Bulk download assignments with comments/annotations

[MrVi]

Hello All,

In Australia with our senior assessment, we need to send away the annotated assignments for confirmation. In the past we would be writing on the physical assignment, scanning it in and uploading them. However, the features in Canvas for assignment annotation and comments are great and we have moved to using them.

The issue comes from the ability to bulk download those assignments WITH annotations and comments. The download submissions button is wonderful that it renames the files with the students name etc, however the annotations do not download with them. 

The work around we currently have is individually downloading the assignments as this downloads the annotations. However, this is less than ideal as it is slower, doesn't automatically zip them, is prone to human error in forgetting to download them all and does not rename the file.

Is there a way or a setting that will allow the download all assessments button to download the annotated versions?

Also bonus question... We have not been using rubrics very much, but I notice they do not download with the files either, is there a way to get them?

Thanks in advance!!

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @MrVi,

You could certainly submit this as an idea for Instructure to consider.  The process is undergoing some changes right now, as outlined in the Turning Your Feedback into Better Prioritization a... - Instructure Community - 637959 blog post, but I believe you can still submit new ideas right now.

I will say in my own opinion that Canvas probably will never do everything that every user would want (nor should it, as it could become a mess of options, menus, switches, etc).  Instructure will generally try to gauge the interest, development time, and other things when deciding what to develop and when.  I hope for your sake that they choose this idea, but it will probably still be quite a few months for it to be released even if they chose it this second.  Just trying to set a realistic expectation for you around this.

-Chris

[Gabriel33]

Your best bet may be the API, using the submissions endpoint: /api/v1/courses/:course_id/assignments/:assignment_id/submissions/:user_id

That will give you a JSON with an attachments key, which will contain, for each of the submitted files in that submission, a "preview_url" which will contain the annotations.

[MrVi]

Thanks Gabriel, unfortunately we need the actual PDF to email off rather than the url. If we were to do that then we would still need to download them individually which we may as well do from the speedgrader. 

[Gabriel33]

You are right, I thought it would be easy to download from the URL given, but it doesn't seem to be, since it just links to the DocViewer.

You could still automate it by starting with the API, and then using something like Selenium to automate the download, but that's slow.

I tried looking into the request of the download button to canvadocs.instructure.com, but didn't figure out the authorization code.

[MrVi]

Its a shame, Seems like the functionality for bulk download is there and functionality of annotated download is there. It should be trivial for Canvas to add a download all annotated assignments button

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @MrVi,

You could certainly submit this as an idea for Instructure to consider.  The process is undergoing some changes right now, as outlined in the Turning Your Feedback into Better Prioritization a... - Instructure Community - 637959 blog post, but I believe you can still submit new ideas right now.

I will say in my own opinion that Canvas probably will never do everything that every user would want (nor should it, as it could become a mess of options, menus, switches, etc).  Instructure will generally try to gauge the interest, development time, and other things when deciding what to develop and when.  I hope for your sake that they choose this idea, but it will probably still be quite a few months for it to be released even if they chose it this second.  Just trying to set a realistic expectation for you around this.

-Chris

[MrVi]

Thanks Chris, 

Yes, I agree you can't achieve everything, and you definitely do not want to overwhelm the interface (I have a software development background). I have added the suggestion through that site and also through our department. It's a feature that would greatly benefit the ~200 schools in our department that use it (and I assume many others!)

Cheers.

[Gabriel33 · Accepted solution]

Access to the DocViewer API might help, as it seems to allow download of the annotated PDF: Download Annotated PDF · DocViewer API.

This post from a month ago was asking for help with getting a key, but there was no reply: DocViewer API - Instructure Community - 639560.