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

[kailey]

With the 7/20 release, the Announcements tool now has multiple references to 'Discussions' that shouldn't be there. I had originally reported this issue to Instructure (case 10923016) on July 2, 2024. The code that introduces these multiple bugs to Announcements was originally supposed to be part of an earlier deploy that was postponed. My CSM informed me that it was postponed so that Instructure had more time to address these issues. You have now released the new code to production, while knowing about these issues and bugs. It is truly frustrating that Instructure relies on their customers to QA their system and even when we do share feedback about discovered bugs and usability issues, Instructure still continues to release code that introduces these bugs. As you can see in my screenshots, there are a number of problems with the Announcements tool now.

1. When editing an existing announcement, a message displays saying, "Students have already submitted to this discussion, so group settings cannot be changed."
   • The message uses 'discussion' instead of 'announcement'. 
   • No student has left a comment on this announcement, so the message shouldn't be appearing at all.
   • What are "group" settings? It's not clear if it's referring to the "Post To" field, but I have not entered a specific section. The announcement is at the default - All Sections. 
2. When an error message comes up (second screenshot), it also refers to 'discussion' instead of 'announcement'. 
3. Parts of the page refers to 'Participants' while the message uses 'Students'. This is inconsistent and could cause confusion. 

When can we expect these issues in Announcements to be fixed?

[SamGarza1]

Hi @kailey 

Thank you for raising this issue. We've resolved the first two points already and the fixes will be on production 7/31/24. I will pass this on to the team for the inconsistent language, and we will work to make it consistent. 

[MeazellOUHSC]

We have an additional issue where an instructor edits announcements and gets a notification. They see all that above and then get a notification each time they edit the announcement, even though it's post-dated. I've reported it via a ticket, but I thought I'd add that here.

[rita_mitra]

In the first Announcement issue, if one sets the Announcement to display at a certain time, it sends an email notification immediately regardless, and/or if one edits the announcement, it alos send an email notification immediately. Will this also be fixed in the July 31 deployment? Thanks! 

[le21]

Having the same issue. But not only do I get notification for all the announcements I create and I edit, so do the other instructors that are also in the class. 

[PallaviJalakam]

I've encountered the same warning messages while editing announcements that do not have any comments/submissions and was wondering if I've overlooked something.

I hope that this issue will be resolved before our faculty return from their summer vacation to avoid any potential concerns or frustrations.

[emg0039]

I have run into a surprising result with the implementation of the "Assign To" button that we can now access without actually editing the whole assignment.

For assignments that have a submission type that is "external tool" - I don't have the "Assign To" button at the top of the page (before clicking the edit button) like I do for quizzes and assignments where the submission type is a file upload in Canvas.  I have not created separate assignments for every submission type to get the full list of which submission type assignments do and do not have the " Assign To" button before editing the assignment- the only assignment types I have this semester are file upload and external tool so those are the two I have checked.

I have attached images of the assignments with and without the "Assign To" button.

I think this might just be a bug or error in the programming, even when there is an external tool linked for the assignment submission I still always set the due date and time in Canvas so it shows up in the to-do list.

[PallaviJalakam]

I can confirm that the "Assign To" shortcut is accessible for all submission types except for External Tool.

[marusak]

We would like to report a bug with the new Assign To experience. When an instructor imports content from a past Canvas course into a new Canvas course and then attempts to edit an assignment, they are not able to save the assignment.

There is an error message about the due date/availability dates (which have come from the past course), but that error message is hiding in the new Assign To tray. If the instructor does not know about the new Assign To tray/how to open it, then they have no idea why they are not able to save the assignment.

We are about to have hundreds of instructors coming back for fall who will be copying content from past Canvas courses into new Canvas courses and then making edits. They do not know about the new Assign To experience yet.

Please make this error message more prominent (not hidden in the new Assign To tray) so that an instructor would realize why they are not able to save the assignment and how to fix the problem.

[henricksen_6]

Thank you for pointing this out @marusak ! 

We filed a report through Canvas support about this and they said "Currently the new Manage Assign to format is looking like it will remain as is. However, I certainly agree there is a better way to make this information present when editing items. In order to provide this feedback so our engineers can better review this, i would recommend going to this page (linking us to the page we are on) to leave those comments and concerns" Basically a "we know there is a bug, go vent here" response. So I'm venting...

