Providing Feedback without an assignment?

[bt130]

Hi All! 

I am running into an issue that probably has an easy solution. Our faculty are running sessions with students and mentors and each week the mentors fill out a standard form and provide that feedback to the students. This does not count toward their final grade and is not really directly tied to an existing assignment. 

Is there a good workflow for providing a form with feedback to students within a course? I thought about doing an ungraded assignment with "no submission" and then have mentors attach the document as feedback but every time I try I can't seem to see the feedback in student view (maybe because I have it marked as "ungraded"). 

Another solution maybe is to use Inbox and provide feedback that way? I am sure I am missing something...

[DrNufer]

What kind of feedback are you looking to provide?  It students are submitting documents then you could always have them send you links to Google Docs or MS Docs (Onedrive) and just provide comments on the actual document.  

If you want to provide feedback in Speedgrader, then yes that would need to be set up in Canvas.  You can set the assignment to "Not Graded" or simply set it to Points but specify 0 points.  This would give you the option of adding a rubric to the assignments and providing feedback on each criterion.  I also like the ability to record webcam video feedback in Speedgrader, but most of the time I will use Canvas Studio or Screencast-o-matic to record a screencast with assignment feedback.  Then I send students the link to the video.  

So, all these thoughts really depend on the type of feedback you want to provide students and if you want to house it all in Speedgrader (which is typically my recommendation).  

[TrishaMeyer1]

If the mentors have Teacher status, you could use an ungraded Discussion for this purpose. If it's a private conversation per student, just create Groups and set the number of students per Group to 1. Each student gets a private Discussion, and mentors can use the Reply feature to continuously upload new feedback forms (or use the RCE directly). You (the Teacher) will be able to see all the Replies (you may need to click on them to open them) between Students and mentors.

If the mentors don't have Teacher status, they will need to be added as members of the Groups, but I don't think a course participant can be a member of more than one Group at a time. So I'm not sure how that would work for mentors needing to provide feedback for multiple students.