As we continue to innovate and improve Canvas, we are excited to share some new features designed to make your experience more seamless and efficient. During InstructureCon this year, one of the most impactful events was Hacknight, where customers had the opportunity to interact directly with our product and engineering teams. The insights and feedback gathered during Hacknight were invaluable and allowed us to make some changes immediately. The remaining insights gathered have been shared across our teams to be considered.
Account Default Grading Scheme
One of the latest enhancements is the introduction of the Account Default Grading Scheme. This feature allows administrators to set a default grading scheme at the account level, ensuring consistency across courses and saving instructors and admins time.
API to Set Post-Policy
We've heard from many admins that the ability to easily set the post policy for all courses is crucial to creating courses. With this feedback, we’ve created a new API that allows for setting the post policies for courses. This API enables users to set the post policy for courses through the API. Making it faster to set the post policy across a large number of courses.
Hyperlinked Courses on the Terms Page
In response to valuable feedback from our Hacknight session, we have enhanced the Terms page by hyperlinking the course count to the filtered courses page. This improvement makes navigation more intuitive and user-friendly, allowing admins to quickly access courses associated with a term. This feature underscores our commitment to incorporating user feedback into our development process, ensuring that Canvas evolves in ways that genuinely benefit our community.
LTI Integration Improvements
As a result of feedback we received at hacknight, we were able to make two improvements to our LTI Integration offerings. First, we know that migrating content created via LTI 1.1 tools to the LTI 1.3 version of the same tool has been a challenge for some time. Because of the opportunity to discuss with users and brainstorm solutions, we were able to create a Canvas API which allows administrators to look up and update Resource Link URLs for content items, as well as any custom parameters associated with that resource. This will enable administrators to know where the embedded links in rich content actually point, since previously all they could see in the HTML was the lookup UUID. This will also enable administrators to migrate content and help their users to move forward with the latest and greatest tool versions.
The second change we made was in response to hearing that a school had repeatedly had their EduAppCenter token wiped out by admins who shouldn’t have had the ability to modify LTI tools. This resulted in all tools being available to install via EduAppCenter, instead of only those which had been reviewed and added to the allowlist. In response to this, we have updated the EduAppCenter token field to only be available to users with the Manage LTI permission, which should prevent this issue in the future.
These new features are part of our ongoing efforts to enhance Canvas and provide users with the tools they need to succeed. We encourage you to explore these updates and share your feedback with us. Your input is invaluable as we strive to make Canvas the best learning management system available. We thank everyone who participated in Hacknight and contributed to the rich tapestry of ideas and insights. Here’s to pushing for growth, discovery, and transformative learning experiences.
Some of these improvements are still in beta or have not yet been released, so be sure to keep an eye on the release and deploy notes for the latest updates.
