What's new in Canvas for Fall 2024

The following updates have been made to Canvas, or are pending further review:

Enabled - Discussion and Announcements Redesign: A redesign of the discussion and announcements features has been enforced by Instructure. For an overview of this change, please see the Missouri Online Blog Post.

Missouri Online has identified, and Instructure has been made aware of, multiple bugs in this redesign. Instructure’s engineering team is working to rectify them, and Missouri Online is monitoring that progress. If any bugs or unexpected behaviors occur, please contact teachingtools@umsystem.edu to report them.

Enabled - Canvas Inbox Updates: Students and Instructors now have the ability to add a signature line to Canvas Inbox Messages. They also have the ability to set an out-of-office message from their Canvas Inbox. A guide for setting these is available.

Enabled - File Availability Times: Instructors can now set a time at which a file becomes available to students in Canvas.

Enabled - Name Pronunciation: Users can now add a phonetic pronunciation of their name to their Canvas profile.

Enabled - Course List sorting: Users can now sort their list of all courses by course name, term, enrollment status, and course publish stats.

Enabled - SpeedGrader “Draft Comment” visibility: When writing comments on an assignment in SpeedGrader, a icon indicating that an unsaved comment is a “draft” has been added.

Disabled - Discussion Summaries: A feature that will utilize Generative AI in order to summarize the contents of a Canvas discussion has been disabled, pending additional testing and review of IT Compliance.

Disabled - Smart Search: An AI powered feature that would allow users to search a course using semantic language has been disabled, pending additional testing and review of IT Compliance.

Disabled - Lucid Integration: Instructure has partnered with Lucid Visual Collaboration Studio to make their products available inside Canvas. This integration is currently disabled pending IT compliance and accessibility reviews.

Disabled - Assign To Modules: A feature that will allow instructors to assign a Canvas module to a specific section or students has been disabled due to bugs with assignment due dates. This bug is with Instructure engineering, and when resolved the feature will be re-enabled.

Disabled - Rubrics Redesign: Canvas rubrics are undergoing a redesign, however bugs have been reported. Currently, this feature is either enabled for everyone or disabled for everyone, so we cannot enable the redesign at this time. Missouri Online will continue to monitor and conduct testing in the hopes of making this redesign available to instructors.