"Real" Student View

[cesbrandt]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For details, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-08-12). 

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Okay, so the title could use some work, sorry about that.

Alright, so the basic idea is that the Student View be expanded to emulate a legitimate account with no special permissions. Now, within Canvas, the current option is fairly accommodating, but it is troublesome when dealing with external tools that are reliant upon additional information that is not generated for the current Student View system.

For example, Chalk & Wire Learning Assessment uses the e-mail address of the user to create or access the account-level intended for that user. This is troublesome for testing due to the need to masquerade or login as a student account, separate our actual accounts. Of course, for administrators, this isn't a horrible setback, but for teachers demonstrating how-to use the external tool to their class don't have the luxury of accessing other user accounts. As a result, they must "borrow" a student account to perform their demonstrations.

As external tools come in all shapes and sizes, I am pushing forward the idea of expanding the Student View to emulate a full user to avoid encountering similar issues that may occur with other external tools that require different information that isn't created in the Student View.

[Stef_retired]

 @a_eberhard ​, cesbrandt​ has nailed it: (1) There is a known bug with the voting system (please refer to the announcement here) and (2) since this idea has already garnered a net up-vote total that is well in excess of the 100-vote threshold, it has moved into the Under Consideration stage, so the downvotes are not affecting the feature idea's status.

If any of the 16 votes against were true votes against, yes, I'd like to know why as well. We don't have formal rules about this, but personally, if I vote an idea down--which I do rarely--I always add a comment explaining why.

[a_eberhard]

Thanks, I didn't know about the bug!

[jbrown]

Our math courses prefer to use the setting, "Restrict students from viewing course after end date" so that students can no longer view information related to posted problem sets. This setting works well, in that the course no longer appears on the student's list of courses and students have no way to access the course. However, the professor--in wanting to test this--tries using the "Student View." It shows the course content in full even after the course end date. Is there a way to improve "Student View" to--in this case--at least say that students do not have access to the course?

[cesbrandt]

Would it be possible to get an update on this idea? It was placed into a Gather Info state with a note that an update would be provided a month later, but it's now been 2 months. I'm just curious where it's at. ^^'

[cesbrandt]

 @scottdennis  and  @sanders3 , it has now been 3 months since the last update saying we could expect a response within 30 days. I understand that's not a guarantee that there was going to be one, but there hasn't been anything mentioned since.

Is this still being considered for future implementation? If so, would we be able to look forward to this within the next couple of months?

[Renee_Carney]

Hi cesbrandt‌

Sorry that getting a response on this idea has taken longer than usual.  I just want to clarify that this idea has never been 'under consideration' in the formal way we use the term.  Gathering information means that our product team is aware of the idea and researching how/if it may fit in a current project, or if it is something squeezable and possible.

As you might imagine, this idea impacts many areas of Canvas, so it's big.  I'll work with the product team to see if we can get an official response sooner rather than later.

Thanks for checking in.

[cesbrandt]

My apologies. I suppose I just kinda grouped them together as part of the same consideration process. ^^'

I knew it would take time, it's just been a while since we had heard anything. Thank you for looking into it.

[bkompe]

I am particularly interested in being able to add the Test Student to a course group. This enables instructors to view the behaviour of groups and be assured that only group members can access group material. This matter is something that instructors commonly ask for assurance about in Blackboard.

[hasti]

What's the status on this extremely important feature? I am currently having to rely on being able to enroll TAs as students in an unused second section of a course so that I can accurately see how students are experiencing things (and to test out how a quiz actually works before I release it to the students). That works fine except when I don't have TAs for a course or I don't have two sections of a course (so one can be the "playground" site - since it seems I am unable to invite my TAs to join a class from a previous semester no matter how I adjust the offering dates).

[kona]

 @hasti , because of this limitation have you thought about testing things in your Beta course environment (or test)?

Here are a couple of guides that explain what they are and how to access them:

What is the Canvas beta environment?‌

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11191-what-is-the-canvas-test-environment?sr=search&searchI...