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.
9/16/17 Production Release Highlights:
- Student Assignments Filter Buttons: When assignments are organized by assignment group, the student “Assignments” page displays buttons to filter by date and by type. The buttons have been updated to read as “Show by Date” and “Show by Type,” respectively.
- Notifications & Course Sender Name: When students view course notifications in their email, all notifications are sent from the course name. This change helps students more easily identify notifications from a specific course. Previously, notifications were also sent from Instructure Canvas or the institution’s name. This update does not affect any other elements in course notifications.
- Conferences Updates: There are a number of updates to the Conferences tool in this release–
- Interface Enhancements: The Conferences interface has been updated with a brighter design and modern icons, which render as a font to provide better support for higher resolution monitors. Additionally, the menu bar buttons have been simplified and grouped together for easier access.
- Presentation Downloads: When adding files to a presentation, presenters can choose to let students download the presentation. By default, this option is disabled. When enabled, the download icon is included in the bottom of the presentation window.
- Promote Viewer to Moderator: In the user settings, a presenter can promote a viewer to be a moderator at any time. Presenters can also change a moderator’s status back to a conference viewer.
- Public Chat Downloads: In the chat window, the Options tab allows users to download the chat transcript as a text (.txt) file. Users can also copy the chat contents, and clear the public chat history. Clearing the chat history cannot be undone.
- End Meeting on Logout: When logging out of a conference, moderators can choose to log out and end the meeting at the same time. Ending the meeting will remove all users from the conference and start to process the recording (if applicable).
- Full Screen Mode: Conferences provides a full screen mode, which allows moderators to display presentations in a full-screen window. This update is helpful to users who may present the conference on a separate screen and want to display the content in a maximum presentation size.
- Multiuser Whiteboard: The presenter can enable the multiuser whiteboard at the bottom of the presentation toolbar. When enabled, users can view the toolbar options and contribute to the whiteboard. The name of each user displays next to the user’s cursor. Additionally, each user has a separate layer in the whiteboard and cannot affect another user’s whiteboard (including clearing annotations). The presenter can disable the multiuser whiteboard at any time. Once the multiuser whiteboard is disabled, the presenter can click the Clearbutton to remove all annotations from the whiteboard. As an additional enhancement to the whiteboard, shapes drawn with the pen tool are smoothed automatically.
- Shared Notes: In the “Shared Notes” window, users can view when another user is typing in the notes window. The “Undo/Redo” icons undo or redo content for the last user who contributed to the notes. Shared notes supports a text toolbar for content formatting that can be opened and closed using the “Text” icon. Before the session ends, users can also download notes as formatted text (.html) or plain text (.txt). Notes are not recorded as part of a presentation. Moderators can also clear all note content for all users. Clearing content cannot be undone.
For a complete production release update, please see:
Canvas Production Release Notes: September 16, 2017
2017-09-16 New Feature Screencast from Canvas LMS on Vimeo.
View the script for this video.
Last Updated: 14 Dec 2018