Making feedback more visible to students

[dfdimatt]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the  Canvas Release Notes (2021-11-20).

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I'm teaching a course using Canvas. This is the second semester I've used it. I like Canvas overall, but I've discovered that my students have a difficult time reading the feedback that I provide on their online assignment submissions because the feedback is split into three different locations, and when student view an assignment that I've graded, there is no visual indication of whether feedback is present, and no unified display of that feedback. I'd like the feedback to be visible by default, or else some kind of visually loud indicator present to show them there is feedback. Let me explain:

1. Say I grade an assignment that a student submitted. They go to the assignment, and can see straight-away a general comment on the lower right-hand side. That's visible by default. Fine and good.
2. But what about all the comments embedded in the document view? Those are not automatically displayed, and there is no marker to show that such comments have been embedded in the document. There should be at minimum a big icon saying feedback is embedded, for sure, so go look at it. Currently, "View Feedback" link is always present, regardless of whether feedback has been embedded or not.
3. Furthermore, the rubric grade is displayed in the upper-right corner, but the detailed rubric view is hidden until students think to click "Show Rubric"... yet even then, the written feedback that I have provided on each rubric criteria remains hidden from view! Students have to hunt for that feedback by clicking the easily-overlooked speech-bubble icon one-at-a-time for each criterion. But I don't necessarily write a comment for each criterion, and there is no visual sign or indication that a comment has been written or not.

How are students supposed to know and remember to check all of these various locations to receive the complete set of feedback provided by their instructors? It is utterly inefficient and defeatist because students don't seem to realize that all this feedback is sitting there waiting for them--and they don't know to look for it.

Now, from a student point of view, I don't want to have to click in so many different places to hunt (perhaps fruitlessly) for feedback that my instructor might or might not have left for me (since there is no indicator signalling the existence of written comments).

The fact that written feedback has been given within the submitted file and within the rubric should be foregrounded--it should be made highly visible to the students checking their grades. That feedback is part of the learning process. It is essential for students to read that feedback in order to improve their work. If they don't know it is there, what is the point?

Don't force users to guess and hunt for feedback. They won't do it. Make it obvious that the feedback has been given by putting some kind of big symbol or message next to the assignment doc (or by displaying the assignment by default so students can see that margin comments etc have been embedded in the file) and also by automatically displaying the rubric WITH the written feedback already visible. Don't make the students click in three hundred different places to get all their feedback for a single assignment. Please.

[Renee_Carney]

 @dfdimatt ​

This is a very thoughtful post!  Thank you so much!  You highlight three very key areas of student feedback!

1) It sounds like you are pleased with the bottom right notification that something has been graded.

2) There is a feature idea that is currently open for voting regarding Crocodoc feedback.  You can find it here:

3) In my searching I did not find a feature idea related to making graded rubrics more visible.  That may be the one are that you want to focus on!

Because of the complexity of the feature development process we ask that the Community focus their feature ideas.  Please focus this idea down to one.  You can find more information about that in How do I create a new feature idea?​  You can also join in and hear our Community Team and Product Team talk about this on Friday in the Community Meet Product Teams; Product Teams Meet the Community​ CanvasLIVE​ session!

There are some great resources around the Canvas Feedback tools.  Here are just a couple

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[Jeff_F]

This one liner is splendid:  Don't force users to guess and hunt for feedback. I am with you on that Derek.

[debra_maranto]

YES!! I provide detailed feedback on every assignment to every student, and they have no way of knowing when they get their grade notification that there is any feedback to read. I have to remind them several times a semester that I spend a lot of time giving this feedback and to please be sure to read it. Now with that said, I would also like some way to be notified when they DO read their feedback and comment back to me. I have no way of knowing if a student responded to my feedback unless I spend all day long, every day, going back over their assignments in the off chance someone read mine and responded.

SMH.

[stevec]

We've been suggesting this literally for years. Every tweak of Crocodoc brings with it another hurdle for students. Why is it so difficult to see that immediate, easily accessible feedback is a necessity for students? They should be "confronted" with feedback, not forced to go through hoops to find it.

[angela_hall]

Yes!!!  I spend hours making comments and giving feedback for students to improve their work. However, since they can't see the rubric/comments on the same screen as their submission, it is hard for them to know what I'm referring to.  It's even harder when they try to fix it, and they have to try to remember what I said to fix.  Also, it would help for the rubric comments to show up in red or some color because they don't always notice them. 

[jhurley]

I totally agree! Students have to literally search for their in-text feedback. It's insane that we spend hours making these comments that might never be seen.

[jordan]

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. November 4, 2015 - Wed. February 3, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

[nuvlg721]

Yes, let's make the feedback VERY visible to students. We've also noticed that students might miss the "view feedback" button if their browser is set to zoom in, so the View Feedback links should be in a place where screen size and resolution won't affect them.

For example:

[915085611]

I totally share this concern.

In the old message system, the typed comments or recorded feedback on an assignment would show up in the list of messages both for me when I selected a student and for the student when he or she opened messages--it was wonderful to be able to see every bit of communication I had with a student during the term and not have to hunt for it. This also meant that I would automatically see if they had posted comments to me. I know this doesn't address crocodoc feedback, but it was a really nice feature that just disappeared.  I know that students can get feedback forwarded to their external e-mail if they set up notifications for that, but there was a really nice sense of conversation when all messages/feedback was organized in one spot in Canvas.

On a related note, I have switched to giving most of my essay feedback as screen capture videos recorded with Camtasia, so I can talk about the essay while pointing to parts of the essay. I generally find that students are more likely to take in this feedback and understand it than they are when I make notes just on crocodoc. It is currently a bit time consuming but would be greatly sped up if a comment option of "screen capture with audio" were added to the video and audio options that currently exist.

[asatkins]

Even sometimes if they are not zoomed! Chrome sometimes shoves it off under the comments based on monitor size/shape and Safari does it nearly always.