Canvas Production Release: April 2, 2016

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.

4/2/16 Production Release Highlights:

Course Storage Report: In Account Settings, the “Reports” tab includes the Course Storage Report. Configured by term, this report pulls the current statistics for storage space used for every course (shown in megabytes). The resulting CSV file will have one row per course and will show the course id, course sis id, course short name, course name, account id, account sis id, account name, storage used in megabytes.

Gradebook Individual View & Final Grade Decimal Places: In the Gradebook, Individual View shows two decimal places for a student’s final grade. This change helps improve consistency with rounding in the Gradebook.

Notification Preference View: In the Notification page, the notification-option menus can be changed without hovering over a communication channel column. This change improves accessibility and allows notification options to be accessed by all users. Enabled notifications are shown with a dark background. Changing a notification option applies the option immediately. Users who have enabled push notifications will still be able to manage push notifications in the “Push Notifications” column. Please note that enabling push notifications only allows notifications to be sent immediately or not at all (daily and weekly notifications are not currently supported).

Manually Graded Question Quiz Statistics: In addition to showing a link to SpeedGrader, quiz statistics show relative grade performance for manually graded essay and file-upload quiz question types. In quiz statistics, manually graded question types are shown in the same table format as other quiz types. A manually graded quiz type is marked as correct if it contains a student score greater than or equal to the question points possible. Grade breakdown responses are shown as the top 27%, middle 46%, and bottom 27%. The statistics also show submissions that have not yet been graded. However, if all scores are identical, a response category may show more than the percentage number of students (e.g., all students score 100%).

Group Submission Individual Comments View: SpeedGrader does not display individual comments made in group-submission assignments. Group-submission assignments are assignments where the instructor creates a group assignment and one submission counts for all group members. This change was made so instructors can always verify that comments are made for the entire group; SpeedGrader defaults the comments field so that it cannot be changed.