Feedback Discussion • Differentiation Tags Bugs

[SamGarza1]

As you test and explore Differentiation Tags, please use this space to note any bugs/features that aren't working as intended you encounter.  If you can share screencasts or links to the behavior, that may be helpful.  

[JarrodHiles]

I also envisage that differentiation tags will be used quite heavily for delegated grading at our institution. 

We are hoping to look at feasibility of being able to automatically create sections, groups, and now more so differentiation tags based on timetable data for purposes such as delegated grading, by leveraging the API. 

[LiamNeedham]

Just identified another issue relating to roles (at least in our instance)

- Grader and External Examiner roles cannot filter SpeedGrader by tag (presumably as permissions stop them seeing the course People page, and therefore by association, tags too)

- Course administrator - can see People page, but cannot see anything related to tags

Is this a standard role set up, or something that we've configured at UoM? Grader, in particular, is going to be an issue if you cannot filter via tag 

EDIT: Confirmed that these are in fact custom roles that we've configured at UoM and will have to work around

[SamGarza1]

@LiamNeedham We did add a new permission for Tags that you should be able to enable for custom roles. It's currently only on for instructors by default since TA and Designer roles can vary so much between institutions.

It should be on for admins as well and you can check that under the permissions for account roles. 

Canvas user permissions

[LiamNeedham]

Thanks Sam, that's helpful 🙂

[kikpe]

Tag Sets

In the introduction video, the presenter says that "Students can have multiple individual tags, but only one tag from a set". In my testing, I created a tag set with three variants and added the same student in every variant of the same tag set. 

 

[james_whalley]

I hope it stays this way. Limiting which tags can be applied to a student doesn't make sense to me. 

[venitk]

@SamGarza1 I also experienced this ability to add more than one tag per variant, which is part of the reason I suggested treating these more like Gmail labels; I didn't realize you wouldn't be able to add more than one variant in a set. I agree with @james_whalley that I'd prefer to add more than one variant in a set, but there's also a workaround of not using a set. 

[SamGarza1]

Hi @kikpe @venitk 

Would you be able to share where you're experiencing this? While this is something that we want to support in the long term it's not something that is currently supported to my knowledge. I'd like to confirm that there's not a bug where the Tag is being applied but not being saved correctly. 

[kikpe]

@SamGarza1 the tag is saving correctly, but I thought that students can only be added to one tag from a tag set.

I created a tag set that had three variants. I added the same student to every tag variant in the tag set. In the video it said "Students can have multiple individual tags, but only one tag from a set", so I believe that it shouldn't allow me to do so. Maybe there can be an option to switch between the tag variants instead of allowing me to add the same student into three tag variants in the same tag set.

[venitk]

@SamGarza1 https://uws.beta.instructure.com/courses/714860/users# 

[vancej]

I am a Primary Sub-Account who just enabled Differentiation Tags. For whatever reason, the button is not visible in the People area. Does the Root Acct Admin have to enable as well? 

[DanJagger]

@SamGarza1 

It seems that if you enable the Diff Tags for an assignment you have to use them for EVERY assignment in that unit. It'd be really useful if you could switch between the delegation by Diff Tag and NOT on a assignment by assignment basis.

You may have a formative assessments you want to monitor as a teacher and then summative ones you where you want to delegate the marking appropriately.

This may not be Diff Tags but the way the 'Launch Speedgrader by Group' setting works, that feature would appear to work better as an Assignment option NOT a course option.

[james_whalley]

@DanJagger What do you mean by "unit"? Do you mean every assignment in that Assignment Group?

[DanJagger]

@james_whalley ha sorry I mean in single Canvas Space - which for our University we call Course units. But yes the ability to use the diff tags (or not) across different assignments in a group... Is there a way that can be done easily?

[james_whalley]

@DanJagger Sorry, but I still seem to be confused. So, in a Canvas course site, you can choose whether to use diff tags for each assignment. They are there as an option on all assignments (if available at all), but they are not enforced and do not preclude you from using Sections or specific student names.

[LiamNeedham]

 Will back this up - when Launch Speedgrader by Group is enabled on a course, it is then enabled across all Assignments in that course

If you have a assignments whereby that setting is not relevant and/or not required, it becomes quite frustrating to keep having to turn the setting off and on. Scale that up to potentially 20 different markers accessing 5 different assignments (with different requirements) in a singular course space, that blanket setting will prove problematic

[SamGarza1]

@LiamNeedham @DanJagger 

I'll pass this feedback on to the team that owns Speedgrader. 

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hi @LiamNeedham, I'm on the team that owns SpeedGrader, and I agree this behavior sounds frustrating, especially at scale. This does appear to be a bug, and we’ll look into it. Ideally, the setting should respect assignment-specific needs rather than applying globally across the course. Really appreciate you flagging it!

[LiamNeedham]

Thanks Yasi. If possible, it would be great if the Launch Speedgrader Filtered by Student Group setting could be configured at the assignment level, rather than course-level 🤞

[DanJagger]

Thanks Liam - much better at explaining this than me!

[DanJagger]

There appears to be a limit on the number of tags you can create. Maximum of 5 Tag Groups and a maximum of 10 tags per group. 

This limit does make them unusable for our needs unfortunately. Be useful to add this limit to the Diff Tag FAQ as we were quite far down our testing process when we realised this and if we'd have known earlier it would have prevented testing something tahts now unusable.

