[Assignments] Warn teachers about changing Assign To information after student work has occurred

[gpillsbury]

Please add an alert of some sort to warn teachers whenever they try to change an existing Assign To field in an assignment or quiz by removing a student or set of students from the list after student work has occurred in the activity (submission or quiz attempt). The result of the change is the apparent deletion of all the existing submissions or attempts, and a great deal of panic and stress.  This is particularly a problem when teachers mistakenly replace the existing set of students - e.g. "Everyone" - with an individual student when they are giving that student an extension on the activity.  While the submissions will reappear once the Assign To field is properly reconfigured, the effect of the error is traumatic and can be prevented with a simple alert.

[gpillsbury]

I have answered two panicked support questions today alone from instructors who have been allowed to mess up their quizzes by changing the existing Assign To.

(Will continue to post here each time an instructor is allowed to fall into this trap...)

[gpillsbury]

The Canvas quiz tool already shows a warning when you open the Settings page or when you edit questions after students have submitted attempts.  It's clear that that warning is either not being read in this use case or it is not clear enough to be understood as affecting the display of quiz results when an existing "Assign To" input field is changed.  A specific warning needs to be attached to a change in the Assign To input field, especially when the instructor deletes "Everyone" from the field and any student attempts have already been recorded.  I think this is by far the most common 'trap': the instructor deletes "Everyone" in order to put a specific student's name in to give them a special extension or availability window.  If we could start by catching the deletion of "Everyone", that would be a good first step.

[gpillsbury]

It just happened again!  Needed a virtual defibrillator to restart the instructor's heart when all the scores came back after resetting the Assign To they'd mistakenly changed.

[gpillsbury]

It just happened again.  The subject line in the email was "DROWNING NOT WAVING", if that gives you a sense of who panicked instructors can get when they're presented with a 'blank' column in their gradebook after changing the existing assignment cohort.