This page will keep you informed about recent modifications and enhancements to the Canvas Learning Management System that may impact your teaching experience. Check back regularly for the most current information and how these changes can benefit your teaching and your students' learning.
Canvas Discussions Redesign
This enhancement aims to improve teachers’ and students’ experiences by offering new customizations and interactive components to discussion forums, including @mentions, anonymous posting, post logging, and enhanced searching and sorting capabilities, and discussion summaries. The ability to set multiple due dates for checkpoints is coming in a future update.
One of the most noticeable changes is the absence of the “edit” button. In order to add discussion prompts and other instructions for students, teachers must now use the kebab more menu to locate the edit feature.
We realize that change can be hard, so to ensure a smooth transition and help you make the most of these new features, we have prepared the following resources:
Instructional Video: This brief video provides an overview of the new features and changes that users can expect to see in the Discussions Redesign. You can watch it here.
Two-Page Guide: This concise document explains which features have changed, and includes tips to assist you in leveraging the new features effectively.
User Guides: We have created detailed “How-To” user guides for both the student and teacher roles. You can find supplemental resources for those using the Canvas Student (iOS/Android) and Canvas Teacher (iOS/Android) apps as well.
Discussion Summaries
The Discussions feature in Canvas is a powerful tool to facilitate conversation and collaboration between students. But we know it can be challenging for educators to keep up with threaded discussions, especially those with larger classes. That's where discussion summaries can help – they accelerate educators' ability to grasp central themes and questions emerging from discussion threads, understand student engagement, and identify areas that warrant further conversation.
The Discussion summary feature utilizes AI to generate a summary that can help clarify topic areas that may need further discussion or clarification.
Selective Release of Modules
Educators can differentiate learning content for students by releasing modules to specific individuals and sections. This will allow you to personalize your course more and assign specialized modules to individual students or groups of students. You can also assign different modules to different sections in the same course.
More information about selective release of modules
Course-wide Smart Search
Searching for content in a Canvas course has been very challenging in the past. Due to this, we have enabled an AI-assisted search tool that can be used to search an entire Canvas course for pages, assignments, and other content.
Use Smart Search to type in keyword(s), content, or just give a general gist of what you are looking for (“guitar”, “what are the steps of photosynthesis?”, “math to turn a function into frequencies“). We think you will be surprised at how well the system understands the intent of your queries and returns results accordingly.
Improved Lucid Integration
Lucid products, such as Lucidchart and Lucidspark, are now seamlessly integrated into Canvas to enhance student learning by facilitating collaborative visual thinking and interactive diagramming. These tools enable students to create and share dynamic visual content, and promote engagement and deeper understanding of complex concepts.
Lucid Spark is a good replacement for Google Jamboard.
Learn more about how to use Lucid with Canvas
DesignPLUS Enhancements
DesignPLUS is a course design toolset that augments Canvas' built-in editing features to allow the user to customize and style content in Canvas more easily. It allows for more advanced formatting and features, such as pull-down menus, buttons, icons, quick checks, etc. It is not necessary for faculty to learn to use DesignPLUS, but for those who wish to augment their design, a site license is available to all NCSSM employees.
DesignPLUS is recommended for more advanced Canvas users who are already familiar with Canvas' basic classroom functionality.
For teachers using DesignPLUS, the product has gone through substantial changes recently.
Learn more about the new DesignPLUS enhancements and changes
Rubric Enhancements - Coming soon …
The process of creating rubrics in canvas was never very intuitive. We have enabled enhancements to the rubric creation process to make the process easier. The guides below detail the changes.