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 Course Settings as a Feature Option. Feature Options allow you to choose when you want to enable the new feature for your course.

This lesson gives an overview of how to manage feature options at the course level. On the course level, you may have the option to implement features on a course-by-course basis. Instructors have no control over user-level features. To view the specific course-level feature options available in Canvas, visit the current course featureslesson.

In order for a feature to appear for a course, the feature must be enabled for your institution by a Canvas admin.

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 environmentto learn about new Feature Options for your course.