course activity icon

[MichaelDesimini]

I have a student who seems to get a blue icon displaying next to some of the courses they are enrolled in. They do not appear to have any missing assignments but these blue dots display in the dashboard. Is there a way to remove them or hide them?

[James · Accepted solution]

@MichaelDesimini 

The blue dot doesn't necessarily mean missing assignments. Per the How do I use the to-do list for all my courses in the List View Dashboard as a student? lesson in the Canvas Student Guide, "Items with new activity display an Unread indicator [1] and include an activity label. New activity can include one or all of the following labels: Graded: a submission is graded, Replies: an announcement or discussion has new replies, Feedback: a graded item has new instructor feedback via submission comments (does not display if feedback is only via DocViewer annotations)"

Based on that, I would check that the student has read all of the feedback.

Hopefully, it will be easy to find once you know what you're looking for.

That said, it could be very difficult to find. Here's my experience trying to track down how to shut off the unread badge.

I had a student last Fall with a similar issue. It was on the grades link within the course, not the dashboard, but I think the student was using the Card view instead of the List view. I tried everything that I could think of -- I'm a Canvas admin as well as Canvas teacher for 12 years and I've done a lot of work with customizing JavaScript to run within Canvas, so I was able to think of quite a few things.

I tried things off and on for about the first month of the class. The student could still see the unread badge. There were some times that I thought it was fixed, but then it came back.

After a month of trying things off an on, I have a message thread that says I figured it out. This student and I conversed about a lot of things and they often replied to one conversation as part of another, so I might be missing something.

Here's part of the thread near the end of the discussion.

It turns out there is a big blue button to "Clear Badge Counts" when a site admin looks at your grades. Easy-peasy, right? I had never seen it before. Well, even though I'm the highest level admin Richland has, it turns out I'm an *account* admin instead of a *site* admin and that's why I've never seen it. My guess is that site admin is someone at Canvas support who needs to do things that they don't trust the admins at the institutions to do.

I was able to lie to Canvas and tell it I had the ability to clear those counts and it got as far as showing me the button, but then when I clicked on it, it said that I was unauthorized.

There are some other options available to me (or me pretending to be you) that I'm going to explore. One of them might be that there is a rubric that you haven't seen (not sure if that's it or not). If those options don't work, then we may have to escalate it to Canvas support.

I would like to figure it out because I have a bunch of unread stuff in my development and testing course. Because I'm both a student and a teacher there, it doesn't let me ever see the grades page with the badges, it shows me the gradebook. I would like to get those 37 badges cleared out for me.

2 hours later, I wrote:

When I went in after trying things and masqueraded as you, it wasn't showing any badges for the grades page. I checked in Chrome and Firefox. However, it might still be showing on your end.

It's something impossible for us to check automatically. Unless a student says something, any unread messages might be because they really haven't read them. The data I pulled showed a dozen or so submissions where you had unread messages, but the grades badge was only showing 1 last week, so I am not sure that what I tried had any effect. When I tried it on my development course, it took it from 37 to 15, but not all the way to 0.

That was last September and I really wish I had documented what "trying things" meant.

I think I looked at the grades page itself within the browser's developer tools and looked for things there. I might have written a script to go through each assignment and mark all comments as read. It might have been some feedback left in an assignment.

It may have been related to discussions that the student didn't have access to and couldn't read. That reminded me that when I copy course content, I often get unread badges showing up on discussions until I go into discussions and mark them all as read. There's no content there, but Canvas still thinks they're new.