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

[vshevchenko]

This is not a solution at all. This is a very poor workaround which does not help to prevent students from submitting their assignment via comments after the due date and even after the assignment until date.

I cannot understand why simple feature cannot just implements as so many teachers asking for it. Is Canvas does not care about people voices at all? Just add the feature similar to "Disable comments for announcements" do disable student comments for assignments". 

[RupertRussell]

This function may be appropriate for courses with one teacher and 30 students but we have courses with over 2000 students enrolled in the same Canvas course and 60 markers.  If a student replies to there assignment there is no way that the reply will be read by the marker who marked their submission. 

[GinSellers]

I, too, am interested in the comment section being disabled. Students will "submit" their assignments in the Comment section to avoid the late penalty. Any help here would be appreciated.

[mbmacdonald]

FYI, people have been asking about this on Community since 2019, perhaps even earlier. For some reason I never really noticed this "feature" until today. Students are putting links to Google docs, uploading files (with the wrong format) and even just typing their "response" into this comment box. Worse still, they can do this after the assignment is officially "closed!" This is perhaps the most egregious oversight I've encountered in my 3 years on the job so far

[AnonymousProf]

In the same boat…this needs to be disabled. Students use that section to hand in late work which they should not be able to do.

[vshevchenko]

It is time for Canvas to do it. So many times teachers asked for that simple feature. There is no reason not to do it. Again, make it as a setting checkbox, so teachers can choose most appropriate option for their class. I do not see any single reason not to do this improvement to support teachers.

[TinaKoeppe]

Please provide a way to either disable the user comments on assignments -or- let us edit the text that goes with the comment box. My team uses Canvas for adult asynchronous professional development trainings in both English and Spanish. We have +10,000 learners take trainings from our catalog every year. All the assignments in our courses are completed via SCORM interactions. All assignments are automatically scored. There are no submissions. The assignment comment box causes a LOT of confusion. It is being used by our adult learners to:

• Type random emojis
• Add extra information that is not requested. Learners spend unnecessary time attaching files and typing information into the comment box because they do not understand it's purpose and/or they think they will get points for extra effort. 
• Make comments on technology issues that are encountered. We have a tech support system, and an email address shared throughout the training where learners can ask for help. When learners ask for help using the "assignment comment" box, we don't see their request until the next workday morning.

As a result, we receive a long list of notifications each morning, of which 5% require a response, but still involve one of our team clicking on and opening each comment box text. It is not uncommon for us to wade through a huge list of notifications featuring happy face emojis, heart emojis, and random comments such as "finished" and "done" before we get to one that requires a response from our team. We frequently get random documents attached and sent to us via the assignment box feature which requires one of us to open and review. 

This design flaw creates a lot of unnecessary confusion for our learners and a lot of wasted time from our team as we still must go through and read all of the assignment comments/attachments just in case there is a learner that needs help or has important feedback. 

One solution may be to allow us to edit the text in the assignment comment box to better communicate its purpose. 

Thank you for your attention to this issue.

[mbmacdonald]

this comment made me laugh/cry for you