Community

This is a very exciting step, but I have a few questions/concerns. The static images for Canvas Help Chat appear to only go to a bot. Will institutions paying for the live 24-7 support see an additional option for live support in that same place? Proactive Messages calls out the links to guides, release notes, and images. What populates that? What about the Vimeo media you've produced? Can local admins add things? Can local admins remove things? Can instructors add thing if it is in their course? Can instructors remove thing if it is in their course? If instructors can update these, will those changes be available in the Select Components area of course copy? Will users have a place to toggle this whole situation on and off? This will be a nightmare when attempting to make locally relevant video documentation if the answer to g isn't "Yes, and that toggle is available for the Test Student too!" ... View more

I am never sure if it is more useful to repeat comments that I find particularly important, or to just Kudos them. I am going to try to organize my own thoughts mixed in with what others have said. On the up side, I think I will be able to cluster things in a way that makes logical sense to me. On the downside, this will likely be an unreadably long wall of text. Apologies in advance. Groups is a fantastic tool, that does way more than what instructors want it to do the vast majority of the time. I strongly believe that Groups needs to be broken into two separate tools. One that is a slightly improved version of what is already there, which I will be referring to as “Project Groups”, and a second tool that allows for the more common uses without the additional Groups work space, which I will be referring to as “Quick Groups”. Quick Groups are needed in situations where instructors are having students do an activity that requires only a single Canvas tool, and/or no out of class time to do. It should not create the Group home area in the left-hand navigation. Quick Groups (both the Quick Group Set AND the individual Quick Groups) should be an option when determining delineation of the following things: Announcements, Assignments, Discussions, Page access, File access, Quizzes, Module access, and Collaborations. This will remove the need to type each student’s name in the “Assign to” area when only trying to do group discussions (or similar delineation). Any Quick Group Set or individual Quick Group that was not selected should be unable to even see the item. Project Groups (both the Project Group Set AND the individual Project Groups) should be an option when determining delineation of the following things: Announcements, Assignments, Discussions, Page access, File access, Quizzes, Module access, and Collaborations. Assigning an item this way should provide a popup notification that the item will be created in each Project Group area as its own unique item. This will prevent the need to go into each groups area to recreate an announcement/page/etc that applies to a few of your many groups. Any Project Group Set or individual Project Group that was not selected should be unable to see the item. Project Groups need to have a course name written below the Project Group name when being shown in the left-hand navigation. The inability to tell which course each of the “Group 1” groups a student is in is awful. Quick Groups should not appear there at all. The Projects Groups area needs the first Breadcrumb at the top of the screen to ALWAYS be the original course, not just when on the Home area. Project Groups needs a Settings area similar to the main course, so that Navigation, homepage, and permissions can be set. Preferably, these options would be available at creation, so that each group can inherit the settings. Enabling the use of Project Groups or Quick Groups should reveal a checkbox for optional different due dates per group. Copy Course Components needs another item selection for Project Groups and Quick Groups. Obviously, it would not move user enrollment, but the ability to copy the setup for both Project Groups and Quick Groups would be a boon. Maintaining group delineation for other tools would be vital. Project Groups and Quick Groups need improved membership management. Selecting multiple users at once for click/drag, forced notifications when new enrollments occur to help instructors keep up on group enrollment, ability to move users between groups without breaking old submissions (potentially the most complicated ask on this list due to the number of unique interactions it could branch into). Project Groups and Quick Groups set up to auto-enroll should update when new users are added to the course. Project Groups and Quick Groups both need a self-signup without needing People to be enabled. Include a setting that functions as an end date where users will be assigned randomly if they fail to choose by the end date. Project Groups or Quick Groups used for discussions should have a read-only option to allow other groups to read, but not participate, discussions held by other groups. Make sure that Project Groups and Quick Groups are both able to function with integrations (when the integration allows) to keep things in synch. https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/Speedgrader-support-for-ungrouped-discussion-posts/idi-p/412275 This is broken. This is not an idea for improvement, this is an observation of something that is broken and needs to be fixed. Anyone who says this is intended functionality needs a stern talking-to by a motherly figure who is “not mad, just disappointed”. ... View more

The University of Wisconsin release notes teams has a lot of feedback about this. I am going to place it all in this one comment to try to consolidate.  New Analytics features being unavailable in Beta is a thorn in our side. Working to make New Analytics available in Beta would be nice for testing. This feature is significantly less useful than it could be if the criteria could be set on a course-by-course level. Different instructors will have different metrics they will be looking for. Having the metrics determined at the University level would already remove the usefulness for instructors, and here at the University of Wisconsin System, we would need to decide for the entire state due to our shared instance. Changing which criteria are checked needs to update the data presented to the instructor. Since this is unavailable for testing, it may already do this. If not it is important that adjusting criteria impacts the data presented, rather than showing static information that relates to now unused criteria. We recommend a rebranding for this tool. Attendance is already used with the Role Call tool, along with other 3rd party tools. We predict confusion for instructors when there is a Grade item created by Role Call named attendance, and also an Attendance tool in New Analytics (which has no impact on the Grade item). Even something as simple as “Digital Attendance” or “Student Digital Attendance” provides a bit more differentiation. The criteria item “Course Access” needs clarification. It says “views a page”, but it is unclear if that means “views a webpage of the course” or “views a Page tool item”. The name implies the first, but the description leans towards the second, while still being ambiguous. The criteria item “Conferences” needs clarification. It says “Student joins a web conference”, but it seems unlikely to us that this tool is prepared to integrate with all of the available 3rd party conferencing tools. The tool should explicitly mention which conferencing tool(s) it is able to track. It seems likely that there will be feedback asking that these metrics can be pushed to the Grades area. We ask that if this if that is ever the case that this does not create a Grade item automatically, and instead need to be manually turned on by the instructor on a course-by-course basis. ... View more

@Steven_S I am Happy to provide the background. I'm a cheat. A fraud. A plagiarize. This is not my idea. The post I made to start all of this is a copy/paste from and idea that has since been moved to a place I can no longer see. I believe the materials I stole were originally posted by @callinger, but the information I tracked down has her by another name. It looks like that might be callinger's real name, and I don't want to accidentally dox anyone. I mentioned that I can no longer see the original. It took some digging to find that out, but the link to that post is here: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/11726  If anyone else is able to see those posts, I would want to note that the reason I recreated this idea here is because the moderators there told us that would be our best course of action. ... View more

These are really wonderful developments, but I am concerned that we know when New RCE will be turned on, but don't know when it will be up to snuff. We all recognize that nothing is ever really done being developed, but the fact that we still have a December go-live date when there is so much still being done is worrying. It would be nice if Instructure would provide us at least one semester with a (more-or-less) finished product before it was forced on. We need time to train faculty and update documentation. ... View more

September 4th update:  ... View more

This was a refreshing read.  I hope Instructure was taking notes when they went through this post. ... View more