) so it is easy to forget that the 'apply' feature ONLY relates to the due date and not the assignment itself.  While before this change there was not way to delete an assignment by selecting a due date, now there is .  If you hit 'apply' but do not then hit the 'submit' button for the entire assignment, you will lose all of the work you have prepared for that assignment.  (Yes, this did happen to me!)

[ElizabethGarza1]

I agree with point 2 as well (though 1 would be a problem for me as well!)  Manage Assign To is not intuitive and requires extra clicks just to do something that already existed easily. While I've been told by Instructure that this is directly related to the modules and pages improvements, this is now more difficult and requires extra work. Instructure, if it isn't broke, let's not fix it. This is creating an environment that feels tricky for users - because they can't save assignments that were brought over from past instances and it's because they can't locate the dates in the system easily. 

[breklis]

I agree 100% with this! I am very excited about the ability to differentiate and assign modules! I also have a lot of concerns about the manage due dates functionality in assignments for all the same reasons stated above.

An additional concern is that the ability to differentiate due dates by student group no longer exists. Instructors with a handful of students who need extended due dates on every assignment relied on this feature. They do not want to create group assignments where once one person in the group submits on behalf of the other group members. Instead, they need to be able to give a different due date for a group of students. Our instructors do not have the ability to create sections, so we can not use that as a workaround.

One of our teachers reached out and has 30 students who need extended due dates. It is not reasonable for this teacher to manually select 30 students every time she creates an assignment. In addition, the chances of her missing one or more students in this process is very high and would potentially result in her being out of IEP compliance. Instructure, please fix this.

Thank you!

[BethSmithvuw]

Noticed a bug with the "Modules: Module and Assignment Differentiation" where by when adding in requirements for elements of a module if there is a text header in the module it 'bombs out' the settings window. logged a support ticket about it. #10907133

[venitk]

I have major concerns about using the new rubrics while grading. 

1. When using traditional view, unless the instructor is using a large monitor, they cannot see the assignment with the rubric open. In other words, the rubric covers the entire assignment. I used by laptop and I couldn't see anything. Admittedly, my resolution is slightly higher on my laptop because of my middle-aged eyes, but many of my instructors also set their laptops to a higher res. Even in your video, which presumably was set to a normal resolution, you can see that the rubric hides much of the assignment. 
2. If the rubric has more than 5 criteria (which would necessitate using the traditional view), instructors will need to reference the rubric and the assignment while grading. They won't be able to remember all those criteria and how the submission does for all of them. 
3. For all view modes, it seems as though the rubric opens in a tray over the speedgrader interface, not next to the interface as the current rubric system does. This prevents the instructor from being able to see some of the annotation tools. For example, when using the point annotation tool, the box to write a note connected to the point is under the rubric tray.
4. If I close the rubric without clicking "submit assignment" (say, if I'm only partway done with grading and want to look at the assignment to see how I would grade a criteria), my previous notes are not saved. The instructor could click "submit assignment" to save their progress, but then there's a chance the student might see an incompletely graded assignment, correct? Most of my instructors don't use the manual posting option because it's confusing. 

Respectfully, although I like the improvements made to the build side of the rubrics, the way this tool interfaces with Speedgrader is not ready to be released even as a feature option IMO. These behaviors make it basically unusable on a laptop (IDK how it would work on mobile), and only halfway useable on a larger monitor. Not a programmer, but to me the obvious solution would seem to be to have the rubric open not on a tray but instead in the speedgrader interface itself, as current rubrics do, which I assume would change a lot about how the tool is built on the back end. 

I will look into submitting these concerns to my CSM, since I know this is a Q&A forum, but I wanted to add these thoughts here just in case I can't get through to the CSM.

[RaviKoll]

Thank you for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback on the new rubric redesign in Canvas LMS. Your insights are incredibly valuable to us.

We are aware of some of the limitations you've highlighted regarding the redesigned rubrics in SpeedGrader and are actively working on improving the experience. We acknowledge that the current experience is not perfect, but please know that we are committed to making the necessary refinements. Your feedback plays a crucial role in helping us prioritize these improvements.

