Ability to unpublish assignments with student submissions

[zellera]

I would love to be able to unpublish (not delete) assignments that have student submissions about a week after the due date. The list of assignments is tremendously long, especially now at the end of the year because every single assignment shows up. They have to wait a long time for the list to populate in order to turn in an assignment as well because there are so many. I always unpublish assignments that have past when able to clear their submission list and to do list as well. I feel like I was able to do this before, but am not able to this year. Can this please happen, especially if we have to continue online teaching next school year?

Thanks!

[awilliams]

Hi,  @zellera . Do you still want the students' scores on these assignments to count towards their total grade? If so, then I don't believe this idea would work because unpublishing an assignment takes it out of the total grade calculation.

[zellera]

Hello! Yes I would still like the grades to stay and be counted in the final quarter grade. This used to be possible, a few years ago. I don't want to delete, just to unpublish it. It would still show on my end, just not the students'. Also, I do not use the final grades in Canvas, so I guess it would not really matter. My school pushes grades to PowerSchool, so once the grade is pushed, I no longer need the assignment. I am just trying to avoid deleting assignments so I do not need to recreate everything the following school year.

I hope this makes sense...

Sra. Amy Zeller

Spanish Teacher

World Languages Department Chair

Spanish Club Moderator

330.773.6658

hoban.org

One Holy Cross Blvd, Akron, OH 44306

[awilliams]

Hi, Amy. I understand you are trying to make things as simple for the students as possible and I commend you on that effort. However, I still think there are some things to consider before taking this approach. Changing unpublished assignments to still factor into the gradebook would be a major shift and disrupt the workflow of the majority of people who use unpublished assignments as they currently function. Furthermore, as a student, it can be helpful to remember what I received as a grade, what feedback was given, and to be able to retrieve my submissions for that assignment. Unpublishing the assignment would remove a students ability to review the assignment for these purposes. Also, I have worked with some faculty who used external grade systems beyond Canvas and it always worked out best when both grade books were in harmony with one another. In my experience, students were disconcerted by seeing different grades in different places.

Perhaps it will assuage some of your concerns about the long list of assignments to know that students will only see a certain number of upcoming items listed on their To-Do list. If you use modules to list the assignments along with other learning activities then students can collapse the modules for the weeks they have completed. Additionally, there are other features within Canvas that help students stay on track even in the event of a long list of assignments such as the calendar and syllabus page.

With all of this in mind, do you still feel assignments with student submissions being unpublished is a necessary change to Canvas or is there another way this can be accomplished?

[zellera]

Hello! Thank you for getting back to me. At my school we also use

PowerSchool and PowerSchool has student's final grades, so they do not need

to match Canvas. Also, students complete much of their work in notability

and are able to pull up old activities there to review them. I do still

feel this would be helpful to those who wanted to use it as the to do list

does not seem to show all assignments, so I have students relying on

looking at a page with assignments listed, as do all of the teachers at my

school. My modules show up, but not all assignments.

One a side note, I also find it interesting that this school year students

are able to see their 'grade' for the quarter in Canvas even though I have

it blocked as not everything was entered into Canvas.

Thank you and I hope we can figure out something that can reduce the list

of assignments that pop up when students are submitting from Notability.

Maybe that is more the angle to take here.

Thank you in advance,

Amy Zeller

[annespinoza]

This is really absurd! In other LMS's you can 'hide' old assignments with or without submissions. Its as if Canvas doesn't understand what it's like to have a learning disability. All of those past assignments become very visually overwhelming for many students. In addition, while looking over old assignments might be nice, if the assignment is a 'get to know you' type of thing (of which I have several) then that is certainly not something any student needs cluttering up their screen. 

Deleting it is really not an option either since you may need evidence that the assignment was indeed missing when semester grades get posted. 

Perhaps they need an extra status, published, unpublished, and hidden. With hidden it would just be removed from student view but still factored into the grade book. 

