Two notification problems when enabling "Online submission" for assignments that can *also* be submitted on paper

[byrdnick]

I allow students to turn in all assignments digitally, which requires me to enable "Online submission" for my assignments. However, many of them prefer to turn them in a hard copy (which is fine by me).

Problem 1: If a student opts to hand in the hard copy and I enter the grade into the grade book for that assignment, the student's Canvas app continues to pester them to submit the assignment (even though I've already graded it!).

Problem 2: To stop the Canvas app from pestering them, students (reasonably) upload blank files. However, this means that Canvas now pesters me to grade a bunch of blank submissions (that I have already graded!).

Is there a way to allow online or paper submissions for one assignment? 

How else can we avoid these gratuitous notification problems?

[paul_fynn]

@byrdnick I think that you can use Speedgrader to mark the paper submissions as 'excused', but I'd be interested to hear whether that impacts your ability to enter, or the students ability to see, their grade....

[byrdnick]

Thanks for this idea, Paul. My worry about marking hard copy submissions as 'excused' is that it may confuse the student's understanding of how it contributes to their final grade: if it was excused, but they turned it in, then should it count as extra credit?  (Not for my cases.) And for the reasons you mention, I probably can't test this with real students' assignments. I'm hoping there's a more straightforward way to handle the massive amounts of unnecessary notifications that this (seemingly common) circumstance produces.

[TrishaMeyer1]

Hi @byrdnick ,

I probably would just include instructions to submit a document that says "Submitted on paper" for those students who choose to do so. Submitting something will clear their to-do list, and you can just ignore the submission and put in a grade (and comments) based on the paper submission, which should trigger Canvas to remove that item from your to-do list. By having them submit the document before submitting the hard copy (or concurrently), you will avoid posting a grade and then subsequently receiving a document that shows up as needing to be graded.

[byrdnick]

Thanks for thinking through this, Trisha.

Alas, my current experience suggests that this will not necessarily remove the item from my to-do list (Problem 2 above). 

I am looking for a solution that isn't more work than its worth. Asking all my students to change their order of operation and double their submissions for each assignment is a much bigger ask than the status quo (of asking them to ignore false positive notifications). 

I was hoping there was a Canvas setting that would stop students' and instructors' notifications for all assignments that have already been graded. I'm surprised that's not the default setting, to be honest — but perhaps I'm failing to realize why that would be a bad default setting.

Thanks again!