Good afternoon,
As we near the start of a new academic year, I wanted to bring folks’ attention to recent changes in Canvas that affect how you navigate and use discussions as well as how you assign work and add due dates to assignments. To reach as many faculty as possible, I’m sending this message to OnlyFaculty and will re-send it closer to the beginning of Fall 2024.
(Apologies in advance for the length!)
Discussions Redesign
Discussions have been given a visual upgrade in Canvas, as well as changes to how they work. Unlike in the past, new replies will be posted near the top of the thread by default. This can be changed with the “Sort” button, and you can also view as a split screen to see message threads via “View Split Screen”:
Replies can be hidden, and so students (and faculty!) may need to click the reply indicator at the bottom of a post to view replies:
If you look to the right of a discussion post, you’ll see three dots. This is an options menu, and there are two things of note here:
“Quote Reply” is a feature that allows for quoted text within a reply. At a certain point, students will see a “Quote” button instead of a “Reply” button when replying to posts on a message thread. This is to indicate what is being replied to and could complement discussions of citation practices. By clicking the dots, you can see the quote when typing your reply:
Another item on the discussion options menu is “Report.” This is a way that anyone in the course, including students, can report a post. Ideally, this would be prefaced by information you share on how digital citizenship works and how respect must be observed in your classroom, in person or virtual.
You can see a few new options when you create or edit a discussion. One new feature is the ability to create anonymous discussions. There are three levels of anonymity, as seen on the discussion settings page:
The option for full anonymity could be useful for folks discussing topics where students may feel uncomfortable sharing their thoughts, or even as an option for ensuring that replies to other students aren’t colored by personal impressions, but rather the substance of their posts.
Lastly, an exciting feature of the redesign that folks have been asking for… edit history! You will be able to see the edit history of posts, as well as whether posts were deleted. This is useful for faculty using the post-first option (where students post before seeing replies). If students post placeholder text, it will now be visible to you even if posts are edited later.
Students are told in a banner on the Discussions page that history is visible. You can see the history of a post by clicking “View History” beneath a post’s title. It will show something like this:
Changes to Due Dates and Assign To… in Assignments
If you’ve gone back to edit an assignment’s due date from a copied course, only to panic when you didn’t see a due date field… you’re not alone.
Instead of the usual calendar at the bottom of an assignment’s settings, you’ll see a new option to “Assign Access.” When you click “Manage Assign To,” you’ll see a slide-out menu appear with the usual calendar:
Click “Manage Assign To”…
…and the calendar appears!
You’ll also find the option to change the assignee and due dates when you click an assignment’s name from the Assignments page or the gradebook. Rather than clicking the Edit button, you’ll click the Assign To button, which will slide out the new menu.
For now, those appear to be the biggest changes thus far. I (and the online team) will help keep you informed about big changes as best we can!
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