What’s New in Canvas for Fall 2018
Greetings MCC Faculty and Staff
Welcome to a new semester. If you’ve been away from Canvas we’ve got a summarized list of what may be new to you when you return to getting your course content put together:
- Student To Do ListThe Student Planner will help students prioritize what they need to do across courses, identify missed opportunities, and add their own items to their list of to-dos to help them manage their time in one place.
Overview of List View for Students
How Do I Use the Dashboard List View as a Student?
- Module DuplicationPreviously, course content items could only be duplicated individually. With the recent Modules update, instructors can duplicate entire modules. If your module has a quiz in it the module cannot be duplicated.
How Do I Duplicate a Module?
- Section Specific AnnouncementsInstructors can now create section-specific announcements in their courses. When creating an announcement, instructors can select to send the announcement to all sections, one section, or multiple sections.
How Do I Create a Section-Specific Announcement?
- Section Specific DiscussionsInstructors now have the ability to invite specific sections to view and participate in a discussion so it can be focused to the right audience.
How Do I Assign a Graded Discussion to a Course Section?
- Inactive Role – (This behavior will begin Aug 25th)
Statement from DO ITS: “Title IV Reporting Improvements (Last Day of Attendance) – ITS and the Office of the General Counsel’s Compliance division, with input from faculty and staff from around the district, developed an application that will assist faculty in reporting more accurate Last Day of Attendance(LDA) dates to the student information system (SIS). This allows for accurate reporting of Title IV funding to the federal government and reduces financial audits at the college and district levels. The system will query Maricopa’s online learning management studio presenting appropriate options to faculty and will launch the beginning of August – prior to the start of the fall semester.”
To support last day of attendance and other operational issues regarding student activity not being available when a student has a withdrawn status in SIS, they have been getting deleted on the Canvas side.The DO ITS team in charge of SIS->Canvas interface has decided to make use of the inactive status in Canvas with the SIS interface so that students who are withdrawn will not have access to their Canvas course but their data will still remain in the course.Faculty will likely notice this in two areas of the course:
- The Canvas grade book, but only if they show the option to display inactive students
and - The people tab. All students who have ever enrolled in the course will always display here so this will make the list longer than it has in the past. This first semester is an introduction to this method and you may receive calls for support about the inactive tag showing up in the people tab or instructors wanting information about dropped students.
Here’s another institution’s description of the purpose and effect:
https://stritch.instructure.com/courses/2566/pages/inactive-status-for-students-new-process
See https://ep.maricopa.edu/ERP/canvas/Pages/Last-Day-of-Attendance-Changes-Fall-2018.aspx to see the offical MCCCD statement about this change.
- Stacking Replies in DocviewerWhen users view comments for a DocViewer-supported document, comments with replies are stacked together. The number of replies is indicated for the comment thread. Users can click the first comment to expand and view all additional comments.
Stacked replies is now in DocViewer
- Badgr is the official Canvas badging solution supported by Instructure. Look for special communication about using Badges in your Canvas courses.