InstructureCon 0017 saw an exciting line up of Product announcements, with some features ready for release, and others preparing for release in the near future. We thought it might be difficult to remember every exciting announcement, so we created this summary and resource post for you. Use the table of contents below to quickly navigate.
We appreciate you taking the time to read through these exciting features. If all of this creative work sparked some creative ideas, there are channels for you to share.
- First, search existing ideas in the Canvas Studio space to see if someone already submitted one like yours.
- If you don’t see an idea like your own, submit a new idea at the bottom of the Canvas Studio page.
- Then, let your Customer Success Manager know about your ideas (share links): they’re great champions for you!
Alexa
The Canvas skill for Amazon Alexa makes it easy for students, teachers, advisors, and parents to ask questions, perform quick tasks, and get information from Canvas on their Alexa-enabled devices. This skill marks the first of many, as Canvas itegrates with voice services to help ease the learning and instruction process.
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Analytics 2.0
Analytics 2.0 will give instructors the right info at the right time to make teaching large courses easier. Analytics 2.0 helps instructors identify students needing attention, assignments that might need to be reworked, and shows the data in a context that provides rich meaning.
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Arc Captioning
Arc allows users to upload and select multiple captions files for a single video, generate new captions for a video using automatic speech recognition (ASR), and edit ASR-generated captions from within the Arc interface.
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Assignment & Page Duplication
Canvas allows course creators to duplicate assignments and pages. The duplication option is located in the Settings menu for these item types that can be duplicated. Duplicating an item defaults the copied item to an unpublished status.
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Blueprint Courses
Blueprint Courses simplifies distribution of good course design through controlled, reusable blueprints, which are critical in online teaching and valuable in maintaining outcomes across a department. They allow for the creation and maintenance of courses that can be locked down for use in associated Canvas courses.
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Dashboard: To-Do List
The new To-Do list Dashboard improves the Canvas experience for both students and instructors. Students can prioritize tasks across courses, view and complete missed course opportunities, and add their own To Do items. Instructors can view all items available to students (to confirm what students can see in their courses), view assignments that need grading, make quick edits to assignments, add their own To Do items, and also add non-graded items including announcements, non-graded discussions, and pages to the student’s To Do lists.
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Gauge
Gauge is the new assessment management system by Instructure. Schools can use it to create, share, deploy, and report on assessments, most of which aren’t associated with any particular course. Reporting features in Gauge will help educators understand what students know and what they don’t and do things to improve learning at their institution.
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Gradebook: New
Gradebook Enhancements is divided into two phases. Phase 1 creates better organization and more intuitive user flows in Gradebook. The biggest changes to user flows happen in Phase 1 so it will be released to production for the masses when it is completed. Phase 2 adds small features that are not disruptive to user flows and will be released as they are completed.
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Nudge
Nudge LTI is an internal research tool that will allow Canvas to make smart notifications. Teachers will have the option of adding the Nudge tool to their courses, which will automatically generate Conversations notifications to students and prompt them to take action to improve their performance in the course.
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- Ask your local admin or Customer Success Manager
Resources:
- InstructureCon17 Presentation: “The Canvas of the Future: Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral Economics” by Hilary Scharton (Recording will be linked when available)
Teacher App
Canvas Teacher unburdens teachers from a load of frequent, relatively lightweight interactions in Canvas. These interactions fall into three categories: updating course content, grading activities, and communicating with students. Canvas Teacher is available for both iOS and Android devices.
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Quizzes
A modern, elegant, and scalable testing engine for our Canvas users, bringing elegance and simplicity back into testing (if it was ever there to start).
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SIS Integrations
This new platform simplifies customer implementation by providing data mapping to address data discrepancies between Canvas and a student information system (SIS). Using data points from the SIS, this platform enables schools to easily create courses in Canvas, eliminating the need for custom development, exports, or custom scripts.
Availability:
- Contact your Customer Success Manager for details
Available Now
- SIF based SIS Integration: available now (roster and grade passback)
- Aspire (bi-directional with Assignment Grade Passback)
- PowerSchool (Rosters Only)
- CSV based SIS integration: available now (roster and assignment grade passback)
- Aspen
- Skyward
- Clever SIS files
- eSchoolData
- Realtime
- Skyward via OneRoster csv
- Elluminate ED via OneRoster cvs
- Proprietary API Integrations
- PowerTeacher Pro—Assignment Grade Passback
In Development
- OneRoster v1.1 based Integration
- Aeries
- InfniteCampus
- Pinnacle by Wazzle Solutions
- LIS 2.0 based SIS integrations
- SAIP by Oracle (PeopleSoft SIS)
- ILP by Ellucian (Colleague and Banner)
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