Mid-term Updates
It has been a relatively calm Fall 2025 semester! Thanks to everyone for your patience and issue reports. I had a wonderful September exploring six of our amazing national parks! I am back to work and have been able to address a number of issues and feature requests. Here are some highlights:
New course creation page
Grading Updates – Se note on timezones below
LTI 1.3 bug fixes
Improved user interface for creating assignments
Bug fixes and performance improvements
We are making good progress toward removing the legacy instructor interface and hope to have this completed in summer 2026.
Improvements to student accommodations
One specific change that I would like to highlight is:
We will now accept late submissions for assignments as long as you have the accept late submissions option enabled. Whether you have checked the released grades option or not. This was a highly requested feature and I am glad to be able to deliver it.
To support this change we have added a new attribute for every course, which is the home timezone for the course. You should go to the course settings page and set this to your local timezone. This will ensure that all assignment due dates are interpreted correctly. If you do not set this, it will default to UTC which may cause confusion. This also prevents students from changing their timezone to get around due dates. If you have any questions about this, please let me know.
I am also considering adding an accommodation that would allow instructors to email students a link to an assignment that is not yet visible. This would allow students with accommodations to access assignments early or late. Please let me know if this would be useful. This is different than the current “visible” option in that the assignment would not be visible to students unless they had the link.
This is a community effort, and I am grateful for everyone’s contributions. Thank you! For those of you who are new, welcome to the community! Please remember that this is a volunteer effort, we don’t have full time staff of support people to answer your questions. qn Please be patient and respectful of others’ time and efforts, please use our public forums to ask questions or discuss problems. If you find that something is not working, please take some time to investigate and report the issue on GitHub. The more information you can provide, the better! Do not presume that because you are having a problem, that everyone else is. Please help us help you! You may use the software differently from others. We welcome constructive feedback and suggestions.
For those of you that use our accommodations feature I would love to hear your feedback. I am considering adding the option to allow students to access an assignment if they have a direct link to a non-visible assignment and have an accommodation that allows them to do so. Please let me know if this would be useful.