Canvas Features and Updates in April

Instructure will be introducing some minor but interesting features that will be available beginning on April 16, 2022. We have chosen to highlight a few of them for you here. Please feel free to reach out to Instructure Support with any questions.

Assignment Default Due Time Field

Faculty will be able to set a default due time for assignments in a course. Currently, the default due time for assignments is always 11:59pm. The due time can still be changed for each assignment, but this will allow instructors to set a different default time course wide. Instructure has recognized many faculty prefer due times just prior to the start of class and have decided to give faculty this option.

Note: This will not change previously created assignments. It will only apply to newly created assignments.

To find out more, feel free to look at the Assignment Default Due Time release note here.

Apply Score to Ungraded Assignments

This minor feature from Instructure allows a score to be applied en masse across ungraded submissions in an assignment group and/or total column in the Canvas Gradebook.
This will make short work of having to manually apply a certain grade to a student(s). Instead of seeing the hyphen, faculty can quickly apply a specific grade at the click of a button.

To find out more, feel free to look at the Apply Score to Ungraded Assignments release notes here.

RCE Icon Maker

One exciting update in Canvas is the Icon Maker. Instructure will provide faculty the ability to create and save icons for their courses using the Rich Content Editor.

Additionally, faculty and students will have the ability to convey messages using emojis as visual indicators along with written comment using the Emoji Picker.

To find out more, feel free to look at the RCE Icon Maker release notes here.