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

[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]

**Edited to included responses I've received from Instructure**

Discussions Insights

Questions:

1. Is the dashboard expected to display all students who have contributed? Yes
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? Only high level replies. Not currently including nested replies. 
3. Is Discussions Insights planned to be eventually supported on mobile? Instructure wants to, but needs to hear more from mobile users. 

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. (Instructure plans to clarify the text)

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

Thanks!

[KathyPalm]

Will the new IgniteAI feature previews be fully functioning in all regions? I'm specifically interested in the availability for EMEA institutions.

[tdw]

Hi @KathyPalm, yes the IgniteAI features in this release are available globally. And as always, the releases adhere to regional data residency, privacy, and other compliance requirements.

[chriscas]

Hi @InstContentTeam,

The new IgniteAI feature previews are all appearing for us in a disabled and locked state.  Support told a colleague these features need to be enabled by our CSM.  If that's accurate, I feel it should be explicitly stated in the release notes.  If that's not accurate, was there an issue with the release over the weekend not unlocking these feature options for us properly?

-Chris

[jlee16]

Hi, @chriscas -

I would expect all course-level IgniteAI tools to be released in a disabled and locked state, because if they were enabled and/or unlocked, teachers could start using them immediately, whereas releasing them locked allows admins to retain control of the launch.  

I appreciate your post, however, as it's good to know that you can proactively reach out to your CSM to ensure that a feature is released in an enabled state if desired - though for us, new features both at the account and at the course level are pretty much always released in a disabled state.  

~jodie

[chriscas]

Hi @jlee16,

I totally agree the settings should be off to start with.  As @tdw mentioned, there was a bug early on during this release where admins couldn't actually change the setting from disabled to enabled (or unlock it for subaccounts/courses to enable).  That's now fixed up, so we're all good though.

-Chris

[jlee16]

Thanks, Chris - I didn't have that bug by the time I logged in on Monday, so misunderstood your original issue.  Glad it's all worked out now!

[tdw]

Hi @chriscas ,

I apologize for the confusion which as exacerbated by incorrect information from our Support teams, I will follow up with them internally.

During the Canvas Release on Saturday, November 15th feature flags for several new IgniteAI features were inadvertently configured by our build scripts to implement the features in the default disabled/locked state but did not include the appropriate permissions settings in the build to allow administrators to change the value of the flags.

Our engineering team was made aware of this on Monday morning and after identifying the root cause (above) they deployed a hotfix on Monday afternoon.

Canvas Administrators can now unlock/enable IgniteAI features in their environments as they would normally do with any other feature flag.

[ellen_peters]

Hi @tdw ,
On our Canvas Test environment (...test.instructure.com) I still can't enable the Ignite feature options from the release. Will the hotfix be applied to the Test environment as well?

[tdw]

Hello @ellen_peters this should be available in test now.  Thanks for reporting it.

[jdurancal]

Hi,

We really welcome this new forum translation feature, it’s a great step forward for multilingual learning environments. However, we’ve noticed a couple of limitations that are especially relevant in truly multilingual contexts.

At the moment, the tool translates all posts into the selected language without first detecting the original language of each entry. For example, in a forum with both Spanish and English contributions, if a Spanish-speaking student chooses to translate everything into Spanish, the tool will also attempt to “translate” posts that are already in Spanish. Adding language detection prior to translation would make the experience much more precise and meaningful.

In addition, in forums where multiple languages are used across different posts, it would be extremely useful to be able to translate individual entries instead of the entire thread at once. This is not only a functional limitation, but also a clear usability issue, especially in large discussions where the process can be slow and inefficient.

Is there any plan to improve this behaviour in future iterations of the feature?

Thanks again for this improvement, we’re looking forward to seeing how this feature continues to evolve.

Jordi

[YasiAfsharnive]

HI @jdurancal. Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We're really glad to hear that the new forum translation feature is useful in multilingual learning environments!

Your point about detecting the original language before translating is well taken. That would definitely make the experience smoother for users who work across multiple languages.

I don’t have details yet on how many multi-language institutions are actively using this feature or what’s already planned for upcoming iterations, but I will share your suggestions with the relevant product manager so they can be considered in future development. Feedback like yours is incredibly valuable in helping us shape improvements.

[jdurancal]

Hi @YasiAfsharnive ,

To give you a bit more real-world context: around 10% of our courses are multilingual (roughly 600 courses and 10,000 students), and in those environments a single discussion thread often contains a mix of Catalan, Spanish and English at the same time.

That’s why both language detection and post-by-post translation are so important, they directly impact how easily students can follow the conversation, participate, and make sense of the discussion dynamics without ending up with confusing or meaningless translation results.

Happy to keep the conversation going. Thanks again for taking this into account!

Best,
Jordi

[YasiAfsharnive]

@jdurancal Thank you for sharing, metrics always help put the request into context!