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.

Course Improvements

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.

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Teachers will now see a new “Smart Search” link in their course menus.

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.

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Course Smart Search - AI Nutrition Facts

Assignments

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 can be used for collaborative activities and assignments within Canvas.

Learn more about how to use Lucid with Canvas

Discussions

Discussion Checkpoints in Canvas

Canvas recently added the ability to add discussion checkpoints to discussion assignments, which means you can set separate due dates for the initial prompt response and for the responses to other students. No longer must you manually type in these dates in the discussion prompt itself. Check out additional information from Ball State University.

IgniteAI 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.

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Teachers will now see a “Summarize” button in each discussion.

The Discussion summary feature utilizes AI to generate a summary that can help clarify topic areas that may need further discussion or clarification.

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Teachers can prompt the AI discussion summary tool to focus on specific areas or topics.

Summaries for Discussions - AI Nutrition Facts

IgniteAI Insights for Discussions

In Discussions, the Discussion Insights Dashboard uses an AI-powered tool to help educators quickly evaluate the relevance and quality of student replies (related to the prompt) and can draw attention to students who may need extra help.

Guide: How do I use IgniteAI Insights for Discussions?

Insights for Discussions - AI Nutrition Facts

Rubrics

Rubric Enhancements

Canvas recently added new enhancements to rubrics to make creating them and using them to grade work easier and more efficient.

The new rubric enhancements also allow you to enable self-assessment for students, where they will be asked to use the rubric to assess their own work.

The guides below detail the changes.

• How do I manage rubrics in a course using Rubric Enhancements?

• How do I add a rubric in a course using Rubric Enhancements?

• How do I align an outcome with a rubric in a course using Rubric Enhancements?

IgniteAI Rubric Generation for Assignments

This feature uses AI to generate editable rubrics with suggested criteria, point values, and performance levels based on the assignment name and description. The IgniteAI Generator for Rubrics works best with the following types of assignments:

• Essays or written responses

• Presentations

• Projects or group work

• Open-ended assignments

This feature can save time when creating rubrics.

Guide: How do I use IgniteAI Generator for Rubrics in an assignment?

Generator for Rubrics - AI Nutrition Facts

Language Translation

IgniteAI Language Translation for Inbox Messages

This feature uses AI to translate messages in the Canvas Inbox. It serves as an accessibility tool to assist students who are not as fluent in English.

This feature is active for all users when using the Inbox messaging in Canvas.

Guide: How do I translate an Inbox Message using IgniteAI Translations

Translations for Inbox - AI Nutrition Facts

IgniteAI Translation for Discussions and Announcements

This feature enables teachers and students to generate language translations for announcements and discussion posts, assisting students less fluent in English.

Guide: How do I translate a discussion using IgniteAI Translations as an instructor?

Translations for Discussions and Announcements - AI Nutrition Facts

Modules

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 Design

Design Quick Start Wizard

You may notice a new button for a QuickStart Wizard when you are editing new content in Canvas.

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The QuickStart Wizard offers ready-made templates and content blocks for your Canvas course. You can access the Wizard while editing assignments, pages, discussions, announcements, syllabi, and classic quizzes. The TLC team has added over 50 templates specifically designed for NCSSM instructors, with more on the way.

These templates save time. For instance, when teaching a new class, you can import a basic syllabus template and start with commonly used language already included. Additionally, these templates standardize layout, improving course navigation for students.

For more information, visit the Guide on on how to use the new DesignPLUS QuickStart Wizard.