Teachers share files as assignments or notes with students to use for instruction or assessment purposes. Students are able to access these PDFs and draw, comment, highlight, and write directly on these shared pages. The most recent update to Canvas no longer autosaves their work. For students who need additional time to finish another day or for an assignment/notes that span several days, there is no way for students to annotate their work and save it for use at a later time. For many departments that rely on students annotating, especially mathematics, it makes Canvas useless.

Please add an option for students to "Save" their work after annotating a PDF so that they can later re-open the document and continue working. According to multiple Canvas representatives, this autosave feature was accidental and therefore is a possible addition to the Canvas app.

Comment from Instructure

Thanks to  @esentz ‌ for sharing this idea, and to everyone who has voted and commented on it. Our engineers are aware of this issue and are currently working on a solution, so it’s not necessary to move it forward for Community consideration as an idea. Thanks for your patience.