[Gradebook] Give instructor access to the Grading History after the course ends

Currently, once a course reaches its end date for instructor access, instructors no longer have access to the grading history in the course.  According to support, this is intended behavior because the Instructors are only set to have access to make changes in their courses until the end of the term date.  There are situations where instructors need to review the grading history for grade challenges and grade changes, but currently cannot without the admin changing the Teacher end date setting.

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35 Comments
curtain
Community Participant

Yes, this is a valid and important detail.  Instructors need to review that history (among other details) to handle administrative tasks with grade challenges, accreditation, athlete and developing scholar reporting, etc.    I am generally on-board with the Canvas idea of 'locking' down past courses into a read-only state but there are areas like grading history that they are needlessly restricted from useful data that they do not need to be to stay with the 'read-only' paradigm.

chriscas
Community Coach
Community Coach

Agreed!  I am also fully on board with the read-only state for concluded courses, but there are definitely too many things that disappear in concluded courses...  Why can't assignments still have the link to SpeedGrader in the right-column?  Why are unpublished files invisible to teachers?  Why don't the "download submissions" links in SpeedGrader work?  In my opinion, all content and features should be available to teachers in concluded mode, just the ability to make any changes to the course should be restricted.  Instructure at least made all of the tool menus available in concluded mode, which was a good change, but a lot of work in individual areas still needs ot be done (in my opinion).

biray
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

This idea will be open for voting on June 3, 2015. Smiley Happy

Sylvia_Ami
Community Contributor

I have a question - in the Term settings, under "Teachers can access from ____ to ____", if the account admin set the end date is set to let's say, 1 month after the term end date, will that allow teachers to access everything in the course an an additional month?  What do most colleges set as the end date a teacher can access a course?  What if a teacher has given a student an official "incomplete" (which could allow the student up to one year to submit coursework)?  How is that handled vs. the term end date access settings?

 @Robbie_Grant ​  How long do you propose the Grade History be available to teachers after a course end?  Indefinitely? I propose at least one year.

Thank you.

Robbie_Grant
Community Champion

 @Sylvia_Ami ​,

We remove access to our courses 2 years and 1 week after the semester they were taught in ends.  By state law, we have to have access to the data for at least 2 years.  So 2 years would be my recommendation.


Robbie

Sylvia_Ami
Community Contributor

Thank you for responding  @Robbie_Grant ​

So does that mean in the term settings, you set "Teachers can can access from ___ to ___" with the end date 2 years+1 week after the term end date?  Do you do this manually each term or is running a script more efficient?

-Sylvia

Robbie_Grant
Community Champion

 @Sylvia_Ami ​,

No, we set the access dates for Teachers starting the day we load the courses until 1 week past the time grades are available for students.  This is typically 10 days after the end of the semester.  This is something that we do manually (to set the from date) and scripted to set the end date.

Robbie

SethBattis
Community Contributor

While currently fielding a parent inquiry regarding grades after the term ended… I am inclined to agree that this would be a useful change!

millerjm
Community Champion

We are still in our pilot/implementation phase.   When we were told "read only" in both our implementation and in the documentation, to us that meant "read everything change nothing." 

We were excited about the fact that teachers would not be able to mess up edit their content and grades but still be able to access grades, activity, etc. 

Having access to grading history is needed in case of "why did I get X grade?" questions from students. 

Having access to student activity and analytics for current and past enrollments is NECESSARY for federal financial aid, since many times faculty are asked for a last date of attendance, or the College is audited and needs to provide data. 

Putting this data in the hands of the faculty is imperative!  We were very disappointed to see that they don't have access to anything except for final grades in the course. 

BROEKERC
Community Novice

Faculty need to have read only access to this data.  Please vote up.