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 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.
6/24/17 Production Release Highlights:
- Blueprint Courses: Blueprint Courses makes it easy for administrators or designers to deploy, update, and maintain course design templates or components across any number of courses or instructors. For an individual institution, Blueprint Courses allows Canvas admins to create content and learning objects, lock specific settings or content items, and push updates to all associated courses through course syncing. Any items that are not locked can be managed individually by a course instructor. Content that can be managed by an instructor is not overwritten when the Blueprint Course is synced to associated courses, and new content created in any associated course is also not affected. For more information about Blueprint Courses, please see the Canvas Blueprint Courses Release Notes.
- Please note that this feature can only be enabled at the root level for our Canvas environment and would apply to all courses. We do not plan to enable this feature as part of the 6/24 release.
- Canvas DocViewer: DocViewer automatically converts common documents types into web-viewable and interactive learning experiences. This feature replaces the current Box previewer and Crocodoc annotation tools in Canvas and provides improved performance. For more information about Canvas DocViewer, please see the Canvas DocViewer Release Notes. For detailed instructions on how to use the Canvas DocViewer, please see Canvas DocViewer on Canvas at Penn.
- Please note that this feature will go live for UPenn between 10am and 2pm on Tuesday June 20th, ahead of this weekend’s release.
- Assignment Groups and Total Points: In the “Student Grades” page, the “Out of” column displays assignment group point values in courses where students are allowed to view total grades. If a student is not allowed to view total grades, the assignment group displays the total percentage for the assignment group only. Total grades can be restricted by an instructor in Course Settings by hiding the totals in the student grades summary. For courses involved in Multiple Grading Periods, admins can choose to not display totals when students view the “All Grading Periods” option.
- Self-Sent Messages: Users can now send messages to themselves without any other recipients.
- New Instructor Tutorials (coming July 15th; mentioned in the June 24th Production Release Notes): On July 15th, the New Instructor Tutorials feature will be enabled for all Canvas institutions. This feature is comprised of the Modules Home Page and New User Tutorial feature options and will apply to all new Canvas courses. Learn more about New Instructor Tutorials in Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-04-22).
For a complete production release update, please see:
Canvas Production Release Notes: June 24, 2017
2017-06-24 New Feature Screencast from Canvas LMS on Vimeo.
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Last Updated: 17 Sep 2021