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.
8/26/17 Production Release Highlights:
- Point and Area Annotation Comments in DocViewer: To save an annotation, Point and Area annotations do not require comments. Comments can be added to the annotation like all other annotation types. This change was deployed to the production environment on August 9th.
- Session Expiration Warning in DocViewer: When a user creates annotations in DocViewer, Canvas will display a session expiration warning at 9 hours 50 minutes, followed by a 5-minute and 1-minute warnings until the 10-hour limit has been reached. This change helps users be able to save their work before the session automatically refreshes at 10 hours. A session can be restarted at any time by refreshing the submission page.
- Insert/Edit Media in the Rich Content Editor: The Rich Content Menu toolbar includes an option to insert or edit media. This change allows users to easily add online media content to a course without having to use the HTML Editor. The “General” tab includes fields for the media source location and dimensions. The media can be resized and set to constrain size proportions.
- The “Embed” tab includes an HTML field for embed code.
- The “Advanced” tab includes fields for providing alternative source URL(s) and poster image information. Alternative sources pointing to different video encodings can be specified to be used as a fallback if the browser doesn’t support the initial encoding offered. The poster URL source indicates the image that displays until the user clicks the play button. If the poster option is blank, the first frame of the source video will be used as the poster image.
- Links from common providers (like YouTube and Vimeo) often link to custom media players, rather than directly to video files, and will not recognize any content added to the alternative source and posted image options.
- SpeedGrader Performance Updates: SpeedGrader has been optimized for performance in large courses and includes an increased submission threshold per student submission. Previously averaging at 800 submissions, the current minimum threshold has improved to 1500 submissions. Assignments with more than 1500 submissions may result in delayed SpeedGrader loading times.
For a complete production release update, please see:
Canvas Production Release Notes: August 26, 2017
2017-08-26 New Feature Screencast from Canvas LMS on Vimeo.
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Last Updated: 14 Dec 2018