[ARCHIVED] Canvas does not support restricted TA access to Assignments?

[dkatugampola]

Hi All,

Canvas currently does not support restricted TA access such as only homework or quizzes. They give full access to assignment group for anyone who has a TA role in your course. Due to confidentially rule, I do not want my undergraduate TAs to access all the assignment details including midterm exams, final exams and course grades. I'm fine with graduate TAs have full access. I think canvas admin/programmers should understand the importance of this important option and make this available for the academic community soon.

As a comparison, Sakai LMS has this feature and instructor can decide what access you give to your TAs. I hope canvas will do the same soon to make canvas more helpful and useful.

One other issue canvas has is the weighted assignment option. Canvas currently does not have a way to weigh say all the homework equally unless they have equal point value. As you can see this is not practical in many situations. For example, we need to give more problem for one homework while another has few and at the same time want to weigh them equally. Again, Sakai has this option. irrespective of the point value, you can weigh assignments within one category equally in sakai. I hope canvas make this option available soon. Thank you.

[mzimmerman]

Hi Udita,

If you have suggestions or feature requests that you'd like Instructure to consider for future Canvas updates, the best way to do that is through the Feature Idea process here in the community.  For more information, have a look athttps://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14903-75187841183 https://community.canvaslms.com/community/create-idea!input.jspa?containerID=2020&containerType=14" ...

Mike

[jmkeel]

Udita,

One way to work around some of your issues would be to have your Canvas Admin create a role (other than TA) with the permissions you would like your undergraduate TA's to have. These permissions can include removing access to the grades or assignments and quizzes.  It isn't equal to the functionality in your former LMS, but it may assist you in the meantime.

Justin

[dkatugampola]

Justin,

Yes, our IT department contacted canvas support to create a different role with different permission level. But unfortunately, canvas replied back saying it is NOT possible. The only option canvas provides is either full access to assignments or nothing since they put all in one category called assignments. So currently there is no option to only have access to homework and quizzes (for example). Please guide me if I'm wrong. Thank you for your inputs.

Udita

[jmkeel]

Udita,

You are correct that the permissions for your example can't be currently be broken up in Canvas. Here is a list of all the possible permissions in Canvas that can be edited in a different role https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/Canvas_Permissions_Course.pdf . While that can't be done currently in Canvas, you can restrict your undergrad TA's from viewing the gradebook. I know that Canvas is currently developing more granular permissions. You may want to submit a feature idea to the development team or (at the very least) follow the development progress here https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/priority-granular-permissions/pages/home .

Justin

[hesspe]

 @jmkeel ‌  "While that can't be done currently in Canvas, you can restrict your undergrad TA's from viewing the gradebook."  Yes you can do that, but if you do, then TAs can no longer grade students' on-line submissions.  It's just wrong (OK, IMO)  to make teachers choose between either allowing TAs to have full view and edit capability to the grade book and grade history or restricting them so they cannot see students' online submissions.  I've probably posted in this space about this issue more often than any other, and for some reason, it doesn't seem to resonate.  I do not understand why others aren't similarly aroused.

[dkatugampola]

What happen most of the time, the teaches contact IT helpdesk and canvas support first. But once they see that they are not corporating with them, they give up! That's how most of the things happening in the country, we are no exception! To make things worst, canvas has a very poor way of obtaining ideas. As I said earlier they have a very poor gradebook. I do not know why the development team does not have a common sense of the need of LMS before they create something. I have to be strict here. Sorry.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @dkatugampola ,

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[mikolaj_sawicki]

I have same problem as Udita - I want my TA to have access to the gradebook limited to homework assignments and quizzes, but not to exams and final grade. Canvas should move quickly to create subcategories in Assignments with separate permission for each subcategory.

Mik

[ds08]

Similar. But I can’t even let the graduate TAs grade the midterms and final, it’s against departmental policy. Right now my solution is to have them sign an acknowledgement of FERPA privacy rules and that they cannot mark up the exams nor change grading. It IS useful that they can see students’ work for tutoring but I’d rather that be a choice of the student.

Does Instructure realize the seriousness of FERPA infractions? Please help us maintain good practices.

[burnsrm]

Two years and they still do not have settings to adjust to use TAs to be limited in what they can see?

[scombs426]

I know this was originally posted in 2018 but has it ever been addressed by Canvas?

I don't see this as a feature request but meeting the legal requirements of FERPA.  If I could restrict grading of the TA to a group - like it works with sections - it could work but with Groups you can't add instructors or TA's without giving them the dual role of students and the team taught course I need to restrict TA access to grade in is one section.  It's not a light matter, looking at different applications now to meet the requirement because I'm not seeing any way to restrict each Team Leader to have access only to their group of students for grading.  The ability to restrict a TA to grade a group or a specific assignment could work.  I've found Canvas to have a lot of great capabilities for integration, etc. but dearly miss the granularity of restricting permissions we had in Sakai.

We're newer to Canvas and I'm really hoping I've overlooked some way of doing this? even the high schools are going to group work, maybe one teacher is grading all the groups.  I can see where universities use sections and assign TA by section but now you have small group teaching within sections and they shouldn't be seeing those grades, how are they meeting the FERPA requirements?

We're using Ellucian ILP and we can't manually make sections or grades will not push back to banner so using manually set up sections cause a null error and shuts down transfer of grades.  Sections must come into Canvas from Banner.