Canvas and Scribd

For those of you working in Canvas right now, you may have noticed that the Scribd preview feature is not working correctly. For those of you new to Canvas, Scribd is a third-party program used by Canvas to allow teachers and students to preview their documents in the browser window before downloading them. Here is an example picture:

Scribd is a great tool employed by Canvas. It also provides a few options such as Fullscreen, Print, and Zooming in/out of the page.

However, going forward, Canvas will only be using Scribd is limited usage. Here is a quote from their update notes from 9/15/12 (original posting can be seen here):

“We’ve been working with the team at Scribd and they’ve been great. It turns out the bandwidth issues due to a network configuration on our side. We’re working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Scribd to find a speedy resolution. Scribd has reaffirmed their ability to handle the quantity of files we’ll be sending. The previewing option is being removed from the File Repository, Pages, and other locations short term.”

While most locations are unavailable at this moment for Scribd usage, the Assignment area still works:

“This still works for assignment submissions in Speedgrader where it is mostly used by our clients, but we want to make sure there are previewing options in a variety of locations across Canvas.”

According to their 9/29/12 update notes, they have found a new technology to use known as Crocodoc. Crocodoc is software similar to Scribd in both look and ability. However, Crocodoc provides a few more options in it such as the ability to create annotations directly in Speedgrader. Crocodoc is expected to go live in Canvas this weekend.

Check back here next week for a posting about Crocodoc and some of its features!

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