Canvas Updates for August 2020

 

Canvas releases updates on the third Saturday of every month in sessions called sprints. There were a few new features released for August of 2020.

Bulk Delete Pages

Being new to building Canvas courses can often mean a lot of mistakes (or at least it does for the author!) Canvas has made it easier be free of these "mistakes" as multiple pages can be deleted at one time in the Pages Index page.  

Course Section Visibility

While all students are visible under the People area of each course, there is a column labeled Section that lets users know which student is in each section. This column can now be removed so that students cannot see who is in each section of the course. 

 

Some instructors use sections within a single course to create groups that have different due dates. Sometimes these due dates are based on a private, potentially identifying reason (illness, personal issue, etc.) that they might not want other students to know. By removing the section column, instructors can continue to use sections to group students without publicizing this information to the rest of the course. 

 

 

The Global Announcements Page

 

Global Announcements is a new option under the User Navigation Menu that allows users to view announcements that were previously dismissed from the Dashboard. 

The Global Announcements page defaults to the Current Announcements tab, which displays all active announcements for the institution. There is also a Recent tab that allows users to refer back to older announcements (as long as their end date has been within the past four months.)