Organize Assignment Page into Grading Periods

[keyaiko]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea open for vote Wed. November 4, 2015 - Wed. February 3, 2016  Learn more about voting...

Have a drop-down menu in the assignments page where teachers can filter the assignments shown by grading period.

For teachers with many assignments, the assignment page can get cluttered very quickly. I understand this is a very specific request, but for those schools that use grading periods, the gradebook is already organized by grading period. I think it would make sense to have the assignment page organized in the same way, with each grading period listed in a drop-down menu as well as an "All grading periods" option for those who want to see all assignments in one page.

  Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-01-09)

Assignments

Filter by Grading Period

[jjordan1]

I had a few Teachers come in to ask me if I could do something about this growth of assignments (before Kevin added the feature).  It wasn't but a few days later that he did and we stand behind it too.  It is truly a K12 need if one uses MGPs like we do.  Our house gradebook gives visibility to Teachers, Students, Parents by "Grading Period" (Quarters in our case) for assignments and grades (as most all do), so this feature would give Canvas's Assignments view the same ability.

Instructure has parity now with the gradebook using MGP's and now 1 of the reports (Teacher gradebook export) to reflect the grading period, it sure seems prudent to give the same parity to the assignments.  This keeps our Day to Day assignments and grades manageable "inside" of Canvas (and allows me to slowly dismiss our old gradebook program).

[Renee_Carney]

  This idea has been developed and is On Canvas Beta How do I access the Canvas beta environment?

For more information, please read through the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2015-12-28)

Assignments

Filter by Grading Period

[joseph_allen]

Thank you Canvas team for making this happen and to all the practitioners for your thoughts and support on the topic.

[Renee_Carney]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-01-09)

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to keyaiko for submitting this idea, as well as,  @jjordan1 , james_pendred, linda_scrivener, wendy_matthews,  @joseph_allen , tmiceli, laura_attridge,  @swright , and  @sarah_pappalard  for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of the Canvas!

[jjordan1]

Last week we filed a support ticket on this feature, as it is hiding assignment groups in each grading period until an assignment is associated with it.  Also if a Teacher adds a new group in a grading period, it will not show up immediately (hidden).  We just started Q3 the week before this went into production and our Teachers have been wondering why their groups are not there.  Many of our Teachers use the " + " next to the assignment group to quickly add assignments to that group.  The intention of the feature as we read it was to filter the assignments by grading periods, not hide assignment groups.  In the Gradebook (Teacher and Student view), all assignment groups show up across all grading periods, so why not leave the default behavior on the assignments page and keep them visible across all grading periods?  If a Teacher does not use a group or two in that grading period, they will still be on the page, just empty.  We see this as a bug with the assignments page related to this new feature. 

[Renee_Carney]

Hi  @jjordan1 ​

I'm sorry that you are feeling frustrated.  I know that change in a workflow can be challenging at times.

We're going to kindly disagree that this is a bug.  The feature is functioning as designed.  I can see your point of view "...all assignment groups show up across all grading periods, so why not leave the default behavior on the assignments page and keep them visible across all grading periods?", however, there are individuals and institutions that like to only see what is relevant as well. 

If you would like to see this changed, please do submit a new feature idea and we can take it vote to see what the Community's priority is.

[jjordan1]

Thank you Renee for the reply.  We are not frustrated, just wondering why the assignment groups became hidden.  Your reply lets us know.  We did not have prior knowledge that the assignments groups would be hidden in the new feature and we used them as mentioned.  When the feature went live, their absence caused our support ticket and our view of a bug.  This particular hiding feature was not written up in the release notes (only the filtering of assignments by grading period), so we did the next step by going to a support ticket route.  We would not be adding a feature request to ask for them to be viewable again, that would not be a good use of time given Instructure's decision to hide them.  We will look forward to other improvements as they arrive.

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you for the additional information, Jason!  I checked in with Erin, when I made my previous reply, and she was planning to clarify documentation!