[Speedgrader] Stop filtering the SpeedGrader based on filtering the Grades tool by section

[cdoherty]

Recently I learned that filtering the display in the Grades tool by section also applies the same section filter in the SpeedGrader. This is not intuitive at all and makes for a bad user experience. There is no indication or explanation that this is happening in the Canvas UI. It is only mentioned briefly in a user guide. As we all know, you can’t put important user experience information solely in a guide because users don’t read guides to learn how to use software. Instead, the user experience needs to be intuitive or at least explained directly in the UI where the work is happening. How do I know it’s not intuitive? I have been using Canvas for many years and never would have guessed this was happening. Not even the Instructure Support agent I contacted knew about this.

Why is this a bad user experience? If there is a multi-section course, this filtering will mean some of the student submissions will not show up in the SpeedGrader. There is no explanation why. It is even worse if the assignment is restricted to a section other than the section selected in the Grades filter, since no student submissions will display and the filtering option doesn’t even show up in the SpeedGrader to give the grader a clue what is wrong and a way to fix it.

It makes absolutely no sense to apply the Grades filtering to SpeedGrader and has no benefit, only confusion.

[cdoherty]

I created a screencast of what I am seeing in Stanford Canvas, https://www.screencast.com/t/PMR8fmCUNEQ.

I have a Section 1 assignment (restricted to students in section Discussion 1), a Section 2 assignment (restricted to students in section Discussion 2) and Essay 1 (assigned to everyone). You will see when I load the Speedgrader for the section-restricted assignments, I see the list of students in the assigned section, but no section filter menu above the names to view other sections. When I open Essay 1, I see the section filter menu above the list of student names. So, the section-restricted assignments only show the students that are members of the section selected for the assignment, with no ability to change the filter. Then, I go to Grades and apply a filter to show only students for Discussion 1. When I open Section 2 assignment, I no longer see the student names I saw before, only the Test Student, and no section filter menu to make a change. When I go to Essay 1, I see the section filter menu and can change the option there. It is a major problem that an instructor can’t change the section filter in the SpeedGrader and has no idea why they don’t see the students listed anymore. They may have set the filter in the Grades tool days before and not realize that is what is causing the problem. There is no indication in the UI that is the problem. The fact that Instructure’s Tier 1 support (people that are paid to understand how this software works) had no idea this was the cause, and suggested many other things that may be the problem, proves this is not an intuitive design.