Features Q&A: Canvas Release Notes (2024-08-17)

[InstContentTeam]

Looking to discuss these features from the 2024-08-17 Release Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

New Features

• Navigation: Lucid Available in Course Navigation- Instructor, Student [Added 2024-08-06]

Feature Options

• External Apps: Allow Toggle Placements for LTI 1.3 Tools- Admin, Instructor [Added 2024-08-21]
• New Quizzes: Custom Results Feedback

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

[anf107]

Please reconsider the adding of Lucid to the course navigation in all courses.  This is the opposite of what we would like.  Some of our faculty will use the tool, but now everyone that doesn't want to use the tool will need to remove it from their course.    

This comment is a drawback and not a benefit.  Sending students to a tool that faculty haven't explored or used is not how we want to help our students.

  
Change Benefit

This enables students to access the Lucid integration even if instructors haven't had the opportunity to explore the tool yet.

[dbrace]

Why is there such a push to adopting Lucid, especially when (unless there is a separate subscription) institutions do not have the ability to centrally manage the integration between Canvas and Lucid.

We have the developer key disabled so that Lucid does not appear anywhere until the standard (free) integration between Canvas and Lucid gives administrators more control.

[brendaa]

It looks like the Lucid navigation item is enabled by default. Is there any option at the admin level to change that? We try to keep enabled menu items to a minimum. We'd prefer this to be an option that faculty choose to enable.

[tonywee]

The New Quizzes Custom Results Feedback Feature seems to be enabled by default at the Account Level as there's no option. It's automatically enabled within New Quiz settings. We'd prefer for this to be an Account level option, as per the release notes.

[chriscas]

Hi @tonywee,

Just for a bit of clarification about the notes (which could be a bit confusing in this case).  For this feature, the notes are indicating that to use this feature, the New Quizzes option itself has to be enabled, so people not using new quizzes will not see this.  I don't believe it was intended to mean this would be a separate feature option, but is just now part of the New Quizzes functionality by default.

A lot of other things where a feature option is identified to mean that the individual feature would be an option itself, but that's not the case for this one.

I've never seen an individual feature within New Quizzes be an option, and the way New Quizzes is built, I don't even know if that's technically possible.  Perhaps someone from Instructure will clarify that for us here though.

-Chris

[tonywee]

Hi @chriscas,

Thanks for the clarification. What you've mentioned has made complete sense but as you've mentioned, we feel that the Release notes themselves could be a bit more explicit. By including the "Enable Feature Option Location & Default Status" section, we would think it's a Feature Option for New Quizzes, and not related to enabling New Quizzes directly.

Thanks,

Tony

[MeazellOUHSC]

Love having things added to our nav by default without our input.   😠

[JamesSekcienski]

We are also concerned about Lucid being enabled by default on course navigation.  We do not want this enabled by default.  If instructors don't plan on using the tool in their course, then we don't want this provided as an access point by default to students.

[ellietf]

Our institution (UPenn) is also very concerned with Lucid being enabled by default in course navigation. We are still working directly with the vendor to get the integration to provision accounts correctly (this is not a smooth or intuitive process just yet), and this placement would create more work and confusion for staff, students, and faculty. Raising the visibility of this tool before our intuition is ready is not a value-add for us!

[rhoke]

Force-enabling a 3rd-party tool like Lucid so students can see and use it "even if instructors haven't had the opportunity to explore the tool yet" is not a valuable update. It creates unnecessary work and confusion for the large majority of courses who are not yet using this tool.

If you insist upon enabling it by default, please at least provide institutional admins the ability to disable it at the root account level while leaving it unlocked for instructors to enable in individual courses. 

[emlarson]

We didn't catch the impact because, for whatever reason, Lucid never did (and still doesn't) appear in our Beta course menus even though it seems we should've been seeing it there since 8/6.  (As the admin I tend to work more in Beta than in Prod because if I'm digging in to investigate something I want to do it where I'm not jeopardizing the real data on the live site.)  Once I discovered this change in production this afternoon, I quickly bounced it off our team and disabled the Developer Key in Prod to turn Lucid off entirely.

We were really looking forward to playing with it through the RCE and had written a promotional article and everything, but there's absolutely no way we can have it showing up in every course with instructions to faculty of "go disable it if you don't want it," especially not as our Summer term is active and wrapping up.  (Now I have to wonder what's going to show up next as a mandatory Nav item in the coming weeks and months?)

