Canvas operates on a three-week release cycle through which features are added or updated. Courseware Support posts highlights from Canvas’s production release notes, a link to these notes, and other relevant content to the Canvas at Penn blog a few days before the production release, which usually occurs on Saturdays. Please contact Courseware Support at canvas@pobox.upenn.edu if you have any questions about an upcoming production release.
6/27/15 Production Release Highlights:
- Excuse an Assignment: Instructors can use the Gradebook to excuse a student from an assignment in their course. To excuse an assignment for a student, enter the value of EX in the corresponding Gradebook cell. The Gradebook will reflect that the assignment is excused for the student. Excused assignments are not included in the calculation for a student’s total grade. Students can also be excused from a Group Assignment; the other members of the group will still be able to view and submit the assignment. Discussions and Quizzes can be excused for students in the Gradebook, but students cannot see that they have been excused from the Discussion or Quiz. This behavior will be addressed in a future release.
- Bounced Warning for Single Communication Channels: When a communication method (or channel) is invalid for a user, Canvas generates an icon notifying the user that the channel has bounced, or has become invalid, and needs to be corrected. This icon now appears if a user only has one communication channel; previously, the icon only appeared when a user had set multiple channels.
- Complete/Incomplete Grades: Complete/incomplete grades display in SpeedGrader. When an instructor entered grades for an assignment as Complete/Incomplete, the points field only displayed a portion of the Complete/Incomplete indicator instead of expanding to a more suitable width. This behavior occurred because the points field was not coded to expand for any values other than points. Canvas code has been updated to expand the box for the Complete/Incomplete grading type.
- Media Files in Safari: In the Safari browser, when a user tried to access a media file such as an audio or video comment, clicking the preview icon did not generate the media file. This behavior occurred because of a change in the Safari pre-load value for JavaScript media elements. Canvas code has been updated to redefine the pre-load value used for Safari.
Other Canvas Changes:
As of July 18, 2015, Differentiated Assignments are no longer a Feature option in Canvas and are enabled for all Canvas users as a standard feature.
For a complete production release update, please see:
June 27, 2015 Canvas Production Release Notes
Please click here to view the script for this screencast.
Last Updated: 24 Jun 2015