Like Marusak we anticipate hundreds of instructors (or more, we are at Ohio State) being confused at why their imported content can't be saved. And it's because of a hidden error message that they can't even see until they click on the Manage Assign to link that they don't know to click on. The error is also about dates, not who to assign it to (directly). They will be frustrated and our support team will take the brunt of it.

Two fixes that I hope to see here:

1) Marusak's suggestion to make the error message more prominent (or actually visible at all) is essential! 

2) change the link name on the assignment edit to something more indicative of what it does. Something like "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]

This issue made it to the engineering team and we are working on addressing it. 

[montgjoa]

It took me three days to figure out how to change assignment due dates. Once I did figure it out, I posted about it on my department Slack, and every other teacher who's teaching a summer class responded that they had to resort to using the "Edit Assignment Dates" page, because they didn't notice the "manage assign to" link or realize that it had anything to do with due dates. 

Another commenter noted the rubric updates, and I have to second their concerns. It looks like those changes haven't been pushed to my institution yet, but I'm very concerned about how the rubrics will work on Speedgrader once they are. Please keep the rubric as a resizable window that can sit side-by-side with the student submission. I can't imagine having to open and close the rubric constantly while grading. 

[henricksen_6]

We have had users say similar things. The "Manage Assign to" doesn't intuitively suggest anything to do with due dates. If an instructor just wants to change due dates, not who it's assigned to, they get completely lost with this new change. 

If nothing else, maybe the link in the assignment edit can be changed to "Due dates and Assign to" so they can at least get a better sense of what the link actually does there. 

[bblanc]

We have the following issues with the Announcements update:

1. All instructor in the site are getting email notification when any instructor makes edits to a delayed Announcement which is really confusing.  They do not get email notification once it is posted to the site.
2. Students are not getting email notification for delayed Announcement (even that they can see it on the site and their notification is set to immediately.
3. We have announcement comments disabled and locked at the Account level, but when you go to create an Announcements at a course site by default you have the Options "Allow Participants to Comment" check, which is wrong and confusing!

I have tickets open for all 3. - Please fix these ASAP!

[audra_agnelly]

#1 is causing a lot of confusion right now. We have leadership teams preparing communications to staff that are sent out through Canvas courses, they immediately make the perfectly logical assumption that their drafted announcement has gone out to everyone in their course.

I'm not seeing the behavior in #2. I tested some delayed announcements and delayed announcements with multiple edits/saves and the notification did go out to my test student accounts at the set delay time. Perhaps this was fixed in Wednesday's release. I had a ticket in about #3 and was notified that was fixed Wednesday. 

[jb2483929]

From our testing of enhanced rubrics, it seems that only the person who first completed the rubric for a student’s submission can make any changes to it. For example, someone in a Teacher role cannot edit a rubric scored by a TA. This is a change in behavior, and not a good one.

[PallaviJalakam]

During my testing of enhanced rubrics, I successfully archived rubrics that were not attached to any assignments.

However, for the rubrics listed under the Location Used column, I managed to archive one, but encountered an issue with archiving another. The error message displayed is "Error Archiving Rubric" with no additional information on the cause of the failure. Additionally, the Delete option is disabled for both rubrics, which I can understand the rationale for.

When I attempt to edit an archived rubric, I receive a warning message stating, "Editing is limited for this rubric as it has already been used for grading." However, I have not attached this rubric to any assignments; I was only testing the Actions options available for Archived rubrics.

I may not understand why anyone would need to edit an archived rubric. Typically, we archive a rubric if it is no longer in use, keeping it as a backup option for potential future needs. In such cases, the rubric can be unarchived or duplicated. Duplicating an archived rubric moves it to the unarchived list and we can edit the rubric from there.

However, editing an archived rubric directly seems unnecessary. Moreover, the warning message I receive is inaccurate since I have not used this rubric for any assignments.

In another instance, I was able to edit a rubric that is attached to an assignment and has already been used for grading, without receiving any warning message.

Shouldn't this error message appear when editing an unarchived rubric that is actually attached to an assignment and is used for grading, rather than when editing an archived rubric that is not attached to any assignment?

It would be helpful to have the list of limitations for the new rubrics interface.

