This month’s highlighted features are the option to schedule posting of grades and comments using manual posting policies and the addition of surveys to the New Quizzes quiz engine. These features arrive Saturday, December 13, 2025.
Teachers can schedule when Canvas releases grades and comments for assignments where the posting policy is set to manual by selecting Grade Posting Policy from the assignment’s triple dot option menu in the Gradebook. Teachers may also schedule comments to be released before grades.
Teachers can create surveys using New Quizzes. Teachers can also migrate Classic Quizzes surveys to New Quizzes.
- On the Assignment options page for a New Quiz, teachers can choose Graded Quiz, Graded Survey, or Ungraded Survey from a new Quiz Type dropdown menu.
- After selecting Graded Survey or Ungraded Survey as the Quiz Type, teachers can check a box to keep results anonymous. Once the option to keep results anonymous is saved, it cannot be unchecked.
- When editing a question on the Build page, teachers can activate a toggle to make the question required. Some NQ question types (categorization, formula, hot spot, matching, numeric, and ordering) are not available in surveys.
- Teachers can review survey responses in the New Quiz’s Reports tab.
- Instructure plans to add the option to export survey results to CSV at a later date in 2026, but it will not be possible immediately.
Find screen shots and more discussion of the New Quizzes survey feature in the product manager Balasz Serenyi’s blog post.
Instructure will rename “Smart Search” as “IgniteAI Search.” They did not announce any feature changes to accompany the tool’s rechristening.
Click here to read full release notes for Saturday, December 13, 2025. (Product releases typically arrive the third Saturday of each month. Instructure moved this release to the second Saturday due to winter break.) The full notes contain more details, links to screencasts, and feature Q&A discussions.
Note: Instructure is migrating their Community website to a new host platform. The Community website will be read-only during the migration and validation. According to the community director Renée Carney’s post announcing the migration, their goal is to enable full functionality, including posting and commenting, by Wednesday, December 10, 2025. If more time is needed, the Community site may remain read-only through Wednesday, December 31, 2025.
Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash