Using Assignment Enhancements in Canvas

6 STEPS

1. The first step is to click Settings

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2. Click Feature Options

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3. Click highlight to see Instructure's warnings/disclaimer.

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4. If you want to enable, click the X button

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5. Click Enabled

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6. That's it. You're done.

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Here's an interactive tutorial

** Best experienced in Full Screen (click the icon in the top right corner before you begin) **

https://www.iorad.com/player/2028733/Enable-Assignment-Enhancements

Canvas has been developing some enhancements to Assignments for the past few years. Recently, they enabled folks to turn these enhancements on as an optional feature. Now, you can too!

Before you do... please make sure to gather a basic understanding of the benefits and limitations so you can make an informed decision!

Disclaimer:

Instructure is actively making changes to these enhancements.
- Any changes they make to the functionality will be displayed automatically.
There might be bugs and other issues
Some things will simply revert to Classic Assignments because they are not yet supported. See the Limitations section below for more details.

Overview

Assignment Enhancements are designed to make the student experience surrounding assignments more user-friendly. Specifically, it creates some changes where students can access feedback and comments from teachers with more ease.

There are many changes (which you can find by looking at this overview article from Instructure) but the main reason I like it is because, once a student opens an assignment to view their grades, submission comments, rubric grading, and teacher annotations are visible immediately without requiring any extra clicks.

Here are other benefits/changes as listed by Instructure:

- The assignment summary header is always visible when viewing the assignment and floats at the top of the page
- The submission process is summarized in a circle timeline at the top of the assignment
- Assignment details can be minimized within the page
- Submissions can be drafted in the assignment without requiring an immediate submission
- Submission types, comments, and any rubric grading is retained with each attempt and viewable by both the student and the instructor
- For instructors, SpeedGrader displays comments based on submission attempt

Video Overviews

Classic Assignments

Assignment Enhancements

Limitations (as of Oct 2022)

Assignments that use Peer Review or use Google Assignments (LTI 1.3) or Google Cloud Assignments as an External Tool submission type will simply revert back to the Classic Assignments appearance.

Enabling Assignment Enhancements

You can enable Assignment Enhancements on a course-by-course basis. To do so, open a course and go to Settings. Select the Feature Options tab and then enable Assignment Enhancements.

The following tutorial works best if viewed in Full Screen.