[Assignments] Prohibit Submissions to Group Assignments without a Group Set

[lindalee]

The Problem:

If students submit to a group assignment that does not have an associated group set, those submissions appear as individual submission rather than group submissions. Because this causes numerous problems for students, teaching teams, and Canvas support teams, we would like to see some kind of error message, warning, or other blocking mechanism when students try to submit -- ideally, this would prompt students to reach out to a teaching team member who could correct the assignment before students begin submitting.

While I recognize that preventing/delaying a student submission may not be consistent with Canvas's student-friendly approach, the dangers, risks, and extra work associated with the problems caused by this issue warrant considering this idea. In the past, Canvas unofficially supported individual submissions to group assignments, but that is no longer the case and a group assignment without a valid associated group set is essentially "broken."

Canvas currently will not save an assignment if a valid group set is not associated with the assignment:

However, Canvas does not prevent you from deleting that Group Set and leaving the group assignment without an associated set of groups. The current confirmation dialog only asks if the user is sure that they want to remove the group set. (See below and https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10708-warn-before-deleting-an-assignment-associated-group-set-...)

Why does this happen? Group sets are most commonly deleted as a result of how Group Sets and Group Assignments behave during course copies (including Blueprint courses -- Canvas Release: Blueprint Courses😞 The copied course has a group assignment associated with the default "Project Groups" group set. However, because this copied group set does not include any pre-created groups (see https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10709-enable-group-setup-wizard-for-existing-group-sets-resubm...), that group set may be deleted and a new one created, to benefit from the convenience of having Canvas automatically create groups. Even if the group set is given the same name ("Project Groups"), it is considered a different group set and not automatically associated with any assignments. And the end result is a group assignment without an associated group set.

If students submit to an assignment without an associated group set, they essentially submit as individuals to the group assignment -- which is not supported. The expectation is that students will be placed into groups within a group set prior to submission (How do I assign an assignment to a course group?).

This behavior causes numerous problems for various groups:

Problems for students:

• Submission is visible only to the group member who submitted the assignment
• Other group members continue to see the assignment as overdue/missing, which can cause anxiety and confusion (and be problematic for any future "nudge" efforts: and feature ideas like https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8585-generate-automatic-messages-to-students-who-do-not-submit...)
• Delayed grading/feedback, if teaching teams need to correlate students/group submissions manually
• Risk of losing credit for a group submission entirely

Problems for teaching teams:

• Loss of the ability to use the group grading/feedback functionality
• The "disappearing comments" problem in SpeedGrader (comments intended for group members do not display in SpeedGrader if students are not in a group, unless the "grade individually" option is selected, see How do I grade group assignments in SpeedGrader?)
• Multiple, possibly different and/or late, group submissions to navigate, if concerned students resubmit because they see the assignment is still due/overdue
• Inability to effectively use the "message students who" feature for the assignment
• Unexpected and excessive manual work to correlate group submissions and students -- especially for large-enrollment classes (which can be very challenging when there are students who use nicknames that may not obviously match the name in the LMS)

Problems for (local) Canvas support teams:

• When we've reported problems associated with this issue to Instructure support, we've been told that individual submissions to group assignments is not supported, leaving our team to address problems locally.
• Often the fix requires recreating the assignment, configuring it correctly with a valid group set, and submitting on behalf of students/groups using masquerade. Depending on the size of the course, this can take a great deal of time, and it requires that support teams doing this be root admins.
• There are fewer options for support teams without the ability to masquerade, placing a larger burden on students and teaching teams.

[cholling]

I'm curious,  @lindalee ‌. Do you find that students hold back self-joining a group once they realize that the first one "gets to be" leader?

[lindalee]

Hi Cynthia,

That's a great question. To my knowledge, this hasn't been an issue/complaint/concern we hear from faculty, TAs, or students. One factor, I'm sure, is that so many of our courses include group work. For institutions where group work is more the exception than the norm, this could potentially be a factor. The group leader can do two things: manage group membership and change the group name. Someone who has been added to a group by the group leader can still elect to leave that group and join another one.

Like most things, success depends on good communication: both the teaching team communicating their expectations and assignment requirements, and students within a group communicating about (and following through on) who will do what.

That being said, though, we tend to see better compliance (that is, more students correctly placed into a group) when we use the group leadership feature.

-Linda

[arild_schanke]

This idea gets an upvote from me. We've experienced the same problems as described in some of the comments here, and it causes a lot of frustration among teachers and TA's in particular. You could always argument for this being a training issue, but a few simple improvements would greatly reduce the training / overall problem solving workload for the Canvas community IMO. I would particularly like to see:

1) The possibility to set a deadline (in the group set) for signing up to groups, and as a bonus - the possibility to trigger a custom message to those who did not sign up X days in advance (I am aware of the possibility to do this manually).

2) The possibility to force group membership before being able to submit. If you are not a member of a group in the affiliated group set, you simply cannot submit! As a bonus you could get a warning and instructions on how to proceed (perhaps just a redirect to group sign-up). This option could be selectable when you set up the assignment (E.g. "Reject individual hand-ins" - tick on/off).

[hesspe]

I think this is probably the most common nasty problem that I hear about from our faculty with Canvas.  It seems to me clearly a UI flaw - and one that would be easily fixed if we could get their attention.  Thanks to Linda for presenting it in such exquisite detail.  I have been finding recently that feedback that is at least worthy of serious consideration has been met with a rather high and mighty response from Instructure, short on anything but boilerplate empathy and lacking appreciation that those of us with a worm's eye view may have something valid to say.  To my perception, Instructure seems to be less responsive and more corporate than it once was, and I miss the old days.  After all this, could this be Blackboard all over again?  Sorry for globalizing.

[abigail_smith_2]

I voted, and what an amazingly detailed and beautiful case you made, LInda!

This would be much less of an issue if Canvas would copy groups and group sets from course to course.  If the groups were configured correctly to the assignments in the first iteration of the course, there wouldn't be a problem in future courses.  As it is now, we have to recreate groups every semester, and re-attach them to assignments.

Thus, I'd ask everyone to please also up-vote this idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1551-copy-group-settings 

[ericlee-]

As support staff, I have seen this issue arise in two separate occasions; both of which were very frustrating for the instructors involved. Voted!!

[ericlee-]

As mentioned in the original post, this issue can occur due to imports and identical group names. If two group sets have the same name, the Canvas UI does not let the instructor know which particular group set the assignment is assigned to. Members of the teaching team may accidentally deleted a group set; unbeknownst to them that it was assigned to a group assignment. Speaking with an instructor affected by this issue, we have determined a few possible UI features that could prevent this from reoccurring.

1. Canvas to not allow more than one group set to have the same name.
   If possible, this would prevent confusion when two group sets have the same name. In the case where same-name group sets are imported, see #2.
2. When Canvas imports a group assignment, the accompanying group set should have a tag like 'Imported' appended to the end of the group set.
   EX: "Project 2 Groups Imported"
   This would differentiate group sets during an import. If #1 is possible, #2 would also satisfy the requirement of group sets having different names.
3. Canvas to display the group set ID on the group set interface.
   If the above two are not possible, displaying the group set ID can help instructors resolve same-name group sets. The group set ID is currently only visible to the instructor through the URL.

[rolfis]

Hi,

There is a possible action for error, that can be made by teachers, when creating a Group Assignment. When selecting Groupset (or "Group Category", this should be named similar) there is the ability to connect empty Groupsets – even create one on the fly, with the option "I'll create groups later".

If this Assignment is then published and students start to submit, it can create some problems with comments and rubrics. For example, if one student submits and the teacher comments on this in the Speedgrader, I think the Speedgrader assumes that this should be a group, even if there is no group, and immediately removes the comment done by the teacher. The comment is only visible connected to the student, in Grades view.

I understand that this process can look different – do you create the groups first, or the assignment? If it's a self signup Groupset, you can't wait for all the students to signup before publishing. And we at support could ask the question: "but you have created no groups, how should this work if it's a Group Assignment?". And so on.

But anyways, there could at least be some kind of warning to the teacher when publishing – like "Be aware: There are no groups in the Groupset you have connected to this Group Assignment, things will problably not work out as you think".

All the best,
Rolf Johansson
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden