As generative AI tools become ubiquitous in higher education, instructors across disciplines are grappling with a core challenge:  How do we authentically capture student learning when an AI can generate a polished essay, summary, or response to prompts in seconds? While detector tools often prove unreliable or punitive, pedagogical redesign offers a far more sustainable solution. Rather than focusing solely on detecting AI usage at the point of submission, AI-resilient course design focuses on making the learning process visible, collaborative, and reflective. FeedbackFruits offers a suite of learning tools integrated directly into Canvas that helps shift the focus from final product to active engagement. Read on to learn how you can use FeedbackFruits to build assignments that foster genuine student learning in the age of AI. What Makes a Learning Activity "AI-Resilient"? AI-resilient learning activities tend to share three core characteristics: Assignments that focus...

If you’ve been offline since May, a few things have shifted in learning technologies. We’re cutting straight through the release notes to highlight what actually impacts your teaching and student experience this fall. Canvas Instructure's Security Incident Instructure, the makers of Canvas, suffered a major security incident at a critical time at the end of spring term. The vendor continues to fortify their systems and provide regular updates . Take precautions against falling for a phishing attempt .  Enhanced Rubrics Enhanced Rubrics is now enabled across the entire institution. The new layout is intuitive, clean, and a welcome improvement over the old view. Read Canvas Enhanced Rubrics feature review in Extra Points . Assignment Enhancements Students get a streamlined, modernized view when submitting assignments. The interface upgrades how students view, submit, and track assignments. Compare a screenshot of the legacy student-facing assignment submission page vs a screenshot ...

Canvas Peer Review Enhancements is an updated suite of features designed to turn peer feedback into an active, dynamic, and fully integrated experience for all. Utilizing peer feedback is an effective way to deepen learning and drive engagement, but managing the logistics inside Canvas can quickly become overwhelming. While the original peer review tool in Canvas did provide a way for students to evaluate each other's work, it relied on manual pairing and was mostly disconnected from Canvas’s broader workflow, which added to the administrative burden on instructors. What Are Canvas Peer Review Enhancements? Canvas Peer Review Enhancements elevate peer feedback from a simple assignment setting into an independent workflow across your course. Previously, peer reviews were tied directly to the main assignment's framework and shared the same due dates and point values. With this update, peer review activities act as single items across Assignments, Modules, the student To-Do list, ...

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. Since teaching goals vary, the workshop supported a full spectrum of approaches, from intentionally integrating GenAI into coursework to limiting its use to safeguard foundational learning. What Made the Lab Value-Driven? Post-event feedback highlighted exactly what made the experience so impactful for faculty: Dedicated Time & Collaboration: Instructors rarely get an uninterrupted day to foc...

Designing meaningful learning experiences in Canvas goes beyond simply delivering content and assigning work. If you are looking for ways to help students think about their learning, demonstrate and organize their growth throughout their academic career, and make connections across their work, Canvas Portfolio is a new solution that brings those goals into everyday teaching and learning.  While the original Canvas ePortfolio tool provided a way to showcase student work, Canvas Portfolio now shifts that experience into an ongoing, interactive process that develops collaboratively alongside a student’s academic path, rather than only at the end. What Is Canvas Portfolio? Canvas Portfolio is a built-in tool that enables students to create a digital collection of their work. It allows students to compile, organize, and reflect on their learning as they progress through their studies. Instead of assembling content after the fact, students can pull in assignments directly from their cour...

Providing meaningful feedback is a cornerstone of student success, and rubrics are essential tools for maintaining transparency and consistency in grading. On May 16, 2026, Canvas Enhanced Rubrics will be turned on in Canvas. This updated feature is designed to streamline how you build, manage, and use rubrics in your courses. In preparation for rolling out this updated feature, I (Rebecca George-Burrs, Academic Technologist in Academic Technology Support Services) spent some time building some new rubrics and managing my existing rubrics in the Enhanced Rubrics space. This blog post is my review of Enhanced Rubrics.  New Streamlining Features for Building Rubrics Building rubrics in Canvas has been known for being time-consuming and requiring persistence. Enhanced Rubrics brings a more intuitive user interface to build and revise rubrics along with flexible viewing and scoring options that make the grading process more efficient. Here is a list of updates that I was most pleased...

When creating video content for your course, accessibility should remain a central consideration. Accurate captioning and appropriate audio description not only promote equitable access to course materials, but will also be required for compliance with the University’s updated digital accessibility policy beginning in April 2026. Proactively addressing caption quality now will help guarantee that your content remains accessible and meets policy guidelines. It is essential to order or edit captions for any video you require students to watch in your course. If you are linking to videos you do not own, take the time to carefully review the existing captions for accuracy, completeness, and timing. Auto-generated captions are often a starting point, not a finished product. If the captions are inaccurate and you are unable to contact the owner to correct them, the video should not be used in your course. Providing content that is inaccessible to some students creates unnecessary barriers ...

