bCourses Roadmap

Overview

bCourses is UC Berkeley’s local brand for the Canvas learning management system (LMS). UC Berkeley licenses Canvas from Instructure, via the Internet2 consortium. UC Berkeley and Digital Learning Services are very active in the Canvas higher education community, and are committed to continuous service improvement of bCourses through ongoing work with our peers and the vendor.

Instructure releases new and enhanced features to Canvas every three weeks, outlined in its Release Notes. UC Berkeley summarizes and highlights important changes to Canvas on the bCourses website. We also submit Feature Requests directly to Canvas based on the feedback that we receive from instructors and students. All bCourses users can participate in this process by submitting their own feature requests directly to Canvas, or commenting and voting on ideas submitted by Canvas users from around the world.

In addition, UC Berkeley works locally on customizing the Canvas platform to meet the needs of our campus, through changes to default settings, custom tools linking campus systems with bCourses, and the integration of third-party tools and features.

bCourses Release Notes Archive

Updates and Alerts for bCourses listed below; most recent first.

bCourses Update Schedule

Every three weeks, bCourses is updated by the vendor (Canvas). UC Berkeley reviews these updates and communicates the most significant changes to instructors using bCourses announcements.

Feature Requests

To improve the core functionality of bCourses, including features such as communications (announcements/inbox/discussions) and assessments (quizzes/assignments), UC Berkeley works with the product vendor, Canvas.

UC Berkeley also convenes the Canvas Research Universities Peer Group, a community of large public and private R1 universities in the United States using Canvas. This group shares information about their experiences using Canvas in large universities, pools knowledge about the platform, and works collaboratively to escalate shared concerns and needs to Instructure. For more information about the Canvas Research Universities Peer Group, contact Allison Czapracki allisoncz@berkeley.edu.

Local Customizations

Create a Site
E-grades Export
Official Sections
Roster Photos
Course Capture
Mailing List
Find A Person To Add

UC Berkeley manages these integrations, and requests about modifications or enhancements to these tools can be made by contacting the bCourses support team bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu.

Technical Issues

When UC Berkeley becomes aware of technical issues in bCourses that the vendor must resolve, we work directly with Canvas to report them. Technical issues are prioritized by Canvas by the severity of impact, number of affected users, and possible workarounds that are available to prevent the issue from occurring.