Roll Missing label in Gradebook back to Beta

[laurakgibbs]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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UPDATE FROM ERIN HALLMARK: Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-09-25)

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My proposal is that the "Missing" label feature be put back into Beta so that the engineers and designers can consider what they are doing, and then do it PROPERLY, before they roll it out again.

After a long weekend spent in a long and ultimately useless dialogue with Canvas Support about the Missing label (details here), I am more convinced than I was before that this new feature (rolled out late in the summer) needs to be put back into Beta until the problems are fixed. Other people have documented problems and proposed fixes as follows:

Allow "Missing" label to be enabled/disabled 

Missing Label Placed Incorrectly/Submission on paper and online option 

No MISSING label for zero-point assignments  

Instructor override of missing submission badge 

Manually graded or "EX" assignments still show as missing 

There may be more; those are the five feature requests I know of related to the new Missing label. Rather than voting on how this mess can be fixed, I propose that we vote to roll it back into Beta IMMEDIATELY so that Canvas can take its time to find the best solutions. 

The problems people are having with this buggy feature are abundantly documented in those requests: the Missing label is being applied to assignments that are optional; the Missing label is being applied to assignments that students turn in IRL as opposed to online; the Missing label is being applied to assignments which are graded manually (i.e. my student forgets to do a quiz; I record it manually... it's still "missing").

Somewhere in all those feature requests is the account of a teacher whose students' parents were going to ground the students because of all the assignments the student had (supposedly) missed. I'll let her comment speak for me too; here it is:

Overall, the Missing message is creating more stress. There are literally students who say that their parents are threatening to ground them unless they "get the work in". This notation is literally causing harm and distress in families. It needs to be changed as soon as possible.

PUT IT BACK IN BETA.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-10-07) 

[laurakgibbs]

Adding here for future reference:

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8498-manually-mark-assignments-lateon-time 

[erinhmcmillan]

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-10-07) 

[Renee_Carney]

laurakgibbs Nice Work for submitting this idea, as well as, khenscheid Thank You ,  @thompsli  Thank You  &  @ProfessorBeyrer  Thank You  for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of Canvas! 

[laurakgibbs]

And thanks back to everybody at Canvas for listening,  @Renee_Carney ‌! I learned so much from hearing about everybody's experiences with the labels: esp. since Canvas reaches across K-12 and higher ed, there is such a huge range of grading and assessment practices. Without the Community to connect and share, we would never know how huge that range is! 🙂

[Renee_Carney]

Very good point!  As crazy at it may seem sometimes to have our feature idea input process so public, there are so many positives to it and you just highlighted one big one.  Having taught in learning management systems/platforms, I know how difficult it can be to see things outside of my own workflow and consider that a feature might need to function differently for someone else!  This forum and community allows those different voices to  share their use cases and work flows and better understand the diversity of users and uses!

[thompsli]

So, now I have a new problem: one of our teachers (our SpEd teacher) wrote a goal about number of late/missing assignments for some of her students. She had written that this goal would be measured by their student grades page in Canvas using the Missing/Late feature, and it's now in a student's IEP (a legal document that we have to have a complicated meeting in order to change) that this is a goal that will be measured and tracked for this student.

What can we do when this disappears to support her need for this data? She was counting on this feature (since it was deployed to production and she doesn't follow the Canvas Community to know that there were issues with it, I feel that she had no reasonable way to know it wasn't stable when she began relying on it), and I don't actually know how else she can get this information directly from Canvas without each of the teachers providing it to her. She was going to measure her goal using weekly check-ins with the students, I think.

[RobDitto]

 @thompsli , could your colleague view the LATE/MISSING flags in SpeedGrader and leave students an assignment comment informing them of either status? With an assignment comment, students would have a discussion icon in their view of Grades, which they could follow to see details.

[thompsli]

Unfortunately, she is not a teacher in the academic courses the goals are about. She teaches an "academic support" class for some of our Special Education students, and some of them have goals as part of their Individual Education Plans around turning in their work on time in their academic courses. 

So, for example, Stu Dent would have a schedule where he takes English 9 from an English teacher, Algebra 1 from a math teacher, Science from a science teacher, and so on. Our SpEd teacher would then look at his student-view grades in all of those classes (which she does not teach and should not have the power to change grades in) to see whether or not Stu is turning in his work on time. 

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, Linnea,

You could always talk to your Canvas admin about enabling the new Gradebook. It can be enabled on a course-by-course basis, so enabling it should not disrupt other courses. The new Gradebook isn't too different from the regular Gradebook, but it does display missing and late labels for students. Missing and late labels apply to online assignment types; they don't apply to on paper types.

Hope that helps,

Erin 

[thompsli]

I feel that I have still not made my fellow teacher's use case sufficiently clear from the suggestions I am getting, so commence a long example with more silly names!

Sandy SpEd has a student on her caseload, Stu Dent. (Sandy actually has lots of students on her caseload, and all of them will be evenly distributed through the various courses the rest of us teach.)

Stu Dent is enrolled in Marla's Math class, Edith's English class, and Heather's health class. Marla, Edith, and Heather are the teachers of their respective classes and in charge of the gradebooks for those classes (along with all of the other things that go along with teaching a class).

Sandy SpEd is not involved in teaching any of those classes, and is thus not a "teacher" in any of those classes, because her job is to support students on her caseload rather than to teach Math/English/Health/etc. 

Part of Sandy SpEd's job is to write individual, measurable goals for students on her caseload. These goals are set in formal meetings where multiple teachers and the parent are present, and the result is a legal document called an "IEP" that lists what accommodations, modifications, or other supports a student is legally entitled to, what specific goals we have for that student, and assorted other things. (These documents are many pages long, and the meetings tend to take at least an hour in my experience.) Once it's in the IEP, we pretty much have to hold another meeting to change it.

Sandy SpEd tries to write goals that are not only objectively measurable (because that's part of what the law says), but a simple indicator to measure given what the goal should be about so that she can easily get the data herself. 

She has goals (in these legal documents) about missing and late assignments for some specific students, which she wrote in good faith when she saw this feature rolled out to production since she could now easily see which assignments were missing or late. 

We need a way for her, as a non-teacher with admin access, to easily see if specific students have missing or late assignments in any of their classes regardless of who teaches those classes or what features individual teachers do or do not have turned on in their classes. We need this because she built goals for the year based on features present when she was writing her goals but which will now not be present for her when she goes to pull her data. She was planning to get this data by viewing the "grades" page for each student in each class (6-8 pages per student for her to deal with) and needs a way that does not involve clicking in to each assignment for each student to compare due date versus submission date (which would easily be over 50 pages per class per student, or possibly over 800 pages total per student, by the end of the semester).