Eliminate the playwalls in the Community

Problem statement:

We are six months into our transition to Canvas. The user community was touted as a "great resource" for new ideas and features. I am regularly finding issues such as the ability to hide grading rubrics from students and the inability to only allow student graders to see the assignment they are grading, while hiding the rest of the gradebook from them. I am able to see that these are ideas that have been in the ideas queue since 2020, but I am unable to upvote or comment on them or describe the impact on our campus because Community roles prohibit me from doing so because I haven't participated in the community enough. Maybe. I can't be sure, because all I see is that each community level has unspecified "elevated permissions". I'm currently frantically working on building a process so that I can collect student performance grades from second year students who are reviewing first year students. I'm building this in Microsoft Forms and will need to reformat this file to import it into the gradebook and capture the comments properly. I can't use the Canvas rubric for this because if graders have access to grade anything, they have access to the entire gradebook which is a MASSIVE FERPA violation. But I can't discuss this in the appropriate idea thread because I'm trying to support my users, not waste time becoming Internet famous on this board.

Proposed solution:

Eliminate all permissions breaks above community member, or explicitly state which permissions are necessary for each level.

User role(s):

admin,designer

13 Comments
Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

@SteveWeidner I'm sorry you're frustrated - and i'm sorry you feel like you're being answered by AI - just the opposite.  You've landed in a Community that has 20 million unique visitors in a year - it's why we have the Community guidelines that we do.  The public nature of the Community is also why we have the spam safeguards that you're bumping up against.

We see that you're struggling with rubrics and gradebook setup and functionality and we're talking with some of our Community Coaches to see if they can help you troubleshoot that. You have posted in the product ideas space of the Community, which currently allows new submissions, but otherwise remains in 'read-only' as we solution a new experience for sharing product feedback. 

Is there someone at your Institution you can reach out to as well that can help you troubleshoot what you're trying to accomplish with rubrics and the gradebook? 

SteveWeidner
Community Participant
Author

I can imagine that your open account policy makes it easy for bad actors to come in and spam your boards. But you also have paying clients who are using their own tools to authenticate their users into your system. This community was a selling point to my institution for how grand your support is, and you're requiring me to log in and out of the system an arbitrary number of times so that I can use this "feature".

"Frustrated" is an understatement.

At the very least, I'll amend my suggestion to removing the playwalls for folks who are authenticated through their institutions, because you're choosing to make it harder for me to do my job. Which in this case is administrating Canvas and being the person to help other folks troubleshoot how to use it.

SteveWeidner
Community Participant
Author

As I'm one of our system's administrators, no, I don't have anyone else here to reach out to for such things.