eLearning Newsletter for Winter 2025

Prior to Winter 2025, student enrollments were deleted from Canvas if the student dropped the class before the sixth instructional day of the quarter. If a student dropped the course, they were still visible to instructors in the course, but the students were marked with an inactive flag.

As of Winter 2025, student enrollments will be deleted from Canvas only if the student drops the course prior to the first day of the quarter. Any student who is enrolled in a course on the first day of instruction will still be visible to instructors in the course, regardless of what day of the quarter the student drops the class.

This change will make it easier for instructors to respond to attendance inquiries from administrative offices like Financial Aid and Registration.

Currently, all lab/lecturecourses have a course shell created in Canvas for each course component. Usually, these courses are set up in ctcLink so that the lab is the enrolling component, with credit attached to it, while the lecture is a 0-credit, non-enrollment component for the course, where the enrollment in the lecture is a direct duplication of the enrollment in the lab component.

Most instructors request that their labs and lectures be merged together in Canvas, or they disregard one of the course shells, leaving it unpublished and unused.

Because of a problem with the way that ctcLink reports enrollments for non-enrollment course components, when a student drops a lab/lecture course after census day, the student enrollment is not dropped from Canvas for the non-enrollment lecture component. This leads to problems with these courses if the lab/lecture is merged, or if the class is only being conducted within the lecture course, and the lab course shell is left unused.

Starting in Spring 2025, we will no longer create course shells in Canvas for course components that are coded as non-enrollment in ctcLink. This will resolve the issue with student enrollments, reduce the number of merge requests that instructors need to make for lab/lecture courses, and reduce the clutter of unpublished duplicate sections for most instructors.

If you have questions, or need to think through how your courses are organized, please contact eLearning to set up a consultation.

As of December 1, Pearson is replacing their old Canvas MyLab and Revel connectors that allowed instructors to integrate Pearson content directly into Canvas. Courses that are configured using the old connectors will continue to function, but you will not be able to link new courses to Pearson through the old connectors after December 1.

These connectors are being replaced with a new connector: Access Pearson. This is already available to you in Canvas and should be used when setting up new courses for the Spring2025 term. DO NOT TRY TO CHANGE THE CONNECTOR YOU ARE USING FOR WINTER 2025 COURSES. If you aren’t using Access Pearson, yet, please wait until you set up your Winter courses to make the change.

Pearson has sent email directly to impacted instructors. Read more about the Pearson LTI connector update here Links to an external site..

The Checkpoints feature allows instructors to set two different due dates for graded discussions.

If you choose to use the feature for a particular discussion, you must:

• set the discussion to be graded
• assign separate point values for the two segments of the discussion
• set separate due dates for the two segments of the discussion
• enter a separate grade for each segment of the discussion

Currently, a discussion with checkpoints only supports a single rubric, and the rubric cannot be used for assignment grading.

Discussions Checkpoints are scheduled to be released into production on January 18, 2025. Assuming this happens, we plan to enable this for all classes prior to the January 28 Tech Talk that is focused on this new feature.

While the feature will be available in all classes, instructors will be able to decide on a discussion-by-discussion basis whether to add and configure checkpoints for graded discussions.

UPDATED--January 23, 2025: There were significant issues with the release of Discussion Checkpoints. Instructure executed a partial roll-back of the feature to do some additional work on it. We're hoping that it will be sorted out in time for us to turn on the feature during Spring Break. 

If you use Groups in your courses and you’ve ever had to reconstruct Group Sets and reassign all of your Assignments and Discussions to the correct group sets after you’ve copied your courses to the next quarter, this is for you.

“When copying a group assignment or discussion topic to another course, a group set with the same name is created in the destination course if no matching group set exists.”

In the past, all group assignments and discussions would be assigned to the default “Project Groups” group set, regardless of how they were originally configured.

Note that this new setting does not create the groups in the Group Set, nor does it assign students to those groups. The major benefit here is that you no longer have to update the group settings in each group assignment or discussion.

The new featureis turned on for all classes. If you don’t want Group Sets preserved when you copy a course, you can turn the feature off in Course Settings, under the Feature Options tab.

Assignment Enhancements for students have been available for several years as a course-level feature option. For Spring 2025, we will be turning on Assignment Enhancements for all courses in Canvas.

We have to implement this change to resolve an ongoing error with the Microsoft One Drive integration in Canvas. Currently, the One Drive submission tab can’t handle file type limitations when used with the current assignment interface. Use of Assignment Enhancements resolves this problem.

Read more about how Assignment Enhancements Links to an external site. changes the assignment submission and feedback workflow for students. Or attend the January 21 Tech Talk on Assignment Enhancements.

The Zoom Meetings integration in Canvas has been available for several years, but we have recently made some improvements to the configuration that will make managing your Zoom class recordings easier.

Zoom meetings that are

1. started or scheduled from the Zoom Meetings tab in a Canvas course and
2. recorded to the cloud

will now automatically have their recordings uploaded into the Panopto Recordings folder for that course.

Meetings that don’t originate from a Canvas course will still have their cloud recordings automatically uploadedto your Meeting Recordings folder in Panopto.

Rubrics are being redesigned to make them easier to use and manage. Several enhancements are available, like

• the option to have ratings run from low-to-high, rather than high-to-low
• different layouts in SpeedGrader, so that your rubrics don’t have occupy half the screen to be usable
• better management and editing tools

You can read more about Rubric Enhancements in the Canvas Guides, Links to an external site. though it is a bit limited. You can also join the Canvas Community Group for Enhanced Rubrics. Links to an external site. If you’re interested in exploring the updates, you can activate Enhanced Rubrics on a course-by-course basis now, in your course settings, under the Feature Options tab Links to an external site..

Rubric Enhancements are still in development, so expect to see them change over the next few months.