Speedgrader changed with Checkpoints feature

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

We were so excited to have Checkpoints, and indeed those work really well; points, calendar, grading and more. We turned the feature on immediately on Jan 18.  Thank you Instructure!  Teachers love it.  Canvas Canvas Release Notes (2025-01-18) - Instructure Community - Discussion Checkpoints

But, the change to Speedgrader for all graded discussions, whether or not they use checkpoints, is causing distress. 

• Instead of seeing all the posts from the student on one screen by default, it can only show the full discussion with Next reply and Previous reply buttons necessary to scroll between the one student's posts.  Teachers report this has more than doubled grading time, especially with large classes.  
• If posts are on different pages, it has to load the entire new page to highlight the student's next post.  All the posts scroll by while it moves the focus. 
• Even if all the discussion's posts are on one page, there's a significant delay while it loads, especially if there are images or videos. 
• There is no indication of how many posts the student made, so you need to keep moving to next (or previous) reply until you return to the first one.  If there are more than 2 or 3 posts it's hard to keep track of which ones you've seen so one rotates around again. 
• If there is only one post, we waste time trying to go to the next one.
• Currently, the discussion search box doesn't work properly in speedgrader, stops with an error on each letter you enter before searching for it.  That is a bug and will get fixed I'm sure; hopefully soon.
• One benefit is that you always see the post in context, but the slowness makes the benefit less useful unless it's a short discussion.

Are others trying out this new feature?

[mwolfenstein]

Thanks @Nancy_Webb_CCSF for getting a post up on this topic.

I'm personally far less jazzed about how checkpoints have been implemented, and I've registered those concerns over in the Discussions Redesign group: A Few Key Pain Points with Checkpoints. For all of the concerns I expressed in that post, the one thing I did not expect was that the SpeedGrader experience was going to be blown up in a manner that would send my faculty into an absolute panic.

I see the logic of the Previous and Next Reply buttons as one way to grade discussions, but I feel like, unfortunately not for the first time, design decisions have been made with a Canvas product that completely fly in the face of regular use cases. Please understand that AI has already radically increased the work load for faculty when it comes to discussions as they seek to sort out real posts from students using AI against assignment directions, and in some cases dealing with large numbers of fraudulent student accounts using AI. I also feel compelled to add that shoving more AI tools into Canvas will not help faculty deal effectively with the problems that AI is creating for them when students use it in unsanctioned manners or fraudsters use it and flood the environment with garbage posts.

Having a clean, quick workflow for reviewing how a student has contributed to a discussion is vital. I'm also pretty certain that the scroll animation is a big time accessibility failure. I recognize that this isn't a bug from the Canvas team's perspective, but it is effectively a severe bug in the grading User Experience for faculty who use discussions heavily. It's a smaller matter for my campus right now because we're in winter session, but a lot of schools are starting their spring terms now and this is once again a disastrous product rollout just when we're starting a term, very much like the huge mess with threaded discussions that plagued the start of the fall term. We really can't go on like this. We need our teaching and learning environment to still behave in an efficient, predictable, and as bug free ass possible manner even as product improvements are implemented. This needs a fix ASAP.

This also seems like the right place to mention again that the feature user group is set to be archived tomorrow, but given the status of the redesign this seems like an incredibly bad idea.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Thanks for the link to your post in the redesign group, @mwolfenstein .  Some things I just haven't tried and clearly need to.

[PLDeMartini]

Hi Nancy,

We're taking a look at this too. We've received the same kind of feedback about SpeedGrader suddenly being changed for all Discussions, whether or not an instructor chose to use the new feature on a Discussion.

In their release notes for the Feature Option, no statement or implication tells us that enabling it would impact SpeedGrader for *all* Discussions. Instructor confusion has quickly followed and seems predictable/preventable.

I tested in Beta and found that enabling the Feature Option introduces new elements to the instructor UI in a Discussion's SpeedGrader entry for *all* Discussions, while Disabling it returns the UI to the prior experience.