We are trying to make better use of our chem canvas course and had a question. Does canvas have a functionality where we can get the kids to do an assignment ‘live’ online through collaborations but at the final stage submit it for assessment?
We are trying to make better use of our chem canvas course and had a question. Does canvas have a functionality where we can get the kids to do an assignment ‘live’ online through collaborations but at the final stage submit it for assessment?
Yes I understand for a group but if i want to give feedback on a live document for individuals is there an easier way?
How did groups get into this conversation? Neither one of us has said anything about groups until now. We've been talking about collaborations.
Collaborations are different than groups.
Yeah, I know, Canvas uses words in different ways than the rest of us. I will use "group" to refer to an official group in Canvas and "team" or "collaboration" to refer to the human definition, just to avoid confusion.
With Google Docs (I haven't used Office 365, which is why I referred you to the documentation), they are collaborating on a single document, but when they turn it in, everyone is turning in a copy of it. If you have 60 students, you get 60 submissions to grade. You can comment individually as much as you want.
If you have it set up as a group assignment, then a single submission that counts for everyone in the group but you will not be able to comment on the document to individual students because the entire group will see it. If you have 20 groups of 3 students, you only get 20 submissions to grade. It's much faster to grade this way, but you won't be able to individually comment.
If you want to provide individual feedback, then don't make it a group assignment, make it an individual assignment.
Working on a team with on a collaboration is not a requirement for this, they could do it completely separate, and a cloud assignment might be better than a collaboration (of one) in that case. But if you want them them to work together in a team then feel free to start a collaboration. They can also share outside of Canvas within the application.
Collaboration has nothing to do with groups (Canvas definitions).
If you use a collaboration, I'm not sure what individual feedback you can give unless there is a portion of the document that is unique to each person. You won't be able to tell who contributed what to the document. One of the problems I run into with collaborations and people working in teams when it's not a group assignment is that I do have to leave feedback multiple times for each member of the team / collaboration, even though the documents are identical. I often don't want the hassle of a Canvas group for my smaller projects, so I have them work in teams, but then each person has to turn it in.
Also, don't confuse cloud documents with collaborations. With cloud documents, each student gets a copy made of the document when they open it. When they go to save it, it uses their copy. This precludes collaborating in a team.
If you want to leave feedback in the application itself (on Office 365 or Google Docs) rather than in DocViewer in Canvas, then there are other things that need done, like adding you to the collaboration or sharing it with you manually. If the document you're commenting on is a collaboration, then you cannot comment individually to people within the office suite. You can after they submit it to Canvas using DocViewer (only if it's not a group assignment), but not in the live version of the document.
Hey Lauren Sayer
If you do have the Office365 integration and students using OneDrive then I would recommend using the regular Assignment tool.
1. Set the Submission type as Online > Website URL
2. Set the Assignment Due Date for some date in the future (to allow them to submit early and regularly)
3. Get students to create their assignments using Word.
4. Have students create a Share link to the document (making sure it is Editable)
5. Get them to submit the link as the assignment:
6. When you get the link, you open it in a new page
7. You are taken to their online document and you can then add comments and review their work via Review:
Pros
Cons
Hope that might help?
Gideon
Thanks so much for this!
Thanks for chiming in Gideon. Since we don't use Office 365 there was a limit to how much I could help. That still doesn't sound as smooth as the Google Doc integration and collaborations.
Definitely Google's poorer (edtech) relation as regards the integration, but I guess you work with what you are given!
Is there a way to upload a Shared Office365 document to an assignment? The instructor Shares a Document with students via the Collaborations feature. The students access the document in Collaborations/OneDrive. But the shared file is not available to select for the assignment as an upload.
Lauren,
Canvas does support collaborations.
I'm not sure what you meant by "live". I use Google Docs where they're all editing the document at the same time. I require the students to integrate Canvas with Google Drive. The students start their own collaboration and copy/paste a template that I have created that I want them to complete. When it's done, they submit the assignment like any other online file upload.
I notice you tagged this with Office 365, so I'll provide links to the guides. I don't have direct experience using Office 365 with Canvas. When I was first deciding which suite to go with, Google Docs had a much better live integration than Office did and I don't know where Office sits now.
Here are a couple of pages from the Canvas Guides:
There are several other pages about collaboration available in the Canvas Guides.