Is there a way to see student submissions if an assignment is reassigned to a different section?

[Nick33]

Hi! As a brief background, I use Canvas for a student program and not for courses or a classroom. This program provides support to students for two years. And each year there is a new group of students, so there are multiple sections on our Canvas shell. However, we do use the grading system, sort of, to grade students' assignments they submit. These grades more or less provides admins an opportunity to see the progress of students.

Anyways, my question is if there is a way to see student submissions if an assignment was assigned to one section but then switched to a different section? Example: Assignment #1 was assigned to Section A. Students in Section A submitted assignments. But then Assignment #1 was reassigned sections to Section B. 

You might be wondering, but why? Because this is a two-year program, students have began to see a long list of to-do's on their Canvas homepage and on this particular program shell. Students also see these to-do's because we utilize the due date system to remind students to submit assignments, but not every assignment is required to be completed. The easiest solution was to delete assignments, but this would require us to download submissions and house them somewhere, which we have begun to do very slowly.

The other temporary solution was to create a section, an empty one and call it archives. No student would be in this section and any old assignments would be assigned to this section. This way, the to-do's of past assignments are now removed from the homepage for students. Unfortunately, now we are unable to see submissions of students who did submit these assignments. When clicking on SpeedGrader, for example, it tells us that there are no assigned students. An easy fix of course is to reassign the old sections, but this would kind of defeat the purpose.

So, is there somewhere on Canvas that houses all submitted assignments even if an assignment was switched sections? Apologies as I just realized I wrote a lot more than expected. Thanks!

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nick33 ,

If an assignment is not assigned to the student, or to the section that the student is in, then you will not be able to see the student's submission or grade--at least, not anywhere in the GUI.  It may be possible to retrieve that data somehow via the API...

The simplest way to do what you want is to leave the assignment assigned to the previous section, but to change the "Due" and 'Available until" dates on the assignment.  Once the assignment is no longer available to the students in the section, it no longer appears in their "To do" for the course, even if they did not submit the assignment.

Then, rather than "switching" the assignment to the next section, you assign to the next section with new dates, but still leave it assigned to the previous section, with dates in the past, and you will still be able to see the submissions for the previous section.

[Nick33]

Hi! Thanks for the response.

We actually are running with due dates on assignments as well as when the assignments are available until. But students who did not submit assignments were still seeing them appear under their To-Do list despite it being a well past the due date.

We also tested this by creating a student account and the assignments also appeared under our to-do list both on our dashboard and under the shell. Initially we asked students to hit the "X" button to make it go away, but often they forget to do this after each semester and the number of assignments pile up.

[dbrace]

Hi @Nick33,

What @mzimmerman recommended and described is what I would also recommend and has also been my experience.

In the "Assign Access" area while editing this type of assignment, make sure that you go all the way down to the bottom and click on the "+ Assign To" button to create an additional entry in the "Assign Access" area.

After doing that, you can create additional entries for either specific sections or students.

You can review How do I assign an assignment to everyone, individual students, or sections? - Instructure Community... for assistance.

If that is what you are doing, I would recommend contacting Canvas Support directly because either a step is being skipped or there is some sort of "bug".

-Doug

[mzimmerman]

Hi @Nick33 

I did not see the same behavior.  

I created an assignment in a course where I had an student enrollment (under a different, non-admin account), assigned to the section my student was in, with a "due" and "available until" set for a few days.  When I logged in and navigated to that course as the student, I could see the assignment in the To-do list.

I did not submit or open the assignment, or close the notification.

I edited the assignment, to set the "Due" and "Available until" dates in the past for that section, and saved it.

I refreshed the (private) browser window where my student was logged in, and the "To-do" disappeared.

[Nick33]

Thanks for trying to recreate it on your end! Maybe it's something I'm doing wrong. I've attached a picture of what the dashboard looks like on my student account. Blocked out assignment names and our shell name for privacy reasons.

I'm wondering if the to-do's are still there because the assignment due date is fairly fresh (5 days from this response)? I've tried reassigning past assignments (about a year out) to my student account and they do not appear on the to-do list, only just the gradebook shows these assignments and past assignments that it's assigned to as "missing." Student account is still able to click the assignments but are unable to submit anything (as intended I'm assuming because of the availability and due date).

 

[mzimmerman]

Hi @Nick33 

When I was checking, it was not the Due Date, but the Available Until date that made the difference.  If the Due Date was in the past but the Available Until date and not been reached yet, the item would still show in "To Do".  Once I changed the Available Until date to be in the past--even a few hours--the "To Do" notice disappeared.