Features Q&A: Canvas Release Notes (2025-01-18)

[InstContentTeam]

Looking to discuss these features from the 2025-01-18 Release Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

New Features

• Developer Keys: Platform Notification Service [Added 2025-01-17]
• Grading: Account Level Default Grading Scheme [Added 2024-12-17]

Feature Options

• Discussions: AI Translation [Delayed as of 2024-12-17]
• Discussions: Multiple Due Dates for Discussions
• Inbox: AI Translation [Delayed as of 2024-12-17]
• New Quizzes: Student Analysis Report Available
• New Quizzes: Question Bank Migration on Course Copy [Delayed as of 2025-01-21]
• SpeedGrader: Improved SpeedGrader Experience [Delayed as of 2024-12-05]
• User Interface: Full Screen Access- All Users [Added 2024-12-17]

Feature Previews

• Apps: Canvas Apps Page- Admin [Added 2024-12-17]

Other Updates

• Analytics: New Analytics migration to Data Access Platform (DAP)- Admin [Added 2024-12-17]

Change Log updates

• Assignment Enhancements
• Enhanced Rubrics [Added 2024-12-17]

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]

Hi, just a question with regard to "SpeedGrader: Improved SpeedGrader Experience". Unlike before, I can no longer see at a glance who has submitted something in the list of students. There used to be a dot next to these people, but that is now gone. Is this a bug or a feature? It makes it difficult to find my way around the list. Kind regards - Julia (Beta-Test)

[Andy_Kalin]

Just wondering - it looks like AI Translation (both Discussion and Inbox) changes show "[Delayed as of 2024-12-17]" in the 2025-01-18 release notes, but do not show that on this page nor on the main Canvas Releases page. Can you confirm whether those two changes are in fact delayed? 

Also, the "Account Level Default Grading Scheme" change has the opposite state - it's shows [Added 2024-12-17] here and on the main Releases page, but that is not reflected in the title of the change item in the release notes, the it does appear in the change log. The same is true for the Full Screen Access change, the Canvas Apps Page change, the New Analytics migration to Data Access Platform (DAP) change, and the Enhanced Rubrics change.

I'm assuming that all of the change additions/delays mentioned above will happen (or not) even though not all are indicated (e.g., the AI Translation delays) on this page nor the main Releases page.

[dbrace]

Hi @Andy_Kalin,

By chance, have you seen https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/The-Product-Blog/An-Update-on-AI-Powered-Translations-in-Canvas/b... which was posted by @TamasBalogh?

-Doug

[chriscas]

A couple questions about the "User Interface: Full Screen Access- All Users" feature update.

1 - I do not see this anywhere in the beta environment right now.  Has the rollout to beta been delayed?

2 - For those of us who have the New User Tutorial enabled (and therefore the full width), will we need to enable this to keep the full width in the future, or will New User Tutorial still enable the full width as well.  I wanted to test this on my own, but can't due to #1...

-Chris

[Mikee]

Yep - exactly this about the Full width config! Thanks for raising, @chriscas 

[Mikee]

@chriscas - the feature option is hidden, canvas support were able to un-hide and enable this for me; 
it's a game changer for the permissions screens! [case 11448631 if you need to check in with them]

[dbrace]

Thank you for the example, @Mikee, and for the case number.

Do you know if this is (at least currently) something Canvas admins are able to do on their own or must Canvas Support (or someone higher up) do it for us?

-Doug

[Mikee]

I am an admin, so I think you'll be able to guess the rest 😉 ...

I had to engage support to un-hide the option - definitely raise a case, as this looks like it's been deployed as Account (hidden, disabled) in beta, meaning it's there but not useable. 

Was advised as 

Enable Feature Option Location & Default Status

Account (Disabled)

[jenn_stevens]

Went to check this morning, the option is still invisible to me (Canvas admin) in beta and prod. Thanks for the ticket#, will use that!

[dbrace]

For anyone curious about "Assignment Enhancements" and stickers. Make sure to check out the change log for 2025-01-18 at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Assignment-Enhancements-Users/Assignment-Enhancements-Release-Cha....

In short, telated to the assignment stickers:

1. two feature options need to be enabled for the stickers
   1. Assignment Enhancements - Student
   2. Submission Stickers
2. when enabled, stickers can be given from:
   1. Traditional Gradebook tray
   2. Individual Gradebook
   3. SpeedGrader
3. as of the morning of Friday, December 20th: if the "Modernized SpeedGrader Platform" feature option is enabled, stickers cannot be given from the SpeedGrader

-Doug

[mbmacdonald]

I have tried to generate a student analysis report in beta a few times and it doesn't seem to work. I keep getting the error shown below (I have tried with several different quizzes, some with many submissions, some with few):

I would just like to know - is this the expected behavior? Is it actually not possible to generate a report in beta? If yes, please say that, and I will happily wait until the production release. 

[emilyk23]

Hello! I also ran into this, but realized it's bc I didn't have any student submissions in Beta. So for these analysis reports, the submissions must happen in the beta instance for them to appear in the generated report.  (The production submissions won't appear in the report.) 

[i_wells]

Hi, Initially I had an error message with this feature because I didn't have enough respondents to the quiz I selected. Another member of our team got round the error message by using more test respondents and said the feature worked in  Beta but they needed to provide marks for any 'essay style' quizzes first before the report would include the analysis for those students.

Is it possible to remove this extra step so that we can get a report of all submissions immaterial to whether they are 'essay style' quizzes? I don't think from memory we had this with the classic quizzes report.

We have also had the same issue as @mbmacdonald with the student analysis report in our Beta environment. We used a legacy quiz that had quite a few responses (to avoid the minimum of three responses required issue as detailed above). But we get the same error when generating the report.

Can this be resolved please so we can test it accurately?

[jht-salt]

Hello,

Re: 'New Quizzes: Question Bank Migration on Course Copy' Feature

We've been doing a little research and testing on this feature to gauge when to release it to staff and what resources will be required to assist understanding.

The testing brought up something that I hadn't appreciated with Classic Quizzes use of Question Banks. There are 2 ways to use questions from Questions Banks: via the 'Find questions' button or via the 'New question group’ button. What I hadn't appreciated is that using 'Find questions' is a point in time question transfer from the Question Bank i.e. not dynamic - the link to the Question Bank is lost. Using the 'New question group' is dynamic i.e. the link to the Question Bank remains. We may have courses where the 'Find questions' button was used and the Lecturers may believe that the questions will change dynamically if the corresponding question in the Question Bank is changed.

While we ponder on the next steps, I've put together a bit of draft text related to the change. Your thoughts are welcome on this.

Summary 

Instructors can migrate: 

• Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes, and 

• Classic Quiz Question Banks to New Quiz Item Banks 

by using the ‘Convert content to New Quizzes’ checkbox on the ‘Course Copy’ and ‘Import Course Content’ pages. 

Key Points

1. When importing course content from another course: 

• It is advised that the ‘Select specific content’ option is used instead of the ‘All content’ option, because selecting ‘All content’ will bring in other undesired information: Note the following content types will be imported: Course Settings, Syllabus Body, Modules, Assignments, Quizzes, Question Banks, Discussion Topics, Pages, Announcements, Rubrics, Files, and Calendar Events. 

• Using the ‘Select Content’ button, you must select all the Quizzes and Question banks.

2. After the copy or import is complete, all Question Banks converted to Item Banks appear on the Item Banks page of the new course, filtered under ‘This Course’. 

3. Classic Quizzes with Question Bank(s) questions migrate differently according to how the original Question Bank(s) questions were drawn into the Classic Quiz: 

• Question Bank questions drawn in using the ‘Find questions’ button are a point in time copy from the Question Bank(s). Any updates to the question(s) in the Question Bank(s) DO NOT transfer to the Classic Quiz. Therefore, the New Quiz is created WITHOUT linkage to an Item Bank(s) which is migrated from the related Question Bank(s). So, any migrated Item Bank(s) would need to be manually edited if the dynamic linkage to an Item Bank(s) needs to be created. 
• Question Bank questions drawn in by adding a ‘question group’ (i.e. using the ‘New question group’ button) are dynamically linked to the Question Bank(s). Any updates to the questions in the Question Bank(s) DO transfer to the Classic Quiz. Therefore, the New Quiz is created WITH linkage to an Item Bank(s) which is migrated from the related Question Bank(s). 

[j_h_tetlow]

Hello,

Re: 'New Quizzes: Student Analysis Report Available' feature

I tried to generate a report in beta today (16.01.25) and got this warning: "There is not enough data available to generate this report. A minimum of 3 submissions is required to generate. Please try again when more submissions are available."

Why doesn't the report generate with even 1 response? We need this report to generate for 1 or more responses to use New Quizzes successfully as a student feedback tool. Could this change please be implemented?

Thanks, Jenny

[j_h_tetlow]

I have added a Canvas LMS 'idea' on the Student Analysis Report csv generation with even 1 response: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Ideas/New-Quizzes-Student-Analysis-Report-generate-a-downl... 

[gkokaisel]

Along with the release of Discussion Checkpoints, the Speedgrader layout for Discussions changed for all graded discussions regardless of using Checkpoints. It would be helpful to make this layout an option so that faculty can choose to see the whole discussion thread or just the individual student posts when grading. 

[JennyDruckrey]

Our institution was really excited about enabling discussion checkpoints and had faculty requests to do so.  Now we have faculty complaints because of the associated poor discussion SpeedGrader experience.  We're hoping this gets addressed quickly, as I see many in the community have the same issue.  I've been given the run around on where to voice my concerns.  CSM told me to contact Canvas support, who told me to post here.  Will there be any updates to this?  Have discussion checkpoints as a course-level feature.  Remove the associated discussion SpeedGrader experience?  We hate to turn this off now as some of our instructors have already implemented the checkpoints. 

[CraigWebster]

The improvement to the speed grader will make it harder and much more time consuming to do the grading for the online discussions.  I wish you would return it back to how this feature was before, when I could grade quickly and easily.  In my opinion, this is no improvement since it makes it harder for me to do my job.

[jht-salt]

Re: The Student Analysis Report and preserving student anonymity

When New Quiz Marking Anonymity is enabled, the Student Analysis Report is not anonymous i.e. the Student Analysis Report csv file is not anonymous and has Student 'Name' and 'ID' listed in the first 2 columns of the file.

It would be expected behaviour that New Quiz anonymity transfers to the Student Analysis Report. Please could Instructure address this.

[aalawso]

Hi.  Engineers--the speedgrader function for CANVAS is slower and more awkward now.  It's taking twice as much time for me to grade discussion boards.  A chat representative directed me to comment here.  

[EmilyCottrell]

Hi 🙂 

Wanted to note--because I think it's an important thing for anyone using the CSV download in New Quizzes--the CSV report does not pull results for all question types.

In my current testing, I can only get it to pull the following:

• Multiple-Choice
• True/False
• Fill-in-the-Blank
• Numeric Responses

It will not pull in essay questions--even if those have a character limit.

This was going to be a suggestion for professors to grade their short answers in one place--can't do that with it this way.

I am curious if this is something that will eventually come in to the CSV file--BEFORE it is grade (I know it will show up once the answers are graded, but that sort of defeats the purpose of bringing in the essay/short answer responses).

[j_h_tetlow]

@EmilyCottrell  I've added an 'idea' to Instructure. See '[New Quizzes] Student Analysis Report - Include free text question responses in downloadable csv file whether or not they are marked': ttps://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Ideas/New-Quizzes-Student-Analysis-Report-Include-free-text-question/idi-p/631790