Looking to discuss this feature from the 2021-06-19 Release Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!
POSTING GUIDELINES This topic is for feature discussion only—please share use cases, best practices, etc. regarding this feature Please thread replies as much as possible to keep posts organized Feedback to product managers about idea enhancements should be submitted in ideas.canvaslms.com (though linking to the idea here so others can find it is welcome) Bug reports for this feature should be submitted to Canvas Support—bugs will not be triaged in this thread
Hello. this looks like a great way to self-direct our staff and students to the community and it's wealth of resources. I do have concerns around the help menu becoming cluttered if users with multiple roles receive links to notes for each role. In our instance of Canvas almost all of our teaching staff are enrolled as students in Canvas Training courses and many also have account (admin) roles. Would that would mean that those with 3 roles would get 3 links to the release notes for the past 10 releases and in time there would be 30 release notes posts populated? Also, there seems to have been some quite important releases/fixes applied in the weekly deploys are these being factored in to this?
Hi,
I have two questions about this feature:1) Does this mean that release notes become visible in the production environment as soon as they are published in the community? (meaning: before the actual production release date)2) Will this be a configurable Help menu link (in Account settings), so we could disable it if we want to?
Reason for asking question 2 is that we prefer to do communication about release notes ourselves. We have a lot of custom admin roles and features for admins are almost always only relevant for account admins in our situation. So we don't want users with an admin role to see release notes for admins.Furthermore, we don't promote the use of the beta environment to teachers, so if the answer to question 1 is 'yes', than that would be another reason for us to not enable this feature.
Are feature options that are automatically enabled part of the release notes included in these alerts? Will this include deploys as well? For example, the recent deploy mentions the Mobile App Feature option is on by default but we will turn it off. We are also interested in knowing of this will be a feature option that can be turned off or customized in the help menu.
While I definitely see what this feature is going for in general, I wish it was a feature option that institutions could choose to enable if they feel it would benefit their users. I think there are many places that would rather do their own communications and customize them to their specific use cases than have generic Instructure links. We've been burned too many times by things that don't quite work as expected at first, so I definitely don't like highlighting new things that may be buggy. I have a few pieces of feedback for the Instructure team:
Sorry for pointing out some flaws and sounding negative, but I think it's important to highlight issues before these things go into production and give others a chance to weigh in as well. Maybe I'm the only one who feels this feature needs tweaking, in which case perhaps my feedback isn't as valuable.
In closing, I love the Canvas community here, but I also think it's important not to try to force every user to come here.
-Chris
If release notes are continually available to all levels at all schools, the notes displayed should bee specific to the impacted roles. Students don't need to see notes that address functions for faculty and admins.
I disagree about the perceived need for admins to intervene between faculty and canvas updates. It is great for admins to be aware of updates and relevant LTIs, and to provide timely updates to faculty with well researched opinions and options. Admins that do that should pat themselves on the back. Faculty are busy and appreciate your research. Faculty do not need to have information screened in an effort to control responses. If admins are known to provide timely and well researched information - faculty will continue to rely on that rather than spend their valuable time duplicating the admins efforts. Making the releases easier to access will not change that response from faculty.
I am taking a closer look at how these notes are added to the help menu. If ten per role will be added (a very lengthy list), it would helpful to also include the year in the link name. I am also not sure what the date in gray besides the link means.
I can see why you think this is a great idea and if we all used Canvas the same way, then it would make sense. But we don't. We all adapt it for our own institution's needs. Often disabling things that we don't want in our environment through Javascript or CSS. Then you have the difficulty that there's languages packs. Are these release notes written to reflect the UK language pack? I really don't want staff confused because you start to bang on about 'Modules' instead of 'Units' or 'Courses' instead of 'Modules'. Especially if you're talking about features we've disabled or changed through Javascript.
It's also worrying that yet again, you are undermining our ability to use the Javascript and CSS customisation option by not attaching any IDs to these new sections and generating random looking CSS classes. Can you please stop doing this? The customised CSS and Javascript is a really helpful facility that allows us to make best use of Canvas.
Stuff like this, really should be a feature option. There's a big risk you undermine our own internal comms. It should be us that decides who sees these messages, not you.
I'm taking another look at the notes to see if there were any changes before the update this weekend. Did this become a feature option? It seems that way looking at the notes but I don't see it indicated in the change log. I just want to make sure I'm not missing something. Thanks!
Hi there, August release notes tell me that this will soon be enabled by default, but can be switched off be Admins if required. I'm keen to hear the reasoning behind it. I only ask because as an institution we decided to not enable this feature. Has there been a high volume of calls/requests from canvas users to have it enabled or something? Is it popular? Should we be re-considering our decision? Should I stop asking questions 🙂
In the 08-21-2021 release notes, it says this feature is now on for all by default and admins must opt-out. How exactly does an admin (like myself) opt out of this? I can't find the feature anywhere in the account settings anymore.
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