Giving learners an editable feedback document -- workarounds?

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pkellygoss
Community Participant

Teachers at my institution often request the ability to give learners a marked document with suggested amendments, which they could then edit and resubmit. (This was possible on previous platforms.)

Unfortunately, while both Canvas Speedgrader and Turnitin have good marking features, both only allow learners to access the marking in the form of a static .pdf document. While I understand why many instructors might require this, it's not meeting our needs.

Does anyone know of a workaround? The best we've managed is downloading all of the original submissions, copying them to OneDrive, marking them in Word, and sharing each submission back to each learner individually. This is of course a bit of a hassle, and is unfortunately causing many teachers to just bypass Canvas entirely. It would be great if anyone knew of any external tools or any other workarounds that might allow teachers to leave comments on work and return a student-editable document containing those comments while still using Canvas.

1 Solution
scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hey Patrick,

If I am understanding your use case correctly, this is actually one of the key features that differentiated Canvas from the competition all those years ago.  You can have students upload Word or other editable file types as assignment submissions.  The teacher can then download all files in one zip file, unzip, edit the files and as long as they don't change the file names, re-zip and upload back to the assignment and every student will get their assignment, with feedback included.  To test this I just had three of me test student accounts drop off Word docs which I added comments and formatting to in Word after downloading them.  I then re-uploaded the zipped files and verified that my test students received the annotated copies.  Will that work for your teachers?

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