Export assignment comments for course

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pasquinit
Community Novice

Is there a way to export the comments made on assignments? I'm looking for a way to access the feedback that I've given to students throughout the semester for help in composing narrative comments. 

The last time I saw this addressed was back in 2016, so I'm wondering if there is any change.

2 Solutions
Steve_Watts
Community Champion

Hi  @pasquinit 
Are you talking about annotations added to the submitted document itself in the doc viewer, or text comments added using the text box on the righthand side in the Speedgrader? For the text comments, each submission has a "Download submission comments" link. However this involves going to each submission in turn and downloading them one by one, which is obviously not practical when you have a large class. I don't think there is a method to download them in bulk from within the course but you could write some code using the Canvas API that would do it. This requires a bit of programming skill - one of my colleagues created a script that exports comments from a specific assignment as a spreadsheet. Unfortunately he no longer works here so I can't fully explain how his code works but if you look at the documentation for the API it might give you some ideas.

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I'm not really an expert in the API but looking at my colleague's code, it seems to be making this call:
/api/v1/courses/ COURSE_ID /assignments/ ASSIGNMENT_ID /submissions
to get the submissions for a specified assignment, then looping through the data set that's returned to create a table with username, submission date, grade, comment etc for each submission in the data.

The documentation here might be helpful: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/submissions.html 

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