Assignment Enhancements: Allow students to add comments when grade posting policy is set to manual

[leward]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please see the Change Log section of  Canvas Deploy Notes (2021-04-28) 

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In the legacy assignments tool, students could post comments at any time, regardless of the grade posting policy of the associated gradebook item.  Now it appears that students can only post comments when the grade posting policy is set to automatic.  I submitted a ticket for this issue and was advised to submit a feature request (which suggests that Instructure does not regard this as a bug).  The support engineer also provided this workaround--students can post comments by navigating to the assignment via the Grades tool instead of directly from assignments.  This is counter-intuitive.  If students can't post in comments in the Assigmments tool, why would they think to try posting by going to the Grades tool.  Also, the only reason this works is because the Grades tool takes the student to the legacy version of assignments.  Presumably that will change at some point.

I can't think of a good reason to prevent student from commenting when the grade posting policy is set to manual.  The legacy tool prevents students from viewing instructor comments until grades are posted and that makes good sense.   The restriction on student commenting does not make sense.  If this is not a bug, can someone from Instructure please explain why students are not permitted to post comments when the grade posting policy is set to manual.

[jsailor]

Thank you for alerting us to this issue, @leward. Students absolutely should be able to post comments to their assignments, even before the grades are posted. When something this obvious seems to be missing, please feel free to submit the issue through our support team so that they can create a tracker for our engineering team to fix the bug. 

Our engineering team has a fix in place for this issue and has deployed it to beta. It is schedule to be deployed to production in our deploy next week on April 28th. 

[kmurday]

That's great news, @jsailor !

I just want to clarify something for future reference. You suggest to my colleague @leward that in the future, "When something this obvious seems to be missing, please feel free to submit the issue through our support team so that they can create a tracker for our engineering team to fix the bug." However, in her original posting, she did say:

"I submitted a ticket for this issue and was advised to submit a feature request (which suggests that Instructure does not regard this as a bug). The support engineer also provided this workaround--students can post comments by navigating to the assignment via the Grades tool instead of directly from assignments."

Is there a way to submit the issue through the support team (more direct than submitting a ticket) that we should know about? This would be extremely helpful!

Many thanks!

[jsailor]

@kmurday, there is not a different or more direct process. Submitting the support ticket is the way to go. @leward followed the proper process. I had read her separate post on this from the beta user group that linked to this feature request and missed the line about her being directed here by support. Apologies for any confusion created by my comment. 

[Stef_retired]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please see the Change Log section of the  Canvas Deploy Notes (2021-04-28).