How do you audit grades for a course when gradebook history returns no history?

[watsonnk]

Many people using gradebook probably need to audit their grades from time to time, indeed their institute may require it.

When you exceed even a fairly modest number of grade entries in a course, gradebook history stops reporting anything at all.

Question: When this happens, can anyone suggest what the teacher responsible for the course should do to get the grade history that he/she needs?

All suggestions/workarounds, especially ones that do not require the institution's Canvas guru to do something bespoke for the stressed teacher, are very welcome!

  Best regards,

                   Nigel

PS: The latest attempt to highlight this problem is open for votes for a few more days, see:

Related requests in the recent past, include:

Gradebook backups, history, and restore

[kona · Accepted solution]

watsonnk​, other than contacting Canvas Support I can't think of any other way to get this information.

[watsonnk]

Hi Kona,

   Thanks for the fast reply, I was afraid that this would be the answer too

So, given that Canvas Support would be overwhelmed if every teacher who wants to audit grades contacts them with a request to extract the information, and assuming this information probably is needed in many courses, I don't really understand what others do. Either flooding Canvas support with requests, not actually checking grades for large courses, or manually exporting grades to .csv from time to time (although that only acts as a partial backup, without history of who did what).  Or perhaps people who need to really trust their grades don't use the Canvas gradebook ?  If it's the latter, that would be very interesting to know too.

[kona]

I'm not sure how other Institutions handle this, but we've been using Canvas since fall 2012 and haven't had an issue with faculty needing to check their gradebook history; in fact I can only thing of a handful of times there was an issue and we needed to contact support. I know a couple of faculty who use the Canvas gradebook and also keep a paper (or electronic) backup, but in general our faculty are using the Canvas gradebook and not having any issues that would require them to check their grading history.

I will say that I strongly advising instructors (during training and email reminders) to note in the comments if they changed a grade and why. It's not that hard to do and is a nice reminder to the student (and Instructor) about why a grade was changed and when (the when is automatically added when posting the comment to the grade).

[watsonnk]

Hi Kona,

    Thanks again, I agree that if someone is intentionally amending a grade, then adding a comment to explain why is very good practice (and I'll remember to do this and encourage others here to do likewise).  A typical use case I'm concerned about is entering grades in the gradebook table view, clicking on a student's assignment and just entering the grade against the wrong student.  When there are many people entering grades for a single course I worry more than if a single person is entering grades for a whole class.

  best regards,

          Nigel

[kona]

Ah, that makes sense.

[watsonnk]

The problem with this is how to encourage anyone to vote on it.  In my institute, I was told that getting my colleagues in my univ. to vote on it may not help as Instructure could disregard them as a cluster of correlated votes, so local advocacy does not help.  Then I saw the fate of a *really* popular idea (and obvious design omission) being archived, so popular and distributed does not guarentee anything proceeeds to the next step either.

So, I'm wondering how to take this further.  Adding yet another feature request may help, but we are then starting to make the case to fix the problem all over again, and will have the same discussion in three months from now.

I'm probably just missing an obvious step in Instructure's logic, it would really help to avoid wasting more time if Instructure could help out here:

• we need GB history (its implemented, this implicitly recognises it adds value to GB)
• above a certain threshold, GB history stops working at all
• did the requirement for this functionality go away above a certain threshold?
  • If "yes", please explain why the need disappeared, not obvious to the end user here
  • if "no", then it's a documented bug design oversight change in user requirements during implementation :smileyshocked: and should be fixed.

Inviting institutes to go away and implement it for themselves based on the API is not really the way to go, a lot of duplicated effort, clearly a bad idea.

I can appreciate that there may be performance limitations resulting from the way GB is implemented but that should not affect the specified requirement of the design.

  On the bright side, at least this behavior is only in Canvas - imagine if your car (brakes) behaved like this, work fine up to some limit, then stop working above a certain speed...

[Renee_Carney]

Hi watsonnk​

You have started a great conversation here and included some important links!  I have sent your questions related to the gradebook history report on to our product team and hope to have answers to your questions by early next week.

I can address some of your concerns with the feature idea process.  If I don't address them all, please do not hesitate to contact me with further questions.

1. Encouraging Voting:  Posting an existing open feature idea in a question (as you did) is a great strategy for bringing it to the attention of a broader audience!  We also recommend that you 'share' the idea with other users that you think may share your priority - including your own institution!  We do take the origination of voting into consideration when we review an idea that has met the threshold, but this is only one small piece of data considered when deciding whether a feature idea is allocated resources for development. 
2. High Priority Ideas and Transparency:  You shared above.  This idea is a perfect example of how we seek to develop solutions that work for a large percentage of our users, and we're not afraid to acknowledge when our users tell us that they had something else in mind!  The "Duplicate" idea is not dead, it is on the radar of our product team and competing for resources alongside other great ideas!

We are so happy to have you in our Community!  Thank you for your questions!

[watsonnk]

Hi Renee,

  Thanks a lot for the fast reply, it would be great to understand more from the product team, as much as anything how a built-in feature that just stopping working (I assume due to implementation/performance limits) is not considered a bug and therefore something to be fixed.  It looks like a bug, behaves like a bug, but it's documented so a feature .

  Have a great weekend!

  All the best,

          Nigel

[scottdennis]

Hi Nigel,

You will find from time to time in Canvas that certain features are turned off for large enrollment courses or courses that have very high activity levels. This is often done by design to protect the overall system from performance degradation.  People love that Canvas has a 99.99% uptime but that does require us to limit some functions for large courses.

[watsonnk]

Hi Scott,

   Thanks for this, agree 100% that the very high uptime is one of the really good features of Canvas, and I can understand that that there are some aspects that will slow it down so have to be managed properly.  The difficulty is removing completely functionality exactly where it is most useful, i.e. for a large course where you are more likely to have multiple people involved in grading, whereas for the small courses where it is slightly less critical, it works.  I suggested that this feature could be limited in scope of who could use it, but not having it at all doesn't seem the way to go.  (Perhaps the idea is to have fewer assessements and more teaching - now that wouldn't be a bad idea !)

   CHeers,

          Nigel

[scottdennis]

watsonnk​,

I agree that it is unfortunate that this feature isn't available where it would provide the most benefits with respects to high enrollment and multiple active graders.  I can tell you that our product managers who are in charge of this aspect of Canvas are aware of this situation and are working on ways to address it.  I'll make sure that they are aware of the idea of possibly limiting access to this reporting feature by role.

[watsonnk]

 @scottdennis 

Hi Scott,

   Thank you very much, any improvement like this would be a great help!  As mentioned in previous posts, it does not need to be widely available, if it was to be available to a teacher for the course that would be OK.

  Cheers,

           Nigel