[jenn_stevens]

As an institution that asked our CSM to turn the Lucid integration off, adding it to course navigation by default makes us less likely to turn it on. I was hoping that after some development on Lucid's part that we could turn it on sometime this winter, but I was envisioning it as part of the RCE, not as a left navigation item.

[clpatter]

Classes start one week from today, and as the main Canvas admin at our university, I'm extremely busy. But now, on top of all my normal work, I have to screen tickets from instructors that want to know what Lucid is and why it was added to their courses.

[emlarson]

Has anyone been seeing (or is currently seeing) Lucid in their Beta environment?  We've not touched the developer key and per the release notes it seems as though we should've been seeing it in Beta since 8/6, but we haven't, and it's still not there.  The only place it appears for us is Prod (and I have to share that as an admin who carefully curates that left-hand Nav I am not happy with something being pushed into our courses past-present-future without any way to control it. I'm working on turning the key off now and communicating that to our faculty, with the hope that it really does get it out of the courses -- something I can't test in Beta because, in Beta, it's not in our courses).

[emlarson]

We got a decent workaround for Lucid's mandatory appearance: rather than disabling the Developer Key, we have that enabled but deleted the App from the root level Settings. Then, we updated our internal faculty KB with instructions on how to add it back into their own courses by entering its Client ID (which is visible to admins when you look at the inherited key). Depending on your setup and whether you allow faculty to add their own apps, that might work smoothly. Worst case, it allows admins to add it back "on demand" without resorting to the nuclear-option of disabling the key entirely.

[dbrace]

Thank you for that alternative, @emlarson. My institution has gone "nuclear" and turned off the inherited developer key but if we roll it out this seems like a compromise.

[JamesSekcienski]

We updated the Lucid installed app settings to hide it from the course navigation by default.  Since it is controlled by an Inherited Developer Key we will need to continue to monitor for changes to the key settings (hopefully announced in Release/Deploy Notes) in case it reverts back to showing by default and we need to hide it by default again.  Here is a blog post that I wrote up that includes instructions for how you can update the app settings to hide by default.  Default Hide Course Navigation Placement for LTIs/External Apps 

[emlarson]

That's really cool, @JamesSekcienski! That tells me I really need to get more comfortable working with the API! 🙂 We share the concern that it might be like playing whack-a-mole if the LTI gets updated for whatever reason, but I'm very happy to have this info. handy. Thank you!

I know I've mentioned this in the thread here before but, speaking of release notes... I confirmed today that our Beta instance of the Lucid Integration LTI's App Placements is simply missing "Course Navigation" as an option. It only shows "Assignment Selection" and "Editor Button" which matches the behavior we had been seeing this summer. Point being, even though the release notes say this was in Beta since the 6th, it's not in our Beta and I can't chalk that up to something like quirky custom JavaScript that's merely hindering its display. That discrepancy doesn't make me very confident that I could trust the release notes to accurately document changes to this (or any other) inherited key that we might want to alter.

[JamesSekcienski]

@emlarson 

You're welcome!  I know this is something that comes up fairly often when installing new tools, so I wanted to finally document it and share this information in case it would help others too.  The API is definitely worth taking the time to learn and get comfortable with using as it can really help with doing things that may not have UI controls in Canvas and/or help with performing bulk/automated tasks.

As for Lucid not appearing as expected in Beta, that is a weird error.  I did see the change in our Beta system since I tested trying to update and hide it in our Beta environment first.  Hopefully Canvas Support can resolve that issue in the future for you.  I'm hoping since they have been reporting on Lucid changes at least that they will continue in the future, but it is certainly something to still keep an eye on moving forward.

[dbrace]

Thank you for the ability to modify LTI 1.3 placements, especially for global/inherited developer keys!

[mbmacdonald]

I also want to add that I don't see the point of including Lucid in the course Navigation. When you click on it, it does not show a list of all the Lucid documents/assignments used in the course. It just provides a way to link out to the Lucid web app (With an additional click).

There is no value-add here at all.

Like everyone else, I wanted to disable Lucid by default in Course Nav. I could not seem to make this work using the API. I have to shout at @chriscas for sharing a script that successfully did this. See our conversation here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Is-there-a-setting-to-hide-new-menu-options...