Canvas Release Highlights for July 2021

Pen writing on ruled paper

Instructure’s production release to Canvas occurs on Saturday July 17, 2021. Code deploys occur on Wednesdays July 7 and 21, 2021.
On Saturday July 31, 2021, Instructure will discontinue remaining SMS notifications (i.e. announcements and grading; other types of notifications were discontinued via SMS in May 2020).

Starting on Thursday July 15, 2021, Instructure has designated regular maintenance windows for us on the first and third Thursdays of each month from 1:05am to 3:05am Eastern Time. They expect actual downtime to last a few minutes. They may not need to do maintenance during every window. Click here to read the scheduled maintenance window announcement.

The July 7 deploy contains subtle improvements:

  • When a teacher customizes the Gradebook assignment columns and exports a CSV file, the CSV file assignment columns have the same order shown in the user’s Gradebook.
  • The HTML editor allows some elements previously disallowed in Canvas: picture, ruby, rp, rt. Some attributes have also been added to the allowlist.

After the July 17 release, students experience a more intuitive workflow when opening New Quizzes from Modules.

Click here to read full deploy notes for July 7, 2021
Click here to read full release notes for July 17, 2021. The full notes contain more details about these and other changes, a link to a screencast explaining some of the changes contained in the release, a comments section, and role-specific user summaries. You can join in the discussion if you log in to the Canvas Community.

Production feature releases arrive on the third Saturday of each month. Click here to view release notes on Canvas Community. Instructure also lists noteworthy changes planned for future releases.

Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash