Getting unsubmitted/draft assignment submissions

[GregSteele]

Have you seen anyway to get a list of students who have started the submission like attached a file, add text, etc but not submitted? One Of our current issues is students who upload a file but miss the last step of submitting it.
They go back into the submission point see what they expect to see as their submission but still miss the submit button at the bottom. So I'm guessing the attempt is saved somewhere, it does not appear to be in the submission.body.

[James]

@GregSteele 

This should really be its own question rather than putting it as a reply here. It has little to do with the original question other than mentioning submissions. It's not going to get the attention it needs as a reply to this thread, which has been answered (even though no one has marked an answer as correct). It should be its own question with an appropriate title so that people with expertise in the area can spot it.

That said, students who don't finish the submission haven't submitted. Instructors cannot see the submission, so it's not submitted. If you could identify students who did this, you would need to notify them in a timely manner before the assignment closed.

While I agree that the process of finalizing the submission is confusing and students sometimes have difficulty finding the solution, this is where educating students on how to tell if you submission has been properly submitted plays a bigger role than anything you could do on the outside.

If you could identify which assignments have a partially completed submission, you would still need to let the students know. If you do that as a submission comment, which is the best place to do so, then they might get a notification once a day (the default). In my classes, one of the first assignments I had was having them set notifications for submission comments to right away. You could send a regular message that shows up in their inbox, but that's not tied to the assignment.

Canvas makes ways to help students know it has been submitted. There is the confetti. As annoying as it was to me as a teacher and administrator, students like it. Educate them: no confetti, no submission. Of course, if you're not using confetti, that won't help.

If you can find where that information is contained, then there are some approaches to consider.

The first one I looked at was Canvas Live Events. There is a submission_created event that says it is "triggered when an assignment or new quizzes submission gets updated and has not yet been submitted." That sounds exactly like what you want. However, I've been collecting this event since 2020 and I looked at the records for this year. There were over 100k submission_created events, but the only two event types were submitted and pending_review. I looked at pending_review, but it wasn't talking about the student needing to review the information. It was from quizzes where the instructor needed to review questions.

The next thing I looked at was GraphQL. There is a submissionDraft object in the submissions. That is likely going to be the most promising approach. It has things like attachments, attempts, body (for text submissions). Unfortunately for you, I didn't take the time to actually find a record with a submissionDraft. GraphQL requests now (as of May 2025) has pagination enforced and so I can only get 100 at a time without writing code. I manually went through 37 pages of 100 records (I had 3644 submissions for a recent class) and none of them had submission drafts. That is why I say it's likely going to be the most promising approach -- I didn't actually find any with submission drafts.

But to be useful for students, you cannot rely on polling data and sending them messages. You need something that is real-time. That means you would have to tap into their submissions page with custom JavaScript uploaded through the theme manager and look for unsubmitted assignments when they move off the page or start to close the page. I'm talking about one of those really annoying "You started to do something but didn't finish it, are you sure you want to quit?" notifications.

The submission page in the browser likely has the information about whether there is a submission pending that can be found in the DOM without having to make API calls. It's going to be more difficult to do so on the mobile apps.

The problem there is that just because someone moves off a page or closes the window doesn't mean they're ready to submit. For a textbox submission, the student might not be finished. They might have answered one part of the question and be relying on the draft mode to come back and finish it. For attachments, they might be making more than one attachment and they need to go work on the other.

It's difficult to say when a student is completely done and you should warn them vs just using what Canvas has built in where a submission takes one additional step -- clicking that button.

While I find those warnings annoying, Canvas has been known to implement them in other places. I know that some people really like them, they just don't work with my workflow.

Education is still be the best solution. If you don't have a Canvas training for your students, I highly recommend it. We have had one for 12 years and it greatly cut down on the amount of time that faculty had to deal with technology questions and allowed them to focus on teaching content. We don't let our students into their real courses until they have completed the Canvas orientation course. There are still problems that come up, but not as many as there would be if we didn't train our students ahead of time. 

Education is beneficial for everyone. We also have Canvas training for faculty. They don't get to teach using Canvas until they complete a training course, either.