This week we were able to track down and resolve a logout issue with Canvas that has been frustrating users this spring. For many years Canvas has been using our legacy CAS authentication service for single-sign-on and single-sign-off. As more and more services have been moved to Microsoft’s Azure single-sign-on system, users have been making fewer login-requests to CAS that would normally push out the login session for 2 hours on each authentication. With Canvas as the only CAS-authenticated service that some users were accessing, they were finding that they would get logged out of after 2 hours when the CAS login session expired. We’ve changed the CAS configuration so that it will no longer logs users out of Canvas as part of single-sign-out. This will allow Canvas logins to remain active for up to 48 hours after the last Canvas page-load.
Separately, we address an issue that was preventing new course sections from flowing through from Banner to catalog.middlebury.edu and on to the Course Hub since May 7. Course sections are now flowing through nightly in time for summer program startup.
Over the next eighteen months, we’ll be asking you to move forms from forms.middlebury.edu and forms.miis.edu into another system. You can get a head start on this now with new form creation tools from Google and Microsoft.
By default, Canvas shows grade-distribution graphs to students. While this setting can be changed by instructors, it is buried under advanced course settings and not easy to find. Showing the grade-distribution in large classes may be fine, but in classes with only a few students it could expose student performance in obvious ways.
Beginning this week, when new Canvas sites are provisioned from the Course Hub we are now hiding the grade-distribution graphs by default. Instructors who wish to display grade-distribution graphs can update the course settings in Canvas to show the grade distribution graphs — only the default for new courses is changing.
This week we’ve upgraded WordPress to version 5.4 “Adderley” which includes many improvements to the “Gutenberg” block editor. You can read more about it in this release announcement.