[EspenSmith-USN]

The Assign-feature for pages will probably not be much used at our institution.

But it is very, very visible as a button of it's own.

Is it possible to place 'Assign' in the three-dot-menu next to the buttons, on top of pages?
Or at least have the opportunity to do so?

[twagoner]

In showing the new features to our faculty, a few things came up in regards to "assign to" in the module settings --dates and requirements/prerequirements.

Instructors find there are always needs for exceptions where students need to get around the module lock dates or the requirements for completion (military service, for example).  If the availability dates for the module were tied to the "assign to" as they are in Pages, for example, then we could give different availability dates for different students. As it is now we either have to have a module lock date on for all or for none. Please consider tying availaility dates to the module "assign to."

If a module is assigned to a specific section then its prereqs/requirements are only for that section, is that correct?

[AllisonHowell]

Hi @twagoner, that's great food for thought. Thanks for sharing! You are correct about the prerequs/requirements being tied to the section or students the module is assigned to. 

[mary_speight]

The new "assign to" function doesn't seem like it was well tested by Instructure before implementation. Our institution typically adds a section for students finishing a grade of incomplete that has extended dates past the term dates. The "assign to" function is not recognizing the extended section dates if the course term dates have expired when using the "Manage Assign To" link at the bottom of an assignment/quiz, but it DOES work by clicking on the Assign To button at the top of the screen in Assignments and Classic Quizzes. The attachments show the same assignment.

[AllisonHowell]

@mary_speight we make a concerted effort to test as much as possible before release, but unfortunately things do occasionally get missed. We have not heard of this issue before -- would you please report this through our support channels? 

[audra_agnelly]

RE: Announcement UI Changes and Notifications

When you edit a posted annoucement, what is the intended behavior of the prompt "Would you like to send a notification to users that the Announcement has been edited?" > Send

1) Who are Users? is it just students? If instructors have the "Announcement Created By You" notification turned on, should they expect a notifications too? Currently they are not receiving the notification, and I have an instructor asking why they're not getting the new notification. Meanwhile, when we have a delayed announced instructors don't see the Send option and are getting notifications for every edit.

2) The phrasing of this asks if you want to let users know that the announcement has been edited, but the notification that students receive is just a new notification of the announcement. There is no clarification in the notification language that this is an update to a previously posted assignment unless the instructor puts in explicit text that the announcement has been updated. If the notification isn't going to indicate that the announcement has been updated, then the prompt should be phrased differently. Something like "Do you want to send a new notification to users with this updated text." 

[ACl4]

Hi there! I am grateful for the new Assign To feature and for your quick attention to the issues related to it! I wanted to ask something about the Pages Assign to. Currently, to see the available from/until dates/times that are set for a page, one must use the three dot menu from the Pages navigation link and then select Assign To to view these dates. Is there anything in the works for putting the available from/to dates in the Pages menu, such as adding these as columns on this page (see attached screenshot)? I think that could be very useful! Thanks so much for considering.

[GideonWilliams]

Top Navigation Placement Feature

Since last night, we have lost the ability to view all of the pages when you click on View All Pages. The scrollbar only goes down so far.

If you sort the pages, you can find the 'hidden' pages. I checked our beta instance and this works fine.

The only change I made was to enable the Top Navigation Placement feature.

Sure enough when I disabled it, I could then scroll down and see all the pages.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this issue. It only shows itself if you have 50 + pages saved in your course!

[GideonWilliams]

Having first put forward the differentiation in Modules idea over 6 years ago I am very pleased to see it in place. 

I am fairly astonished that no-one has mentioned this but was it not possible to include Text Headers in the Assign to feature?

As a school, Text Headers are vital for grouping content and making content more manageable and easier to follow. Because you cannot assign them and you still want to use them, you end up with some very confusing elements in the Module! with loads and loads of headers with nothing underneath.

Would it be possible to add this feature in please. It means that you can then have Modules with different tasks for different groups in a lesson format.

[Chris_Hofer]

Adding this here...as the Canvas Deploy Notes (2024-08-28) - Instructure Community - 612024 (canvaslms.com) indicate that Instructure will be reverting the dates interface back to what it used to look like (or very close, at least) on Wednesday, August 28, 2024.