Option to Disable Student submission comments in Assignments

[bhmills]

Is there a system-level or course-level way to disable student assignment comments in Canvas? To my knowledge and testing, faculty are not notified of these comments. Please let me know if there is a way to immediately notify faculty when a student posts an assignment comment.

Recently this is causing us problems, as students are posting questions before or when they submit an assignment and expecting a reply and faculty are not seeing them until they go in and grade.

[VAWilkerson]

My understanding is that the teacher must set up that Canvas notifications forward to their school email. Otherwise, the notification sits in Canvas until teacher sees it.. basically at grading time.

[bhmills]

I just took a look and you are right! Thank you! This helps, but do you know if it is possible to disable the student comment ability at a course or system level?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @bhmills,

I don't know of any way to disable that functionality.  I think it's basically considered core functionality of Canvas.

According to the  Canvas Notifications - Instructure Community - 387041  guide, submission comments should by default have a notification setting of "daily summary", meaning teachers should receive an email once per day with all of the comments made during the last 24 hours.  Teachers could change that setting to "immediately" if they wish, but unfortunately there is no easy way to change default notification settings globally.

I hope the info is helpful, even if it's not quite what you were hoping to hear.

-Chris