Summer 2025 Canvas Roundup

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Welcome back for another semester! Summer is always a busy time and a welcomed break from the school year. Because of that, we’re going to highlight some of the Canvas changes to make sure you’re up to speed with the current status of things.  

Assignments

Canvas has made a few tweaks and adjustments to Assignments this year – they made it simpler to update due dates for assignments with “assign to” available in more places, they added a way for students to self-assess their work with the assignment’s rubric, and they have an annotation assignment type! For full details on each of these changes or features, check out “State of Canvas 2025: Assignments.”

Discussions

Canvas finally added a much-requested feature for discussions this year – Discussion Checkpoints. Now, you can set one date for students to submit initial replies to the prompt and a second due date for students to submit replies to other students.  

Canvas has also added an AI feature that allows you to quickly generate a summary of a particular discussion. At the bottom of the discussion prompt, click the “Summarize Discussion” – and enter any specific areas or topics you want the summary to focus on in the “Topics to focus on” box.  

Check out full details and information on other smaller changes and future updates for Discussions in “State of Canvas 2025: Discussions.”

Quizzes

Over the summer, New Quizzes finally added a text block option! Now, you have an easy way to provide directions or additional information inside a quiz without tying it to a particular question. When building a New Quiz (or item bank), simply choose “Text Block” from the options. You can then give the text block a title and enter all your content through the Rich Content Editor.  

For full details and information on what’s coming next for New Quizzes, check out “State of Canvas 2025: Quizzes.” 

Want to never miss a post? Subscribe here!