Canvas is continually creating new features to improve your user experience. The majority of improvements will be made available as part of our regular release cycle. However, some features may affect your personal interaction with Canvas. Learn more about User Feature Options and how to enable them in the manage new features lesson.

Canvas is continually creating new features to improve your experience. The majority of improvements will be made available as part of our regular release cycle. However, some features may change the workflow for common activities in Canvas during your current term. Because we want you to be able to learn about these features at your own pace, they’ll be placed in your Account Settings as a Feature Option. Feature Options allow you to choose when you want to enable the new feature for your institution. Most institutions will pilot the feature within their institution and then enable it for the entire institution between terms.

This lesson gives an overview of how to manage feature options for an entire account. Features can be activated on account, course, and user levels. On the course level, you can give instructors the option to implement features on a course-by-course basis. Admins and instructors have no control over user-level features.

The majority of features will be available for you to enable at any time. However, some features will only appear after they are enabled by your Customer Success Manager. To view specific feature options available in Canvas, visit the current account features lesson.

Please note that most Feature Options will only be optional for a short period of time. Once a Feature Option is officially released to your production environment, you'll have a few releases (depending on the feature) before the option will be enabled for all Canvas users. Therefore we encourage you to use your beta environment to learn about new Feature Options for your institution, and when the features are released to your production environment, allow them as quickly as appropriate for your institution.

Note: Account-level features cannot be managed in Free-for-Teacher accounts.

You can create online assignments for students to submit their assignments through Canvas.

When allowing file uploads as an online entry option, you can restrict certain types of files for assignment submissions. In the case of restricting assignments with an odd or unusual file type, try adding it to your course to confirm the file is accepted before requesting students to submit the file type.

If your institution has enabled Google Docs, the Google Apps LTI, or the Microsoft Office 365 LTI, students can upload files from their respective Google Drive or OneDrive account directly. (If only Google Docs are enabled for your institution, students must connect to Google Drive as a web service to submit an assignment as a Google Doc, Google Sheet, or Google Slide.) You can allow Google Drive and OneDrive files as submission types by selecting the File Uploads checkbox when creating an assignment.

Google Drive File Types

Students can submit Google Doc (.gdoc), Google Sheet (.gsheet), or Google Slide (.gslide) files. They can also use Google Docs to submit uploaded Word (.doc/.docx), Excel (.xls/.xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt/.pptx), and PDF files not converted to Google Docs formatting.

When Google file types are submitted as an assignment submission, those files will convert to their Microsoft counterpart file types and appear in the submission as respective Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files. Canvas uses the conversion file type for submissions (and to render supported file types as Crocodoc files in SpeedGrader), so if you want to restrict file types to only include Google file types, you must also include the file types for each respective Microsoft file type as well. For instance, if you want to only allow Google Slide submissions, you must include .pptx as a restrictive file type, otherwise Canvas will not show the .gslide files in the Google Doc tab.

Turnitin File Types

If your institution has enabled Turnitin, you can create a Turnitin assignment. Turnitin accepts various file types and images.