[ARCHIVED] Revised essays

[james_wenzell]

Hi.  Like many of you, I am new to doing my courses online.  I teach English and have students revise their essays.  Now, of course, they upload them on Canvas.  If students are doing revisions, how can I have them upload them if the original upload is already there?  Do I set up a separate column for the revision and just assign no point value? Any help would be appreciated.  

[Shar]

Hi Jim Wenzell,

I'm sure an English teacher will chime in here with how they handle revisions (ping stefaniesanders‌). But I want to let you know that right now*, students can upload multiple times into the same assignment until the close date hits.

So how do you normally handle revisions? Do you only grade the last version they turn in? If so, then good news in SpeedGrader you see the most recent version, there'll be a history of submissions that you can go through but the one you see first (and the only one students can see) is the most recent submission.

In this example, I turned in my 2nd version kinda late. heh.

*Coming next month, we'll be able to set a limit to how many times an assignment can be submitted. Limited Submission Attempts.

Hope this news helps,
Cheers - Shar

[Stef_retired]

Hi,  @james_wenzell  Welcome to the Canvas Community and to Canvas. (Thanks for the tag, ishar-uw. )

Jim, I've changed the format of your post to a discussion from a question, as it seems likely that the prompt won't elicit a single correct answer but rather an ongoing conversation with suggestions, because there are many ways of doing this.

I used to teach humanities courses that included weekly assignments requiring students to write 250-300 word responses to the prompt they chose from three options. I provided considerable feedback on their submissions (I did all that in Turnitin's GradeMark) but didn't give them a revision opportunity for the short essays; rather, I asked them to take the feedback and apply it to subsequent weeks' activities.

The course also included two required long-form essays, and for those I did give students a revision option. The way I did that was to have them upload a draft to an assignment that would not count toward the final grade that was designated for that purpose, and I used DocViewer to annotate their drafts with my feedback. They then used that feedback to submit to a second assignment, and I assessed that one using GradeMark.

I stress that this was an option I offered to students. In other words, students who wanted to benefit from my feedback before writing their final essay could take advantage of the zero-point assignment; students who wanted to wait until the last minute before the final essay was due would be assessed on what they submitted.