Canvas Release Notes (2019-04-20)

In our "Beta" environment, I am noticing that links within the global menu slide-outs for "Account", "Admin", "Courses", and "Help" are now all underlined...even though I do not have the "Underline Links" Feature Option turned on within my own Canvas profile. Was this an intended change?

rmurchshafer

I'm seeing the same.

ptart

Will the update to Conferences be pushed to BETA/TEST or do our users have to go to http://test.bigbluebutton.org/ to get familiar with this? We have many year-round schools that will go until June 28 using this tool. It is very intuitive but people still need time getting use to it.

Thanks,

Patrick Tart

straussi

If we enabled the Content Security Policy, would we have to whitelist any items contained in our account and sub-account theme JavaScript? Or does the policy only apply to courses?

sonya_mcchristi

Experimented with the Content Security Policy as I thought this would enable us to embed, for example, Twitter widgets on pages, but the page still strips out the script part of the embed code - "platform.twitter.com" added to the whitelist.

cjr201

Good to see allowing all people who can view the gradebook to be able to see the override column to avoid confusion in classes that use it.

Hi, Chris,

Will you please submit a support case for that change?

Thanks,

Erin

Sure thing! Ticket submitted ... #04234972. Initial reply from Support is, "Okay in this case I am we are not seeing any reason for this behavior. I will be sending this ticket to my team to look into further. They will contact you when they have more information."

Course Import Copy Canvas Course – Restrict List of Terms to Only Active Terms

This is going to cause major problems for all our faculty. They need to be able to copy from past terms (even after the term has ended) as well as future terms.

Example for Past Term - Often our faculty want to copy from a Canvas course from a past term, even though the term has ended. For example, I taught Math 205 in Summer 2017. I am teaching it again Summer 2019. I need to be able to copy from the 2017 term into this Summer’s term.

Example for Future Term - We also still need the functionality of copying a Canvas course from a future term into another Canvas course. Here’s an example:

I am teaching 2 Art classes this summer. The term start date is June 1.
I copy my Spring Art course into one of my Summer course shells.
Then I want to copy that Summer Art course into the other Summer Art course shell.

With this new release, I won’t be able to do that until the term start date. I need to have the course populated before the term start date because students start their online course on the first date of the term.

Am I understanding the new release description correctly? Does anyone else have a problem with this?

I am experiencing the same thing. I just submitted a report case too. Thank you @Chris_Hofer ‌ for bringing this to our attention.

Thank you for posting this, @Sylvia_Ami . I would have missed it in the notes. This may have an impact on our instructors as well. I wanted to test this out for myself in Beta masquerading as an instructor. Although the chances may be small or reduced that instructors would want to copy content from a course that is more than a couple years old, I could still imagine a scenario like this at our Technical College. Further, I discovered that if a course/term is not displayed in the drop-down list, I was not able to type in the course number in the text search box to the right of the drop-down list. It did not find the course in my search results ... probably because the course/term was now hidden from that view.

rmurchshafer

This is going to be a major issue for us too and if it remains we will likely need to remove all term dates ☹️, or at least set the "teacher can access from" dates to be a very wide window (years......). But I'd rather not do that because those dates help manage removing courses from the dashboard of teachers. We have some courses that only get taught once every two years so it's very important for teachers to still be able to import content from older courses. I'm hoping this was an oversight that gets changed before being put into production.

straussi

Agreed, thanks for catching that, @Sylvia_Ami ‌. We don't use Terms at all, so I hope this doesn't change any of the definitions of 'Default' Term or 'Active' Term. Our look-ups and reporting are always done on 'Default' Term.

@straussi ‌ - I think if your Default term is set so Teachers can access from "whenever" to "term end" and if the term end is "whenever" then you'll be OK. The Default term would be considered "active." There's just a problem when you have term end dates in the past and term start dates in the future.

straussi

It is interesting, and certainly we hope nothing changes in our definitions. Here's is the way the 'Default Term' is defined, with all calendars in the edit being blank (we have never defined Term at all) ...

Term Runs from

whenever to whenever

Students can access from

term start to term end

Teachers can access from

whenever to term end

TAs can access from

whenever to term end

Designers can access from

whenever to term end

Hi, Patrick,

BigBlueButton is deploying their updates on April 20, along with the Canvas release. Their testing link will let you test all of their new features!

Thanks,

Erin

Hi, Sonya,

This feature is different from the HTML whitelist, which is not affected by this feature. It's for letting specific courses use page content outside your organization that may contain JavaScript, such as computer science courses. Some instructors do not want to allow JavaScript into their courses since JavaScript can be used for malicious purposes.

Hope that helps!

Erin

@straussi ‌ I have the same settings in our Default term. You should be fine. I put our training courses and development courses (Sandboxes) in the Default term.

All the courses in our official schedule go into Fall, Spring, and Summer terms for teach year. Those terms have specific start and end dates. That's when we'll run into problems with the Course Copy drop-down menu only showing active terms.

Hi, all,

Just a kind reminder that if you're seeing something contrary to what you expect from a feature, please submit a support case so your specific workflow can be reviewed by our support team. If something is amiss, we're happy to make it right. If it's intended, your feedback is important for our product team to consider adjustments by posting your thoughts in Ideas.

Thanks so much!

Erin

I've submitted a Help Desk ticket per the recommendation from erinhallmark‌ about the Course Import Tool issue. If you would like to reference my ticket, it is #04238326. Hope this helps.

millerjm

Does this only affect users that have access to < 100 courses? We've been on Canvas long enough that our teachers have to use the search box to find the course because they may have subaccount access or they just have a lot of past courses.

Does it only affect how the drop down is populated vs. the actual ability to copy the course? I'm trying to figure out who to masquerade as in order to test this...

Thanks!

Joni

I masqueraded as two different instructors in both our "Production" and "Beta" environments. Both instructors have well over 100 courses. In "Production", they do not have the drop-down to select a course to import content from. However, in "Beta", the drop-down has returned...and I'm guessing this is because there are less courses to display since only a few recent terms are displaying. My earlier comment still stands about not being able to use the search text box to find a 2+ year-old course to copy. For example, I tried inputting course numbers from courses in Spring 2015 and Fall 2016, and Canvas could not find them.

Chris

Hi @Sylvia_Ami ‌,

Thanks for noticing this... This will be a *huge* issue for us too. Restricting the course list for imports to just active terms makes absolutely no sense. At the minimum past courses need to be included, but, as you and others pointed out, there are plenty of use cases for importing from a future course as well. Instead of restricting the course list, I'd suggest fixing whatever code is causing import from future courses to fail, as that seems the much better route to go here. This may seem like a minor change to Canvas engineers, but it's a major change for faculty, and one we won't even be able to provide a workaround for. I'll submit a ticket to support too.

-Chris

unknown

Hi,

In Speedgrader the highlight annotation doesn't seem to work. Thanks.

unknown

When I click on the Technical Support button in Help the computer tries to launch Outlook, which my company does not use. How else can I request support? Thanks.

sonya_mcchristi

Hi Erin, thanks for your reply, that's how I thought it should work, but the Javascript for the Twitter embed code is still being stripped out in my testing.

Stef_retired

@andrew_abercrom ‌, the Technical Support link is attempting to launch a prepopulated email. I've sent you a message with the email address to use to contact Technical Support at your school.