The October 28th release is packed full of features and enhancements for instructors!
For Instructors:
- The new Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor (RCE) helps you with enhancing your students’ ability, especially those who use a screenreader, to perceive and to process content created using the RCE, such as content pages, activity instructions, and discussion posts. Remember: making your course materials usable and accessible benefits all students. Some issues that the checker currently identifies include: text size contrast, table captions and headers, heading structure, and image alt tags. For more information about the tool, please check out the release notes posted above; for more information about accessibility, please feel free to email us! (Recommended resource on accessibility)
- You can now copy a discussion.
- The move-to menu that appears when you copy an assignment or a discussion has been replaced with a sidebar.
- The Gradebook History page has been redesigned to include filter controls for student, grader, assignment, and start/end date.
For Students:
- An issue that results in students receiving an error following quiz submission has been resolved.
For Everyone:
- In the document previewer (DocViewer), you can now collapse and expand longer comments.
In addition, a recent blog post by the Office of Distance Education and eLearning lists some additional enhancements that are coming to CarmenCanvas next semester:
- With the Office 365 integration, you (and your students) will have the ability to, in CarmenCanvas, create collaborative documents, access and create links to files stored in Office 365, create assignments where students can receive, edit and submit a document stored in Office 365, and more. (More information)
- A new Gradebook is coming! The basic functionality remains the same, but it will come with new features and enhancements that will help with efficiency. Some items include additional ways to soft filter the columns (including student names), custom per-account colors for statuses such as late and missing, hiding unpublished assignments, cross-hairs to highlight the currently focused cell, late policy automations, as well as reordering the group and total columns. These functionalities will be rolled out in phases, with the first phases being available on an opt-in basis – Teaching and Learning will offer resources and showcases prior to Phase 1 becoming available in January of 2018.
- A newer, faster and better Quizzing tool (codenamed Quizzes.Next) is coming some time during the Spring 2018 semester! This is a complete rewrite of the quizzing functionality, and it will be initially available as an additional assignment type rather than a complete replacement (which will happen no earlier than 2019). See a feature comparison between the existing Quizzes tool and Quizzes.Next in its current form. Teaching and Learning will offer resources and showcases as soon as the new tool becomes generally available.