Extra Points contributors are interviewing University of Minnesota instructors working to comply with the updated digital accessibility policy effective April 2026. These blog posts highlight the approach they take as they lean into the challenge of revising their course content to be digitally accessible. This post highlights Dr. Vanessa Lee, Professor of Psychology in the College of College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities Campus. Interviewer: When did you first start hearing about digital accessibility?   Vanessa Lee (VL): I think I first started hearing about digital accessibility in the spring of 2024. However, it wasn't until the summer of 2024 that the emails started coming in, urging me to really begin this work. Interviewer: What were your initial thoughts, feelings and concerns about the need to make your course materials accessible? VL: My first reaction was that this is a good and important thing to do for my students. I was already having to make various accommodatio...

Designing a personalized learning experience in Canvas often requires a careful balance between providing specialized support and maintaining a well-organized, manageable course structure. While Canvas Groups and Sections have their function for student organization, Differentiation Tags is a new tool to help you deliver targeted instruction with even greater precision and privacy. What Are Differentiation Tags? Differentiation Tags allow you to create custom labels and assign them to specific students or groups of students. Unlike Sections or Groups, these tags are completely invisible to students. This "behind-the-scenes" layer of organization allows you to categorize students based on specific needs, progress, required accommodations, or any needed way to sort students without creating public-facing labels. Once a student is tagged via the People page, the tags become a selectable option in the "Assign To" field. This means that you can deliver specific assignm...

  Extra Points contributors are interviewing University of Minnesota instructors working to comply with the updated digital accessibility policy effective April 2026. These blog posts highlight the approach they take as they lean into the challenge of revising their course content to be digitally accessible. This post highlights Dr. Olivia Crandell, Assistant Professor, Center for Learning Innovation, Rochester. Interviewer: When did you first start hearing about digital accessibility?  Dr. Olivia Crandell (OC): I think I first heard a general announcement in the fall of 2024, likely in a campus-wide email. However, I didn't give it serious attention until it was actually brought up in a department faculty meeting. It's been about a year since I have had digital accessibility seriously on my radar. Interviewer: What were your initial thoughts, feelings and concerns about the need to make your course materials accessible? My initial thought was that this would be a lot o...

 Hello readers, On behalf of the teams that contribute to the Extra Points blog, we want to extend a sincere thank you for being such an engaged community of readers. We directly support the University of Minnesota’s teaching mission, and this blog has been a terrific space to share information and highlight current topics. Our goal is to ensure the content we create is timely, relevant, and useful for your work. To do that effectively, we believe the most important voice in the room is yours. In this post, we are asking for your guidance: What do you want to learn about or discuss next? Your challenges, curiosities, and innovative ideas are the best source of inspiration for our future posts. Your feedback will directly help our teams plan and write articles that address the real-world needs of instructors and staff. What topics or formats would be most valuable to you? To get the conversation started, here are some of the types of articles we often write. Are there specific topic...

Extra Points contributors are interviewing University of Minnesota instructors working to comply with the updated digital accessibility policy effective April 2026. These blog posts highlight the approach they take as they lean into the challenge of revising their course content to be digitally accessible. This post highlights Deanna Koepp , Associate Professor of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development in the College of Biological Sciences , Twin Cities.  Interviewer: When did you first start hearing about digital accessibility?  Deanna Koepp (DK) : I sort of knew in the background that digital accessibility was a thing, but I didn't truly focus on it until last summer. That's when I received a notification from CBS (College of Biological Sciences) about an approaching compliance deadline in April. I went to a workshop by the IT people in CBS where digital accessibility suddenly moved from a vague awareness to an urgent, concrete task. Interviewer: What were your initial...

In April 2025, Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS), in collaboration with academic technology professionals across the University of Minnesota system, conducted a series of focus groups to understand instructor sentiments and address the complexities of integrating generative AI into higher education. Focus group participants included instructors from multiple University of Minnesota campuses. The goals were to gauge instructors' feelings about the value and applicability of these tools in and beyond the classroom, and to identify where common assumptions about generative AI break down across different disciplines. Note: throughout this post, “generative AI” and “AI” are both used to refer to the broad category of artificial intelligence that can produce content such as text, images, video, audio, and/or code. Focus group process ATSS partnered with Usability Services to establish the session goals, determine participant recruiting criteria, craft the interview protoco...