If you have any further concerns or suggestions, please feel free to reach out. We appreciate your patience and support as we work to enhance the Canvas LMS experience.

Thank you again for your valuable feedback.

[leward]

Hi @RaviKoll.. I was just testing the new rubrics design on our beta instance, and I noticed that the new interface does  not appear when creating or editing a rubric directly within an assignment (as opposed to within the Rubrics) tool. Should I be seeing the revised interface regardless of the location of the rubric?

[PallaviJalakam]

That's correct! The option to create a rubric from the Assignment page uses old interface.

[leward]

@PallaviJalakam,

Really???  I know there are other issues to resolve, but I can't imagine enabling this feature option until the same interface is available throughout the application.  Offering a different create/edit interface in different locations within the app will only confuse instructors.

[audra_agnelly]

Can we get more clarification on the rules for Archive function for Rubrics? My interpretation is that this would be used in lieu of Deleting when a Rubric is attached to a graded assignment (like archiving grading schemes). I attempted to archive some rubrics in a test course but I get a popup message that just says "Error Archiving Rubric" with no additional clarification as to why. I was only able to archive Rubrics where the "location used" column was empty. When Location Used lists 'courses and assignments' I get this error, but if archiving is not available for rubrics used in courses and assignments, why is the Archive menu item even a selectable option? The option to delete is disabled for those rubrics, I would expect the Archive option to be disabled as well if the rubric can't be archived..

[RaviKoll]

This seems to be a bug. If you continue to experience this issue, please reach out to your CSM, and we will promptly investigate it.

[audra_agnelly]

Thanks @RaviKoll , I can do that, but my question wasn't really answered. What is Archiving supposed to do and when would a teacher Archive a rubric? Is the bug that Archive is enabled in the drop-down menu, or is the bug that I get an error when I try to archive a linked rubric linked to assignments? The release notes don't provide any details about this feature and as of this morning the Canvas guides for Rubrics have not been updated to reflect this weekend's release.

[RaviKoll]

The archive functionality can be utilized to restrict a rubric's future usage. An archived rubric cannot be added to an assignment until it is unarchived.

[LauraCira]

Regarding the Assignments: Assign To Interface Update feature, I agree very much @audra_agnelly that the the Assign To block is crucial enough to warrant placement on the assignment settings page without the need to open a new window to access it. Most of the time, assignments/tests will have one date range and it is simpler to have this necessary feature surfaced for efficiency. If the instructor needs to post additional time frames, that would be when the new flyout is most useful. 

Additionally, I would like to request that we allow due dates (and Module availability) to be able to be set for course groups as well as sections or by student. Many courses create ad hoc groups for projects or different learning tracks, and assigning things like a unique Module or Assignment or Test to these groups is critical for clarity in a large class. Giving these groups their own availability and due dates is often very useful, as well. 

[audra_agnelly]

@LauraCira thanks for lifting up Groups. I think that's a whole other conversation too since Groups are used by instructors to differentiate instructions, but the Group feature itself is designed for Group work and as a result it doesn't work for some things (ex. External Tool Assignments).

But also, take a look at the discussion on the post The Latest on Releasing Modules to Students and Sections, there's a whole conversation there about the Assign To changes in Assignments and some updates from Instructure. 

@AllisonHowell is anyone at Instructure monitoring and responding to questions in the Release/Deploy notes Q&A anymore?

[AllisonHowell]

@audra_agnelly Thank you for calling out that we missed these questions. We're getting on this right away! 

@LauraCira Yes, we are looking into what it would take to assign to groups as we understand this would be extremely beneficial! And we are also going to adjust the design based on the feedback we received. This change will be documented in the release/deploy notes when it goes out. We are working on it now though I can't give an exact date yet. 

[breklis]

@AllisonHowell Is there an update on this? I understand you did not have an exact date on this back in July, but it's been over a month. I'm so glad it's being looked into! We really need to be able to assign to student groups. Thank you!