[Student Grades] Add 'submission date' to the student grades page

[asatkins]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas LMS

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As admins/teachers, as well as for parents, the best way to see all grades for a student in a course is from the student grades page:

It would be great to have an extra column showing "Submitted" time/date either before or after the "Due" column. This would give us all the necessary information to speak to a student or parent about a student's progress without having to click into each submission. This column should be blank until the student submits the assignment, adding an additional visual indicator (other than the white background) for showing something is not submitted yet. As this is the only place parent observers have to see their student's grade, it would be vital information for parents looking to make sure their student is working consistently, not putting things off and submitting them all at the end of each week/month, right before the parent checks.

For another use case, we have an advisor role that frequently speaks with parents. The parent calls in asking why their student is behind in Algebra, as they've been working in it for hours every day (which is what the student is telling the parent).

Here are different scenarios that require different parent intervention but are currently all identically displayed on this page:

1. The student worked consistently and on pace for 3 months and then have done nothing for 3 months

2. The student has been working consistently but at a pace slower than the ideal. Our students are permitted to do this as we're work at your own pace, we'd just like the parents to know if this is the case.

3. The student did not start working on this course until 3 months after the start date. They have been working consistently since then, but are still behind.

4. The student started at the beginning, did not work for several months in the middle, and is now frantically trying to catch up so they don't get caught.

As it is, all situations look the same from this page, which is the easiest way to tell progress for a specific student. It would be great to have an easy place to tell both due date and submission date for a student for all of their assignments.

[biray]

Thank you for your submission,  @asatkins ​. I believe you can already find this information in your course analytics. What will Analytics tell me about my student in my course? There's a section that lists all the assignments and tells you if it was submitted early, on-time or late. Does this help?

[asatkins]

Hi  @biray ​!

Thanks for the suggestion! Our teachers do use student analytics, but they're inconvenient or inaccessible for the two use cases mentioned - admin who needs to review the student in all courses, and parent, who has no access to the analytics page. There are two barriers for easy use from the admin side - one is workflow and the other is presentation of information.

Workflow is hard because there's no handy way to get to the student analytics page. The advisor takes a call, searches the student in the global user search, and opens the user page. She then opens each course in the course list for that student in a new tab, clicks on 'grades' in each tab, and gets to that grades page so she can tell the parent how the student is scoring and progressing in each course. This is already a pretty high number of clicks. Unless there's a shortcut I don't know, to use the analytics, she would need to open each course (which opens by default to the student-in-a-course page), navigate to the homepage, navigate to the course analytics, find the student from a potential 1100 user list, click into that student's analytics, and then do that 2-6 more times (depending on the grade level). This alone is quite a bit, but it would be worth it if it then clearly gave the information. Because of the size of our courses, this is what an average submission analytics chart looks like for one of our students:

In order to tell any of the 4 scenarios listed in my original post, the advisors would have to be retrained and still end up doing some guesswork and interpretation, which is a lot to ask when they're already holding a conversation with the parent. They could learn to do it, but it still doesn't give us a clear list of submission times for all 100+ assignments in the course. For courses our size, it really would help to just have a list.

The other use case is the parent observer, who doesn't have access to this page, as far as I know. Let me know if I'm wrong on that.

Either way, the graph is not very helpful to us, a straight list of submissions (which will also be in due-date order, unlike the graph) would be much more functional and not even truly duplicate the information available, as this chart doesn't provide exact submission dates/times as our term dates are 22 months.

Thank you!

[Chris_Munzo]

Hi,  @asatkins ​ -- I wanted to let you know that Dropout Detective from Alliance Partner - AspirEDU​ solves part (though not all) of your need.  For each student, we provide a single screen that lists all courses and all current grades.  Each course and grade provides a link back to the appropriate pages in Canvas for further research.  Please contact me if you would like to learn more.  Thank you!

[asatkins]

Hi Chris,

We did actually vet Dropout Detective and decided against it. It requires vendor access that our internal IT was uncomfortable with. We'd really love to see improvements right in Canvas, we've found that most faculty aren't likely to use an LTI.

Thanks!

[Chris_Munzo]

Hi, Amanda!  Yes, I totally understand - third party products don't work for everyone.  Since my original reply to you, I've learned that we are in the process of creating a custom report for an existing client that DOES list the submission date of assignments.  (Since that is a data element that we retrieve every night.)  So you can reach out to me directly if you want to explore further.

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. February 3, 2016 - Wed. May 4, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

[blee]

This is clever and would be very helpful in any advising situation.

[asatkins]

Thanks Brian! I was hoping we weren't the only ones who needed this 

[stephanie_pope]

Could this idea be added to the AMAZING parent app (coming soon)? Great suggestion  @asatkins ​!

[xcotto]

Hi  @asatkins ​

I did Request this Feature last year ago but unfortunately  it didn't reach the 100. More like the date/time column

This will be Awesomeeeeee