Word Count

[dcwaslus]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

Can we get a word count tool for our courses?

Well, I don't know about a word count minimum requirement.  I was just thinking put something in like the corner of the text box or in the toolbar where it shows how many words have been written.  Yeah, I've had assignments where I had to have a 300 word minimum, and would have to copy and paste it into Word to figure out if I had enough.  I think this is an easy script to make, but I don't want to assume anything since I have very little programming experience or ability.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14438-canvas-production-release-notes-2018-04-21 .

[joshuag]

I know this feature has been in development for some time, but I’m not sure why. As far as I can tell, Canvas is using TinyMCE 4 as its content editor for text submissions. It appears that TinyMCE 4 already has a word count plugin, which seems to provide the exact functionality OP is asking for. This doesn't solve the problem in SpeedGrader, of course, but in terms of student submissions, this should provide exactly what we're looking for. And if I'm not mistaken, we're talking about literally one line added to the TinyMCE initialization call to enable it. (I haven't gone through the trouble of trying to deobfuscate the Canvas app to find where that call is happening and test it out, but we'll see how bored I get later on.)

Just wanted to make sure that y'all weren't trying to reinvent the wheel.

[scottdennis]

Hey Joshua,

Thank you for your concern about wheel reinventing.  I knew about the plugin for TinyMCE.  I am technical enough to know that the version of tiny that we use in Canvas is heavily customized but I don't know exactly what goes into that or why employing the plugin is not a simple task.  I do know that it has been considered/is being worked on.

[tom_gibbons]

Any ETA on this?

[mcohen]

Well it's close to 2 years since we began asking so don't hold your breath

[scottdennis]

Hey Tom,

Unfortunately, no ETA.  I asked about this last week and learned that the plan is still to upgrade to a newer version of Tiny MCE but that there are development projects that still need to be completed before that can be done.

[nbierma6]

Scott, thanks for the update. Ordinarily I get that trying to do one thing when it comes to development has cascading effects on a number of other things. What surprises me on this one is that TinyMCE already has a plugin built for this and to implement it "in the wild" it looks like it's just activated by name in the tinymce.init function. (Outside of TinyMCE, there are a number of lightweight JQuery plugins that achieve the same thing.) I realize TinyMCE in Canvas must be a different beast and the cascading impacts of added features are considerably more complex, but to see how simple and how light a footprint this feature has elsewhere does make me wonder why it's this tall of an order for Canvas after such a long time.

[scottdennis]

Hey Nathan,

I didn't know specifics, just that this update is/was waiting until another project got done first.  I went and learned more this morning.  I can now tell you that there really are specific things that need to get done and that it makes sense to do them before changing the editor itself.  So, it really is a simple change that can't happen until more complicated rich content service things happen in the background.  I can well imagine that that is frustrating to hear but from what I can see it is legitimate.

[jthoms]

Since this is of such importance to my school, I've done similar explorations to what Nathan is reporting (I attempted to write some Javascript, but the counts were note reliable). If it's possible to have even a "band-aid" fix like what is available natively in TinyMCE, I'm sure we'll take what we can get. Hopefully this can be explored sooner than later

[brian_d_greenhi]

Yes -- I'd really like to have a word count feature added to the text entry boxes.  This seems like it ought to be easy enough to include given that the users are simply entering plain text.  That will allow us instructors to impose word limits on discussion posts or text-entry assignments.

[ronmarx]

YES, really like this feature! Look forward to using it in any student-deliverables. Imagine the meta-knowledge and skills developed in a journalism class!