By April Pelt, Digital Learning Strategist
If you’re looking to up your Canvas game during the new year, consider trying out these new features.
Canvas recently introduced a New Gradebook interface. In addition to featuring a more streamlined look and more sorting options than its predecessor, the New Gradebook allows instructors to automatically apply late policies to student submissions.
New Gradebook is currently a beta feature, so you will need to manually enable it in each of your courses. To do so:
Once you have enabled the New Gradebook, you will be able to automatically apply late submission policies to student work. To use this feature:
If a late policy is enabled, then you will not need to take lateness into account when grading the submission. And if a student has a valid excuse for turning in a submission past its due date, then you can change their submission status so that the late penalty does not apply to them.
Note that Canvas’s late policy options aren’t highly sophisticated, so if your individual course policies are more elaborate than applying a deduction per late day/hour, then you will likely need to continue applying deductions manually.
Consult the Canvas Guides for more information on applying late policies.
A word of caution: Once you’ve applied a late penalty to a student submission, you cannot revert to the current gradebook.
If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to spend less time on mundane tasks, then you may want to ring in Spring 2018 by giving Canvas’s Duplicate feature a try. It allows you to create a copy of any Page, Discussion, or Assignment (though not, as of this writing, quizzes) within a course.
To use this feature:
This will create an unpublished copy of the item, which you can then rename and edit as needed.
Here are a few suggestions about how to make the most of the Duplicate feature in your courses:
A word of caution: once created, copies become independent items in their own right, so changes made to the original will not be reflected in the copies.
This follow-up session demonstrates additional program functions, including new item banks, stimulus questions, and New Quiz reports.
The new Smart Search feature in Canvas uses advanced AI and semantic algorithms to deliver relevant search results from the content of your Canvas course.
Check out the recording of this Quick Hits session dedicated to understanding the New Quizzes feature in Canvas.