Alternatively if there a way to increase that limit at the root level that would be great... Ideally we'd need 100s of them on some of our courses.

[SamGarza1]

Hey @DanJagger, 

Great call out about the FAQ; I'll make an update to it. As defined in our technical documentation our max number of Tags/Tag Sets is 40 and a Tag set can have a max of 10 Tag variants. We're looking into the max 5 Tag set issue you're experiencing. 

@audra_agnelly We'll also look at options to prevent users from creating more than the max number of variants. 

[audra_agnelly]

 I just tested the variant limit. In the interface I was able to keep creating variants, but after creating 25 variants I saved and received the message "Validation failed: Variant limit reached for tag". If there is a limit of 10 variants the creation window needs to disable the +Variant prompt once that limit is reached, end users shouldn't be receiving error messages for doing things the application is allowing them to do. The error message also fails to communicate what that limit is, the only way to know the limit count is through trial and error.

[S_Carter1]

Is there an ETA on when the bug that doesn't let us add differentiation tags to students in more than one section will be fixed?

[embleton]

On our beta instance, a student can be assigned MORE than one tag from a set. This is a problem.

[james_whalley]

Maybe this is something that could be set at the Tag Set level so that you could allow or disallow multiple tags from a group.

[embleton]

The documentation says it's not supposed to happen: can only give student OEN tag from any tag Set. A bug,

[james_whalley]

@embleton Right. I understand it is a bug, but I actually prefer the functionality the bug is causing. Since there are users who prefer the bug and some who want it to work as designed, I was positing that they could update the functionality to meet the needs/desires of both groups of users.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Agreed, @james_whalley, it would be best to have a choice.  Our teachers would mostly want students assigned to only one tag per set, mutually exclusive groups; but I can see that it would be useful in some situations to be assigned more than one.  Would it be possible to simply assign tags that are not in a set for those instances?  

[james_whalley]

@Nancy_Webb_CCSF A tag not in a set would work for that. It's probably not a huge issue. I do imagine that a few instructors will build tags within a tag set, not realizing the limitation and then be frustrated when they go to list one or two students with a second tag in the set after having gotten all of the other students assigned.

[tle1]

Can assignments only be assigned to a single tag at a time?

This seems a little limiting.

The assign-to interface lets me add multiple tags either as separate assign-to or in the same assign-to but after saving it only saves one tag or tag variant to the assignment.

edit: Sometimes it lets you save two groups (tags) other times it deletes one or both or all of the tags. Sometimes it even deletes sections assigned along with a tag on the same assign-to.

It seems like putting a due date helps retain tags but not all the time. I can't pin down what's exactly causing the behavior.

I was trying to assign two variants in the same tag set to an assignment and I couldn't get two to stick. Then I noticed the behavior being erratic in holding any multiple tags, variant or not. 

edit 2: new observation -- the assign-to in the full edit page seems to mostly work. But the assign-to in the assign-to only pullout is the one that is deleting groups/sections after saving.

[tle1]

I was looking over some tag and group assignment interactions and noticed something that could cause problems.

 

I have a groupset with 2 groups

- Students ABC and DEF are in groups 1 and 2.

- Students ACE are in Tag TS-One Blue (a variant)

- Only Tag TS-One Blue is assigned to the group assignment (only they have editable grades in the gradebook)

However it still seems to affect the unassigned students, B D F in the gradebook.

Ideally there won't be group assignments assigned across tags that conflict with groups and groupsets but we all know it will happen.

It would be nice if there was a safeguard to prevent unintended grading results when using tags and group assignments together.

[SamGarza1]

Hi @tle1, using Tags with group assignments is not a supported use case. Groups will have to be continued to be used for assigning group assignments. Thank you for identifying this as a potential UX issue with group assignments; I'll ticket this for our team to investigate and address. 

[DanJagger]

Hi @SamGarza1 

Trying the CSV Diff Tag upload and finding some issues...Please can you advise...

• There's still a limit of 10 Tags per Group Set - Can this be changed? its very limiting, but also...
• Managed to create a Group Set with 10+ tags via the Import which then errored when editing - it also seemed to merge previous uploads - see attachment
• Previously deleted Tags reappeared randomly
• The CSV Template download contains a lot of information about previous Tags/Tag Groups that no longer exist
• The CSV Template includes a Name column that is not referenced in any of the guidance - can we have some consistency here please
• Using 10 Tags per Tag Group I still hit a limit at 40 Tags - I'm sure I've read the limit is much higher - see attached
• It's unclear in the guidance if you can create and allocate Tags in a single CSV or if you need to create them first - can this be clarified please in the guidance

I'm supporting a cohort of 260 students and want to be able to tag them into 52 Groups of 4 so that supervisors can work closely with their students but this is proving really difficult with the Diff Tags and this isn't really a large cohort for our institution.

[lhaddad]

Hi, @SamGarza1 

I only enabled the "Add" permission for the teachers, and I am observing the following issues:

I created the tag and assigned it to students, however, the instructor doesn't see the tag icon next to the student name.

Also, when the instructor tried to delete a tag, the following pops up. They shouldn't because the "delete" permission is not enabled, however the error message is somehow confusing. It would be ideal to have a pop-up message notifying them they cannot delete the tag.

It would be helpful if the Upload CVS button is disabled when only the "add" permission is enabled.

Thank you for looking into this.

Leila Haddad