The new changes to canvas

[ThomasHolmes]

I want you guys to know that the recent changes that you have made to Canvas for our university are the worst!!! Who decided on these changing: esp, in the discussion forum and I do not like the term of using "teacher." I am a Professor. Teachers are in high schools or community colleges. CHANGE IT! These changes that they have made in canvas is a serious setbacks like going to the day of BlackBoard. The change was not a good move.

[distance_ed1]

Hi,

A Canvas representative can say for sure, but I don't think this is the appropriate forum for this kind of concern. This forum is for questions about the Canvas platform. Your institution's Canvas administrators may be more equipped to voice these concerns on your behalf to your CSM.

All the best,
Danielle 

PS. Elitism is not a valid reason to demand a product change. You'll likely be more successful advocating for changes that actually relate to the core functionality of the system or that have a real impact on student success. 🙂

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

@ThomasHolmes ...

For context about the Discussions/Announcements Redesign project ... I can tell you that as a Canvas administrator in higher education, the ability for us to turn on/off the new Discussions/Announcements Redesign has been available for a while now.  This means that your school Canvas administrators may have chosen to enable this in your Canvas environment earlier than other schools have done.  It is also true that on July 20, 2024, the new design of Discussions/Announcements will be enforced for all Canvas customers.  You can read more about this at: Canvas Release: Discussions/Announcements Redesign - Instructure Community - 464064 (canvaslms.com).  I understand the frustration, but as you can see from this document, there are some new features of Discussions that you might want to take advantage of that you didn't have access to before.

You may do this already, but if not, I'd encourage you to follow both the Canvas Release Notes and Canvas Deploy Notes areas here in the Community so that you can stay updated on the kinds of things Canvas is pushing out for everyone.  This also gives you some time to test things out for yourself prior to the updates going "live".  Also, you can leave feedback for Instructure on what you like, what you don't like, etc.  Typically, before a release goes live, you can try out the new things by signing in to your school's Canvas "beta" environment.  More info at: What is the Canvas beta environment? and How do I access the Canvas beta environment as an instructor?.  I always tell people to make sure to sign out of "beta" before returning to your regular "production" environment ... the environment you are used to signing in to on a daily basis ... as both environments have slightly different URLs.  How do I log out of Canvas as an instructor?.

Re: the use of the word "Teacher" ... As you may know, Canvas is used in K-12, in Higher Education, and other businesses who want to house course content online.  While I cannot speak for the exact reason they chose "Teacher", it's probably more of a universal term that applies to a wide variety institutions and businesses.  Your Canvas administrator(s) could certainly create a new role called "Professor" or "Instructor" and then create a set of permissions that matched exactly to the permissions given to the "Teacher" role, but I there might be other reasons why your Canvas admin(s) would want to keep things they way they currently are.  This is a bigger discussion you'd want to have with your school's Canvas admin team...as @distance_ed1 has suggested.

I hope this information will be helpful in some way.

[scottkvcc]

I have to join Thomas in my distaste for the discussion changes.  As he stated, it isn't very cool to lump all us higher education people in with K-12 by calling all of us "teachers," but that doesn't bother me as much as this:

The new discussion format always goes back to "collapse threads" and "newest first" after I have changed it. I need my discussions to always be "expand threads" and "oldest first." Can you please fix it so that once I make a change to how it is displayed, it stays that way?