Different Closure Dates and/or Group Settings...

[AmySasser]

Hello, all! I am teaching high school students, all in one Canvas course, some of whom have extended time on assignments. I am strict about late work, so I set my assignments to close at a certain time using the "Available Until" function. However, for those with extra time, I need to add a day to that. I thought I'd found the solution by building a group and listing it as a group assignment, but with individual grading. However, when any student from my "Extra Time" group turns in work, even though it's grading individually, it "takes the spot" for that assignment, so others look and it seems to be already submitted. Is there a way around this?

The only other solution I've found is quite tedious: manually enter every name that has extra time on every assignment every time. I have 39 students who need this accommodation, so I'd have to enter all 39 names for every assignment rather than just assigning it to one "group" of Extra Time students.

When I'm filling in the "Assign To" section, it only gives me my groups if I say it's a group assignment, but on a group assignment, one person turning it in uses the spot.... I feel like there HAS to be a better way, that I'm missing something....

Please help!

[ColtonSwapp]

Hello @AmySasser 

Thanks for posting in the Canvas community! 

I was able to take a look at your post here and I would love to try and assist! 

With groups in Canvas, when you have students submitting work to assignments, one student can submit to the assignment and that submission will show as the submission for all the students in the specific group. The individual grading setting basically makes it so that you can look at one submission and apply the grades for each student in the group individually, instead of the entire group. This comes in handy if you have a student who is doing more work than some of the other students in the group. You can give the one student a better grade, while giving the others a lower grade. Or vice versa. 

Based on what you're explaining here, I don't think that a group assignment would be the best way to accomplish this. 

If you have some students who are going to need extra time to turn their work, it might be best to remove the group assignment settings and keep the assignment assigned to "everyone." or "Everyone else." You would add an availability block and assign it to the students who need extra time. You can set it up so that only those students get the extra time to submit, by adding a new availability block (The +Add button in the edit screen for the assignment) with the specified dates you are allowing them to have.

Here is an example of how I would setup the availability blocks on a assignment, as an example. Everyone else will have until Sept 9th with an availability block of Sept 1-Sept 9. My example student (Peter Bishop) will have a due date of Sept 11 and an availability block of Sept 1- Sept 11th to submit. 

Hopefully this helps! 

-Colton

[AmySasser]

Thanks for the reply! I already know about the availability blocks (I didn't know to call them that, though). The issue is that I have a list of 39 students who I would have to put into a secondary availability block for every single assignment throughout the entire year. That's a lot to type in and select for every assigment.

For now, I've found a workaround by recording a macro of myself typing in those 39 names, so I can just hit one button to do it; however, I don't like this for several reasons, not least of which is that it requires outside software, so I can only use it on my personal computer (I can't install software on the school's computer). Therefore, if I want to use this neat shortcut, I have to wait until I'm on my own machine to do it—which means I'm working on my time away from work!

I was hoping there was some built-in function I wasn't aware of to let me manage this, but it looks like there may not be.