Weekly Web Updates – December 23, 2019

Course Hub improvements

Canvas-course start/end times now expand to cover section dates

When instructors create Canvas courses via the Hub, the Canvas course inherits the term dates by default. There are some cases where course sections have dates that don’t align with the normal dates of the term. To cover these cases the Hub now will now set an earlier start date or later end date when creating the Canvas course so that the Canvas section isn’t made inaccessible by following the term start/end dates. Sections that start or end within the term dates will still just inherit the term start/end dates. These dates will only be set when creating the Canvas course and can be overridden by instructors as desired.

MiddFiles resources can now link to folders from cross-listed sections

Most sections taught each semester have a single section with students enrolled and any cross-listed sections are for categorization purposes only and have enrollments disallowed. There are about a dozen sections each year however that have students enrolled in multiple sections. Often these are cases where one section is the normal one and the other meets a writing requirement.

There is now an option at the bottom of MiddFiles resources to choose which folder to link to. For most resources this will have a single option (the current folder), which is the default if nothing is specified. For cross-listed sections where multiple cross-lists have enrollments, there will be multiple options to choose from. Note that the system that auto-generates MiddFiles folders merges permissions into the first section (alphabetically) already. This choice in the MiddFiles resource just allows linking to this merged folder from the additional sections, it doesn’t actually assign any permissions.

Screen-shot of the MiddFiles resource interface showing the new option.
Screen-shot of the MiddFiles resource interface showing the new option.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Course Hub: Canvas-course start/end times now expand to cover section dates
  • Course Hub: MiddFiles resources can now link to folders from cross-listed sections
  • Added the ability to embed Slate forms in our Drupal 8 sites.
  • The Library and Offices and Services sites now have a Latest News component that will show the last three stories from a category or group.
  • Fixed an issue where some locked views in Banner were preventing successful completion of the weekly MyEmma import script.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new “Offices” site for institution-wide anchor functions.
  • Creating new Drupal 8 sites for our schools and programs.
  • Post-launch improvements of the updated Course Hub.

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