Instructor override of missing submission badge

[jannunziata]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

If a student emails an assignment rather than submitting through the assignment tab in Canvas, the missing submission badge appears. Once the instructor manually enters a grade for this assignment in the gradebook, Canvas should eliminate this badge from student notification.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-13886 .

[laurakgibbs]

There are clearly a LOT of problems with this new feature. More links, discussion, etc. here:

https://community.canvaslms.com/people/laurakgibbs/blog/2017/09/09/gradebook-dismay-the-thoughtless-... 

[thompsli]

Not all instructor entry of a score means that an assignment is missing. I manually enter zeroes for missing work, and other teachers I know use "balanced grading" policies for missing work and enter 30% or 50% for missing work. We would want it to continue to show "missing" even after we entered a score.

I would support an option to be able to manually flag an item as missing/not missing, but putting in a score should not automatically remove the "missing" mark with no way to retain it.

[laurakgibbs]

It's so important for Instructure to hear about all these different approaches to grading. I know they put a high premium on keeping things the same, but I personally think it is GREAT that people are using so many different approaches to grading, based on what is best for their students, and complicated though it may be, Canvas has got to let us follow our own methods. Thanks for sharing your situation here,  @thompsli ‌!

[thompsli]

I think that sometimes Canvas's developers don't really understand which decisions "belong" to them and which need to belong to the instructor. This is a great case of them not thinking through how their "helpful display tweak" would override various intentional decisions made by instructors. 

I know they want uniformity, but how I grade in my classes is not their decision to make. It's my decision, made in collaboration with my department, my school, and the school board as needed. I am qualified to make that decision because I have a graduate degree in education, am licensed by my state as a teacher in my subject area, regularly attend professional development around pedagogy in my subject area (and around pedagogy more generally), and am generally an expert in the field of how my course should be graded and otherwise run. They are not, because they have spent the time I spent doing that learning how to be experts in other things needed to create, manage, and improve an LMS.

They may or may not know more about human computer interaction issues than I do (I went to grad school in that before switching fields, but did not complete a graduate degree in that area and do not consider myself an expert), so I try not to complain too much about their interface decisions that can be worked around.

But this hits too close to pedagogy, and that's the domain of the teacher, not the LMS. Uniformity is a nice goal for a computer interface, but it's really not an appropriate goal for all online classes across all subject areas K-Ph.D to have grade books that run the same way.

(Also, how do you create blog posts of your own? I can only seem to create them in groups like K-12. Is it because I have not sufficiently "leveled up" to be trusted with my own blog?)

[laurakgibbs]

I agree 100%,  @thompsli ‌ ... and one upside to this Gradebook message discussion has been to bring that tension out into the open. I have felt some frustrations like this (Gradebook limitations) all along, but this has brought it very much into focus.

I was talking yesterday with the online course director at my school, and she had a lot of good things to say about the new Gradebook which is scheduled to be turned on soon at my school; she said it might even be this semester! Her impression was that it had a lot more options for teachers to configure the Gradebook in very different ways, and now I am eager to try it. Apparently we will be able to enter text, not just numbers. For me, that will be a huge step forward. Not having a text field option has been my single biggest frustration with the Gradebook from the start.

About blog posts, I am pinging  @Renee_Carney ‌ and stefaniesanders‌ about that. They did a rollout of personal blogs back last Spring, and I think this would be a great time for them to see who else wants to take advantage of that here. I have enjoyed interacting with you via the different discussions where our paths have intersected, and I would be an eager reader of your blog posts!

[thompsli]

Ah. It's good to know the "blog" thing is a feature that has to be turned on per-user rather than an inability on my part to find the right button. 

I wonder when my institution will be getting the new Gradebook - I haven't really been keeping up with that product rollout. We're small (less than 300 7th-12th grade students using Canvas, plus an elementary program using another system) and have limited internal IT support, so we often aren't on the cutting edge of new feature rollouts being done progressively. (Our school Office Manager is also our Canvas Admin (among other things), so her time to spend on Canvas-related issues is limited.)

[laurakgibbs]

I will report back for sure! As soon as it becomes available, I'll copy one of my courses as it is now so I can do a side by side comparison with the new Gradebook. I was feeling kind of cynical about it, and also not even sure if it was coming this year, but the conversation with my director made me optimistic!

[Stef_retired]

 @thompsli , this resource explains how Community members "earn" user blogs: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-1321-how-do-i-create-a-blog-post-in-the-community?sr=search...‌ We're rooting for you! 😉

[thompsli]

Ah hah! Another mystery solved. 

[dbrooks1]

In my face to face class, I get papers on paper and online.  All of the on paper submissions show missing in Canvas even after I've posted a grade.  When I post a grade, that should automatically override the "missing" badge or give me the option to take that "missing" reminder away.