[ARCHIVED] How can I print out all of student submissions for a given assignment plus submission details?

[JillianWallis]

I am having a hard time looking at my computer screen and would like to print all of my student's submissions at once, rather than file by file from the download. 

The fact that I am unable to print from within the Canvas grading area seems like a real missed opportunity. At least this way I could page through all of them hitting a button on each.

Also, my students do not seem to get that they need to put their name on their submissions, and it seems like it should be trivial for Canvas to both print everything out and append the student name and date of submission to each.

[Ron_Bowman]

@JillianWallis -

If you are talking about an actual assignment (i.e. not a quiz), then you  can perform a bulk download of all submissions (in the picture below, project 7 is an assignment showing in the grade book, the download submissions link is near the bottom from the menu options).  That download will contain all files that the students uploaded and it will have their names attached to the file name.

You can then print those files as you desire.

Here is the instructor manual page on download - it shows downloading from the assignment itself

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-download-all-student-submissions-for-an...

If you are referring to something other than a regular assignment, then options exist as well for those.

 

[JillianWallis]

As I said in my original post, I can download them all and then print them individually, but that process is annoying as all get out. While I appreciate that Canvas provided meaningful file names with the student name, etc., unfortunately does not lead to that information printing along with the rest of the file.

What would be really useful is if there was a print button on each assignment in the speed grader interface, that printed the assignment files with the student metadata on them. Attempting to print the browser page that included both the assignment and the student information lead to a horrible overlapping frame mess, that obliterated the student work. It is possible to create a different layout for printouts than for display, and this is a real opportunity for Canvas to improve the instructor experience.

[Ron_Bowman]

@JillianWallis - Okay.  I misunderstood your post about downloading all of your students submissions.  I took that to mean one submission from each student in the class.  However, After the comment  by @Ambrosety and by you I am now interpreting your post as printing out the multiple submissions made by one student.

As far as I know(which is not much) there is no way to do what you want within Canvas.  However, if you are familiar with script writing (perl, bash, etc), you could probably write a script to do what you want as far as taking the canvas file name information and creating file names for each assignment with meaningful information(words instead of numbers) that could then be batch printed. Not that you should be required to do something like the above, but it is another unfortunate result of the some of the shortcomings of Canvas.

[LandonWhitley]

I think what the author of the post is asking is:

How do you print all the submissions made to a single assignment?

For example, if I have essays submitted via Canvas, is there an easy way to print them all without downloading the documents? Right now, I have to download, open, and print each submission individually...which is a logistical nightmare. 

I think your coding solution works for this, but I'm reviving this thread bc I would love if this feature could be added...hopefully someone in charge will see this, or someone else knows a fix. Essay grading goes so much faster on paper, and it isn't always fair to make students print depending on your demographic. 

[nixbuckner]

I have a teacher who has downloaded all of the submissions for her class for an assignment and wants to print them as a batch  rather than clicking on each document and printing separately.  I can't find a way to do this and would appreciate any suggestions anyone might have.

[Ron_Bowman]

@nixbuckner 

I just did a search on google about mass printing from a windows command terminal (I was guessing the teacher was using windows), and unfortunately there is not an easy way to do it - or at least no way I am going to try and explain here.  That statement is based on my search and not on personal experience with trying to do a bulk printing on windows.   I remembered about powershell and did a search there.  The following link shows how to do the print from powershell, and then the code shown could be put into a loop (I would think) to where you could have all the files in a directory(folder) and run a command in powershell that loops through all files in that directory and prints them.

https://techexpert.tips/powershell/powershell-printing-file/

Now if the teacher is using a Linux OS computer, then it is trivial to print out all files in a directory.  Just some basic scripting language to do it.

[ShannonDoyle]

The work around I found for this was to download all the files, then export the compressed files to their own folder. From there, if they are docs, you can select up to 10 at time, then right click and select "print" from the pop up menu.  It's not a perfect workaround (I can't include pdfs, for example, and if you select more than a certain number at a time, the "print" command won't appear in your right click menu), but it was a lot faster than opening and printing every file individually (I had 78 submissions to print, but this only took a few minutes).