Published Assignments not visible to Students in a Published Module

[ChristineSharpe]

I currently have teachers voicing that they have some students that are not able to see a certain assignment within a Module. I do not have a specific example as the assignment does eventually appear for the student. 

The assignments are published, the Modules are published, the assignment is assigned to the student that cannot see it. 

I am unclear as to why there would be a delay for some students to be able to view the assignment and not others. Ideas?

[James · Accepted solution]

@ChristineSharpe 

There is a bug in Canvas related to submission records not being created. I recently wrote about in Speedgrader not showing all students for certain assignments, but it affected over 680 assignments for our courses and other people are seeing it. One of the symptoms is that students cannot submit assignments and they do not show up on the To Do list for them. It could apply to the student not seeing it at all in a module. For more details, read that post.

The quickest way to check to see if it is an issue is to load SpeedGrader for an assignment with this issue. Check to see if all of the student names are there. If some of the student names are missing (and you're not filtering them), then it is likely this issue.

It seems to predominately affect assignments without due dates. Of those 680 assignments, less than 10 had due dates. This is because editing the due date fixes the issue of the missing submission record. If no one has submitted, you can also unpublish and then republish the assignment. That worked for about 675 of the 680 assignments we had. For the others, I had to edit the due date, save it, reset the due date to what it was, and save again.

That may not be your issue exactly, but it's worth a quick check. If not, you've only wasted a minute of time. This could even be something the instructor does in case there is a delay between when they notice and you hear about it.

As for the delay, it may depend on the type of assignment. There may be other things going on in the background that are causing those missing submission records to be created. If the instructor went in and edited the assignment, it sends the due date back to Canvas. That may be enough to trigger it, but I'm not sure.

[NoahBoswell]

Hey @ChristineSharpe ,

We are experiencing the same issue. This is something on the backend of Canvas that we don't really have control over, it's an operating system issue. Something that we have done is if the student can't see it in their module, depending on how long the URL is, they'd either just type it in and enter it, or we'd canvas inbox it to them really quickly and they'd be able to access it within a matter of seconds. It's not that the assignment isn't published for them, it is, it's just taking Canvas a hot minute to load it into the module.

I also recommend having the assignments tab enabled via your course navigation, sometimes that can speed the process up because the student can still likely see it published there for them, even though it doesn't exist in your module just yet. That's also worked for us, too.

Hope this helps a bit, too.
- Noah

[DiannaDK]

We're having this issue, but it is affecting pages, assignments, and quizzes.  I will check the suggest fixes for assignments and quizzes, but does anyone have suggestions when it occurs with a page?

[James]

@DiannaDK 

The pages may be related, but it shouldn't be the submission record that was missing. However, it could be another record that is missing. 

You can try unpublishing and republishing the pages. If that doesn't work and they have dates on them, try changing the date on them and then changing the date back.

If they don't have dates at all, then it's likely a completely different issue.

The general advice (what we would tell people before this bug) is to check the module requirements and mastery paths.  You can assign pages and modules to some students but not others. That means that there are more and more places where something could be blocking the student from seeing the content.

If a module requirement was keeping a student from seeing something until a condition was met, it might appear that it was delayed. In the meantime, a student might complete whatever requirement was keeping them from seeing it and then the hidden assignment "magically" appeared. If someone is using mastery paths, the student might have needed to complete the assignment that determined the path they were on before they could see the assignments within the path.

I don't know that the issue I describe is what you're seeing, just that it aligns with the symptoms people are describing. I had another school confirm today that they were seeing that problem as well for quizzes and assignments. They didn't mention pages.

[DiannaDK]

Thank you so much.  There are no mastery paths or requirements in play.  We were actually able to find a workaround by assigning the page to all students ( I should have mentioned that in the first post).  

Tomorrow when I'm at my desk (and have my two big screens) I'll go through your recommendations with a fine tooth comb and make sure that I have checked each of these.  When I chatted with support they were at a loss so I really appreciate your perspective.