Canvas Release Highlights for September 2023

In this post, I highlight features from the Canvas release on Saturday, September 16th and a code deploy from late August.

  • Teachers and other graders can view and annotate files in Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote formats in SpeedGrader, and all users can view them in DocViewer previews. This feature was enabled August 31, 2023 for US Canvas users (click here to read more).
  • Teachers can create points to letter grade schemes. These work like percentage to letter grade schemes insofar as they express points earned / points possible ratios in proportion to the scheme’s maximum. A scheme with a maximum of 4 points – the default – would express the score 8/10 as 3.2/4 (just as its percentage expression is 80%).
  • When a page title is edited, Canvas will automatically update all links to that page in a course. The alleviates a problem where editing page titles broke links.

  • Teachers using New Quizzes can enable an option for students can build on their prior attempt if multiple attempts are allowed. If enabled, students are only presented with items that they missed in their prior attempt. This is an exciting option for formative assessments & practice quizzes.
  • Teachers can generate item analyses on demand for New Quizzes. This is an option for a new version of New Quizzes item analysis. The old version, which is available after a delay, will continue generating reports through 2023.

 Click here to read the full release notes for Saturday, September 16, 2023.

Click here for the list of Canvas release notes. The full notes contain more details, links to screencasts, and feature Q&A discussions. You may log in to the Canvas Community to post.

Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash