Can I receive a notification when teachers enter grades for their classes?

[rpsimon]

Hi, I am going to be pulling/exporting Grades from Canvas on a daily basis in a couple of weeks during our school's midterm exams.  Is there any type of notification that I can receive (as an admin) after teachers enter their midterm exam grades for their classes?

[bneporadny]

Hi Rebecca,

As an admin there is not any #notification‌ currently available for you to receive when an instructor enter grades. I think the best thing you can do and stated you were going to do is to pull grades daily. 

There are ways to pull entire grades for a term instead of having to go into individual courses. Are you going to be using those to pull the grades?

[rpsimon]

Yes, I will be using those to pull grades.  I need to pull grades from different courses each day.

[kblack]

Hi rpsimon - I am fairly certain the answer is "no."  The key resides in this PDF that is linked at the top of this online lesson:  How do I set my Canvas notification preferences as a student?  Specifically, this quote from page 8, where I added the bold type on my own:

Notification settings do not apply to only one course. If you are enrolled in multiple courses as a student, but you are also enrolled in a course as an instructor or equivalent role (TA, designer), please be aware that notifications from those courses will show student grades (as instructor roles do not have their own grades in such courses).

So, in theory, you would have the very least have to be enrolled as a student in each of those courses, based on this description.  This makes sense, since instructors do not get notifications each time they input a grade for a student, and likely would not want to.  Unless there is some hidden API call (which I am definitely not an expert in), I cannot think of a way to do this through the GUI, at least.  (Perhaps there may be something within your SIS, if Canvas grades are also set there?????)

[rpsimon]

Thanks, I actually did have a "fake student" enrolled in a bunch of classes, but a number of teachers didn't like that.....so I removed the student from the course.  

[James]

rpsimon 

I haven't used them, but Canvas Live Events will send values to an Amazon Web Services SQS Queue when certain things happen. Grade_change is one of those live events. I do not believe that the queue can be specific to a course assignment, although I recently read that course level events were coming in 2020. That would still be all of the grade changes for all assignments in all courses or multiple queues with all assignments for each course.

It would be easier to poll the courses you need and retrieve the submissions for the particular assignments. It avoids the overhead of setting up live events and it really doesn't take long with the List submissions for multiple assignments endpoint of the submissions API. That also includes a graded_since parameter so that you can fetch just the information since the last time you fetched it. You'll still need to make one API request for each course, but they can be really quick with the right parameters.  Set student_ids[]=all and the assignment_ids parameter to the ID of the midterm exam that you need to monitor. The assignment_id would be different for each course.