Canvas Production Release: April 23, 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.

4/23/16 Production Release Highlights:

Wrapped Assignments and Event Titles: The Calendar-Month view supports text-wrapping for events and assignment titles with long names. When this feature is enabled, a calendar item-name longer than the width of the date wraps the content to the next line. Some events may create additional white space between shorter events on the same week as days with longer events because the Calendar infrastructure enforces a table grid for the entire row. “Wrapped Assignments and Events Titles” is used in conjunction with the “Wrap Event Titles in Calendar Month View” account-level feature option, which must be enabled by an institutional admin in Account Settings.

Sub-account Global Announcements: Admins and sub-account admins can create global announcements at the sub-account level. This feature allows sub-account global announcements to be shown to all sub-account admins and users enrolled in courses within the sub-account. To help differentiate announcements at the account and sub-account levels, the message also indicates which account or sub-account sent the global announcement. “Managing Global Announcements” requires the “Global Announcements” account permission.

Gradebook Performance Updates: Gradebook content is loaded incrementally for improved performance. Some Gradebook features such as column sorting may not be available in larger courses until all students have been loaded on the page.

Communication Channel Update: If a user tries to reply to a message in an unconfirmed communication channel, the error delivery message includes information about how to confirm the communication channel so replies can be sent back through Canvas. Previously the message only mentioned that the reply could not be delivered, and the majority of users were unsure how to update or confirm a communication channel.

Folder Clicks and Page Load: When a user repeatedly clicked folders in the left panel in “Files,” the right panel stopped loading for the last selected folder and did not display any files content. This behavior occurred in Chrome and Safari. Canvas code has been updated to remove unnecessary calls to previously selected folders and view files content.

Crocodoc Annotations and Group Assignments: When an instructor creates Crocodoc annotations on a group assignment, all students in the group can view the annotations.