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Need to Know

Submit your fall semester course material orders

If you haven't already, please submit your course materials orders as soon as possible by filling out the Course Works Request Form or via email: [email protected]. For questions, email [email protected].

Good to Know

Canvas updates 

Canvas ePortfolio retirement extended to December 2026

Instructure has extended the ePortfolio retirement to December 31, 2026 to allow students more time to download their work and transition it to the new tool, Canvas Portfolio. No new portfolio work should be done using ePortfolios.Instead, have students showcase their work in the new Canvas Portfolios tool, an ongoing, interactive process that develops collaboratively alongside their academic path, rather than only at the end. Read about the upgraded Canvas portfolio tool in Extra Points, Showcasing Growth: Introducing Canvas Portfolio.

Managing access to course content after the term ends

In Canvas, when a term ends, your course transitions to a read-only state for students. While this allows students to refer back to prior work, it also means they retain access to your course materials, lectures, and files for as long as they have access to Canvas. Ongoing access has raised some concerns around intellectual property — that students may recreate entire courses for personal archives, share materials on social media, or upload content to large language models (LLMs) in violation of University policy. 

If you're concerned about the availability of your course after the semester ends, you can choose to restrict access. 

  • Navigate to your Canvas course, 
  • Select Settings from course navigation
  • Check the box to Restrict students from viewing course after term end date. 
Canvas Settings area open with the "Restrict students from viewing course after term end date" box checked and highlighted

This ensures students can no longer access the course once the term is over. 

Important note: Do not manually "Conclude this Course" as a means to restrict access. Concluding a course alters all enrollments — including yours. You will no longer have instructor privileges to engage with content, add other instructors, or make arrangements for satisfying an incomplete.

FeedbackFruits updates

Locked allocations are a thing of the past

icon of a basket with text Feedback Fruits below

Managing student groups and Peer Review assignments is now much smoother. Previously, mid-project student drops or group changes often locked reviewer allocations, requiring an IT support ticket to resolve. With this update, 

  • Instructors have full independent control to manually adjust or delete allocations at any time — even after feedback submissions have begun. 
  • The dashboard now updates in real time, showing changes and submissions instantly without page refreshes.

For example, if a student drops the class after submitting a review, you can immediately delete that allocation and reassign teammates on the fly without being locked out.

Generative AI in Higher Ed

Assignment (re)Design lab helps instructors plan for assignments in the age of AI

Designing assignments for the GenAI era cannot be done in isolation. To tackle this challenge, Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS), the Center for Educational Innovation (CEI), and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) recently hosted a full-day, in-person Assignment (re)Design Lab. The event brought together 24 attendees from three UMN campuses, sparking lively, cross-disciplinary strategy sessions among instructors, student guests, and table facilitators. The lab provided instructors with the structured time needed to design new assignments or overhaul existing ones with GenAI in mind. Read Extra Points, “Insights from the Partnered Assignment (re)Design Lab” for more information on the workshop.

Accessible Bytes

GAAD 2026 event videos available for viewing

Diverse people socializing on a section of the globe.

Just over a thousand people attended the UMN’s fifth annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on May 21, 2026. Registrations represented a large number of higher education institutions as well as other organizations. Dr. Shanna Katz Kattari presented this year’s keynote, "At the Intersection of Access and Justice.” Captioned recordings for the event are now available on the GAAD website or by visiting the GAAD 2026 playlist.

Engagement and Learning Opportunities

August Teaching Enrichment series

August 10-28, 2026; online via Zoom

Choose from a large assortment of virtual workshops on practical and relevant teaching strategies related to generative AI, team-based learning, setting the tone on the first day of class, Canvas, supporting neurodivergent students, new teaching assistant orientation and more. See August Teaching Enrichment Series session details and register today.

Check out more events across all TeachingSupport partners.

Spotlight

 

Decluttering your Canvas site with the Content Audit Tool (CAT)

To help navigate digital accessibility standards, the University of Minnesota’s Office for Digital Accessibility (ODA) uses the 3Rs framework—Remove, Revise, and Right First. For people who work to make Canvas course sites accessible, the "Remove" stage just got easier.

The challenge: The Canvas filing cabinet effect

Over multiple semesters, a Canvas course site can easily begin to resemble an overflowing filing cabinet. It is common to continually add new PDFs, handouts, and links, but it is just as easy to forget to pull out the old drafts and redundant materials when they are replaced. This accumulation creates digital clutter that makes the course harder to manage and navigate.

The solution: The Content Audit Tool (CAT)

The Content Audit Tool (CAT) offers an automated solution to this problem, allowing you to quickly audit your course sites and ensure they contain only the content intended for students to see. CAT scans the entire course to find files, Pages, and Assignments that are in the site but not actively linked to any learning paths. This easy-to-use tool will be invaluable for cleaning up a site before copying it forward to a new academic term, before publishing a new term’s course site, or anytime you have a chance to clean up course content.

To pinpoint what is active, CAT reviews student learning pathways such as what is linked in Modules and what things are linked from course site Pages. An item is considered "in use" if it is structurally linked within any of the following areas:

  • Modules: The primary navigational pathway provided for students.
  • Assignments & Discussions: Active interactive components of the course.
  • Pages: Links embedded directly within the text of course pages.
  • Quizzes: Any items or questions contained inside a quiz path.
  • Announcements: Class-wide updates and structural notifications.

Important Note: CAT does not track behavioral metrics, such as whether a student has actually clicked on an item; it strictly checks for structural links within the course design.

How to use CAT

Running an audit takes only a few clicks directly within your site. See the step-by-step directions on how to access and use the tool. Once in the tool, it runs automatically and generates a report based on the current items in the course. It displays a bar chart with the total number of items in the course compared against how many are currently unused. You can use a dropdown menu below the chart to filter your view specifically between Assignments, files, or Pages. Additionally, a Show Unused Items Only toggle switch isolates the clutter, providing a clean list of items that require action.

Take action with CAT

Once you have an identified list of unused items within CAT, you can decide what to do with them:

  • Delete Unneeded Content: You can manually delete any files, Pages, or Assignments that you don’t use anymore. This frees up storage space and significantly reduces clutter for you and your students.
  • Save and Archive Content: For materials that you want to keep for future sections but not be in an active course site, you can check the box next to the items and export them to a development course site. Because development sites are not connected to PeopleSoft or student enrollments, they serve as an ideal environment for archival safekeeping.

By using the Content Audit Tool, you can clean up your course sites more easily, reduce the scope of your accessibility compliance workloads, and maintain accurate and organized learning pathways for students.

Additional Resources