This month’s highlights are our enablement of DesignPLUS Student Cards and Instructure’s release of a tool to migrate videos embedded from YouTube into Canvas Studio.
Canvas users will find a new Student Cards button at the top right corner of the People page in their courses. After scrolling to the bottom of the page so that all user information loads into your browser from the server, you can click Student Cards to see the profile pictures for students in an enlarged photo grid layout. Initially, students without profile pictures are included in the grid; there is a button to filter them out so that only those with pictures are shown. Click Student List to return to the default view. We enabled this DesignPLUS feature on Thursday, September 11, 2025.
Due to a change in YouTube policy, YouTube videos embedded in Canvas directly (without using Canvas Studio) may start to show ads on Monday, September 22, 2025. Canvas Studio media from YouTube will not show ads or in-video links. Instructure released a migration tool to convert videos embedded from YouTube into videos embedded from Canvas Studio on September 1, 2025. Teachers can enable this tool in the course Settings > Feature options tab. After a refresh, the tool appears in the course navigation menu. Teachers can use the tool to scan course content for embedded YouTube videos and replace them with embedded Canvas Studio versions of the YouTube videos all from the tool. Please note that the tool finds embedded YouTube videos but ignores links to YouTube videos. The tool also does not scan New Quizzes content, which is technically a first-party integrated tool for Canvas.
The Studio guide to migrating YouTube videos to Canvas Studio shows the process using the tool, as well as a manual approach. If you have links to YouTube videos, please consider adding those videos to Canvas Studio and replacing the links with the Canvas Studio media to get the benefits of playing the video through Studio.
Although the highlights do not come from this month’s production release notes, click here to read release notes for Saturday, September 20, 2025.
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