Features Q&A: Canvas Release Notes (2025-11-15)

[InstContentTeam]

Looking to discuss these features from the 2025-11-15 Release Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

New Features

• User Navigation: Canvas Portfolio Feature Preview Concluded

New Feature Previews

• IgniteAI Translations for Inbox, Discussions and Announcements
• IgniteAI Insights for Discussions
• Ignite AI Rubric Generator

Feature Preview Change Log Updates

• Performance and Usability Upgrades for SpeedGrader: Comment Library Filter

Other Updates

• Legacy Canvas Native ePortfolios: End of Life
• Gradebook: Improved Gradebook Performance with GraphQL Data Fetching

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

[jdurancal]

Hi,

Great to see this new translation feature coming to the Canvas discussions, it’s a really valuable addition for multilingual teaching and learning contexts! 👏

I was wondering if there are any plans to allow translation at the post level rather than translating the entire discussion thread. In multilingual classrooms, not every message is written in the same language, so having this granularity would make the feature even more powerful.

Also, based on the “AI Nutrition Facts,” could you confirm whether European-hosted Canvas instances use AWS infrastructure located in the EU region?

Best Regards

Jordi

[snugent]

On the IgniteAI Rubric Generator, I don't see this option in the feature options where I can enable this option in our beta account. Am I missing something? 

[kailey]

Discussions Insights

Questions:

1. Is the dashboard expected to display all students who have contributed?
2. For students with multiple replies and threaded replies, which responses are included in the evaluation? Dashboard description says "latest contributions", but does that include high-level replies only, both high-level and nested, latest X number of replies, or something else?
3. Is Discussions Insights planned to be eventually supported on mobile?

Feedback:

• When insights has never been generated, the page reads, “Try adding a specific prompt or just generate without one”. What does 'try adding a specific prompt' mean? Upon first load, I thought I had to type a 'specific prompt' in the search bar. The text is very confusing.
• The tool should be more reliable. Too many times I run into the 'There was an error generating the insights' error. I get this when there aren't even many discussions in the thread (e.g. ~20-30 replies).
  
• It would be nice if teaching team members can edit the Relevance score so that mislabeled ratings could be updated so teaching team members don't need to see that inaccurate score every time they check insights.

Translations

Questions:

1. The release notes has the Discussions/Announcements translate button text as "Open Translate" next to the Expand Threads button. However, in our Beta instance, it says "Enable Translation" and appears in the filters row. Which is expected/accurate?
   
   
   
2. Is there a word or character limit for the discussions/announcements translation feature? I consistently get a "text too long" error with a 411-word announcement, but a 589-word announcement consistently translates fine, so the error I get does not seem accurate. 
   

Feedback:
On the Feature Options page the caret dropdown for Inbox Translations has:

To me, this suggests two functions - the second being that any Canvas user can set their preferred language in Canvas and ANY AND ALL Inbox messages received will be automatically translated to their preferred language. After unsuccessfully getting this to work and confirming with Instructure, my assumption was incorrect. The wording could be tweaked for clarity that the feature only has one function - allow senders the option to translate outbound messages.

I had also shared the translations feedback in Tamas' blog post.  

Thanks!