Canvas Updates

Officially cross-listed courses will now be automatically cross-listed.

Courses officially cross-listed in the Schedule of Classes will now be automatically cross-listed in Canvas. Previously, instructors needed to submit a request form. Please email [email protected] to report any issues with your automatically cross-listed Canvas course or if you do not see a course with combined sections.

To check whether a course is cross-listed, visit the course Settings, and click on the Sections tab. 

Instructors teaching multiple sections of the same course can choose to cross-list these sections. 

To make multi-section teaching easier, instructors may now request a multi-section cross-list in Canvas. Common tasks such as sending course announcements or making a correction to a Canvas assignment or quiz can be made once in the combined section course. To be eligible, all course sections must be the same course and term, taught by the same instructor.

As we cannot assume every instructor wishes to teach using combined sections, please request a multi-section cross-list using our online form.

Course storage quotas will increase to 2GB.

Canvas course storage quotas will increase from 1GB to 2GB (2x increase). We still encourage all instructors to take advantage of more sophisticated file storage options for large files. Video files should not be stored directly in Canvas. Instead, use Panopto Video for media.

The Panopto streaming media service is purpose-built for large video files. Students can take advantage of smoother video playback, the ability to take notes, and the ability to bookmark parts of a video.

Individual user storage in Canvas will increase to 1GB.

Primarily impacting our student Canvas users, individual user storage will increase from 100MB to 1GB (10x increase). The increase in storage will also help instructors who use Canvas Inbox (email like messaging in Canvas) to send attachments.

We still encourage all users to take advantage of more sophisticated file storage options (Panopto Video for media and Office365 OneDrive for large files).

A newly redesigned Discussions interface is available as a feature preview.

Instructors may now activate the redesigned Discussions feature preview. Feature previews allow users to try out future enhancements before they are made widely available. To activate the redesigned Discussion interface, visit the Settings area of the course. Locate the Features Options tab and, scroll down to Discussions/Announcements Redesign. Clicking the X icon will activate the feature.

The redesigned Discussions interface offers a new Reply Sidebar, the ability to mention another discussion participant (@tag), quote other replies as part of a discussion reply, and an anonymous discussion option.

For complete details, visit the Canvas Release: Discussions/Announcements Redesign webpage. You can also watch a short video on the redesigned interface on the Discussions Redesign Early Access webpage.

Course instructors can more easily add their colleague using the “Co-Teacher” role. 

Faculty can now use the new "Co-Teacher" role to manually add a teaching colleague to a course who is not instructor of record or teaching assistant. Two versions of this role are available:

• Co-Teacher (Editing), used to give a colleague complete access to edit the course and grade students.
• Co-Teacher (Non-Editing), used to give more limited access to a colleague without editing or grading privileges. This role does allow the user to copy course content (useful when sharing a course with a colleague).

The Teacher role should be reserved for instructors of record. This role is assigned to instructors of record when GET enrolls users in Canvas automatically. For this reason, the Teacher role will no longer be available when manually adding users to a course. Moving forward, use the Co-Teacher role instead.

This new role also helps alleviate an issue where the daily GET/Canvas sync would remove manually added Teachers. Manually added Co-Teachers will now remain in the course unless removed by the Teacher.

Canvas updates in place. There are no major releases, features are added as they are available and improvements are released as they are completed. Releases and deploys will be separate events. A deploy means making code available in a specific environment; code may or may not be visible. A release represents a scheduled event when code is intended to be visible.

• Releases contain changes that affect user workflows for any Canvas-related product, including API/SIS integration adjustments.
• Deploys contain non-customer-affecting code changes intended to fix bugs, improve performance, and prepare for new features.

Releases and deploys will take place on the following timelines:

• Feature releases in the production environment take place on the third Saturday of every month, beginning August 17
• A preview of the following month’s release will be available in the beta environment the same day as the production release, beginning August 17
• Deploys of the main Canvas codebase to the production environment take place every other Wednesday, and beta deploys take place every other Thursday, beginning July 31 and August 1, respectively.

If you are interested in following the release cycle, you can subscribe to that calendar.