Improvements to Canvas Coming Saturday, November 21, 2015!

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.

11/21/15 Production Release Highlights:

Anonymous Grading Student View: Students can view whether or not an assignment was graded anonymously in SpeedGrader. Anonymous grading is set by opening SpeedGrader options and selecting “Hide Student Names” in the SpeedGrader check-box. Notifications of the anonymous status are shown in both the student “Grades” page and the sidebar of the assignment submission page.

Submission Attachments and User Quotas: Student submission attachments are not counted against a user’s quota limit.

Firefox Crocodoc Annotations in SpeedGrader: When an instructor uses Crocodoc annotations for a supported assignment submission type (primarily Word documents and PDFs), the Firefox browser frequently removes the last annotated comment when updating the score field in SpeedGrader. This behavior is a Crocodoc-specific limitation within Firefox that cannot be resolved by Crocodoc at this time. To warn about the effects of Firefox and Crocodoc annotations, Canvas displays a warning banner that says “Warning: Crocodoc has limitations when used in Firefox. Comments will not always be saved.” To avoid losing any annotations, instructors may choose to use another browser when providing Crocodoc annotated feedback, or try clicking the screen before navigating to another student.