Welcome to the College of IST Learning Design eNewsletter
March 2017

Canvas Updates

Canvas released its latest updates on March 11th. Not all of the updates may apply to Penn State’s usage of Canvas. Of note:

Discussions–Attachment Edits

If an instructor enables discussion settings to allow students to add attachments and edit discussion replies, the Edit option allows students to remove a file attached to a reply.

SpeedGrader–Unmute Assignment Warning

When an instructor unmutes an assignment, SpeedGrader displays a warning indicating that the assignment will be visible to all students. This change matches the behavior when an instructor unmutes an assignment in the Gradebook. 

Latest Release Notes

Canvas Extra–Undelete and Restore Feature

This features allows you to see a list of restorable items that had previously been deleted from the course. It also provides information regarding the date and time created and the last update.

To get to this feature, at the course homepage, add “/undelete” to the end of the URL. This takes you to the Restore Deleted Items page.

Course Template Changes for SU17

In SP17, we’ve been piloting changes to the course template based on student preference feedback from a SP16 survey.

Based on student feedback from SP16 and SP17, we will be adding the following updates to our SU17 template:

• Course Home Page – now includes Modules with a link to the Course Stream (recent activity) on the right (the right sidebar will also continue to include To Do and Coming Up lists).
• Left Navigation – revised order with Grades closer to the top.

Copy of World Campus Courses Available

Our offices have been distributing copies of World Campus courses to interested IST faculty members.  Faculty members have generally been using these courses either to review content, or to use the content in residential distribution at the UP and commonwealth campuses.  For those who are interested is receiving a copy of a World Campus course, please fill out a Course Request Form. 

After you fill out the form, faculty members will be given access to a Box location that will contain the most-up-to-date version of the course. This will be a mechanism to instructors to access future course updates as well.

Join Us for the Next Online Community Luncheon

Please join us for the next Online Community Luncheon on Friday, March 31 at 12:00 PM where topics will include Peer Eval and Teaming. Please feel free to join us online.

As a reminder, the Online Learning component of the IST Statewide will be a half day on May 9th.  

If you have any agenda items either for the March 31st or the May 9th meetings, please send them to Amy Garbrick at agarbrick@ist.psu.edu.