Canvas Scheduled Outage

Canvas Maintenance Saturday, Aug 31.

Instructure be performing maintenance on our Canvas instance starting on Saturday, August 31st at 10PM MDT and lasting until 2AM MDT the following morning. You may experience a short downtime during the maintenance period and we recommend that you make contingency plans for any processes that you have active during this maintenance window.

Canvas updates 8/17/19

NEW! Blackboard ALLY Accessibility Reporting Feature

We're excited to introduce a brand new feature to our accessibility product called A11Y: A faculty-facing accessibility report. This report is intended to act as a complement to the existing accessibility indicators, and provides an accessibility summary and overview at the course level. 

 

The report shows the overall course accessibility score, the distribution of course content by content type and the list of all issues that have been identified in the course. The instructor can then easily see which content items in their course have been flagged with an issue, and is able to jump directly into the instructor feedback from the report.  

The course accessibility report also provides some help with prioritization, and will show different options such “Content that’s easiest to fix” and “Content with most severe issues” depending on the content in the course. The instructor feedback can again be triggered for each item, which should make working through the remediation of multiple items quite a bit faster. 

Next to this, the course accessibility report also provides a list of all the content that can be found in the course, including the ability to sort by severity, issue name, number of issues identified and accessibility score. The images below provide a visual as to what the report indicates.

  

New for Canvas Fall Term-Course Copy, New Gradebook

Copy a Canvas Course

Are you ready for the Fall term? Here is some new information about copying course content.

Canvas has introduced a new feature when copying a previous course. Before searching for a previous course, make sure you check the 'Include Completed Courses' box.

Course Settings>Import Course Content>Copy a Canvas Course>:

This will allow you to search all of your previous courses.

New Gradebook

In January 2020, Canvas will switch all users to the new Gradebook:

Old Gradebook:

As you can see in the example, the grade columns will remain. The main differences are in where to find the various controls/filters.

You can continue to use the current gradebook during the Fall term. You can switch back-and-forth between the two gradebooks by going to Course Settings>Feature Apps. Toggle the New Gradebook on/off to switch between gradebook views. We are encouraging everyone to try the new gradebook during this Fall term before the change in January.

The Student gradebook view will not change.

As always, if you have questions, contact Rob Gibson (rgibson1@emporia.edu), Mark Summey (msummey@emporia.edu), or Hind Aaati (haati@emporia.edu).