[hemerson]

I agree! I'm using a course as a resource for a group of students and there are no real grades involved. They need to submit a particular form each quarter and I'd like to hide the fall assignment so they don't get mixed up with the winter submissions. 

[meghan_kennedy]

I agree. I use Canvas at a college and this system makes sense. My kids are using it in elementary school and here it does not. They have quarter grades and so being able to unpublish assignments that have been submitted is helpful because their grades "start over." Right now it is confusing and overwhelming. The elementary school kids will have 30+ weeks of modules and assignments if they instructors can't unpublish items that students have completed. Yikes!

[SHD]

I recently discovered that an assignment that I had decided against and had not meant for students to see had been published on my course site. Though I had not intended for students to complete this assignment, a few of them rather dutifully did so. As I am unable to unpublish it, despite having directed students to NOT complete the assignment, because the prompt remains visible to students, another handful of them have done so. It's not clear to me why an instructor does not have complete control over what students can and cannot see. We make mistakes (as in this case), and we should be able to correct such errors; however, the inability to unpublish an assignment to which students have submitted can compound the error as in my recent experience. Thank you in advance for considering this suggestion.

[rblumjose]

I too would like the ability to unpublish or "hide" assignments. We just started quarter 2 so teachers and students do not need to go back into their quarter 1 assignments anymore. It's just distracting and clutters the gradebook. Please enable this feature.

[leanne_m_woods]

We're getting tangled in vocabulary. "Unpublish" seems too specific. I want students to be able to focus on missing assignments that are still within the deadline. I want to hide missing assignments where the deadline has passed. HELP. 

Also, I wish I could live chat about this rather than float this message in a bottle out when I have a class affected by this issue in 90min...

[gnoack]

I think an easy fix would be to use the Modules to organize assignments for students. I don't allow students to view the assignment page as I think it's too confusing and a jumbled mess.  Instead, I publish all activities and resources in modules.  Students can collapse modules to only show what is relevant, or instructors can unpublish modules to remove them from students view. I believe this can be done regardless if the assignment is published. 

For elementary schools, I would recommend using a new course shell for each grading period. I used to teach elementary, and I can sympathize, you have a large amount of grade columns to sort through. 

[wilcoxs]

I teach in an alternative school and sometimes recycle assignments as students come and go.  The ability to "Hide" assignments would be extremely helpful.  However, given that we can't, as suggested earlier, I also use Modules that cover one or two weeks at a time (at the most).  When we finish a Module, I can unpublish the module which "hides" all the assignments, pages, etc., that are in the Module.  I also "Hide" the "Assignments" link on the left in Canvas, along with the "Quizzes" and "Pages."  This way, students MUST go through the Modules to get to what they want.  When a Module is complete and they no longer need access, I unpublish the Module and it no longer shows for the student.  For my own sake, every time I create a Module, I move it to the top, so as I look at all the Modules and accompanying assignments, quizzes, etc., I see them in descending order current module on top, the one from last week just under, down to the first module we did being at the very bottom.  This keeps the students' view clean and keeps me from having to scroll all the way to the bottom every time.  

[annespinoza]

Ugh! Canvas, this is silly. These are good workarounds but why are we having to come up with workarounds? I don't really want to unpublish an entire module because there are parts of it that the kids might need access to throughout the class. I don't want to move items out of a module and into one I can unpublish either since I'd have to rebuild the modules every semester to start a new class. I simply want to turn off little assignments within each module and leave the pages with information.  

[wilcoxs]

@annespinoza Totally agree. Those are workarounds, and there needs to be a feature that allows teachers to hide individual assignments from the students' view.  If it were available, I would be using that feature all the time! 

[DanaTafoya]

A work around that I am not sure maintains grading integrity is - 

I created a module called "Archives" and move completed assignments into the module. The module remains unpublished, even though the content is published. The content is then not visible to students. 

[wilcoxs]

I do that, too.  I don’t have to worry about the integrity of the grades.  I have an unpublished module called Parking Lot that I move assignments to. But it’s a pain to have to move things back and forth. 

[russell_monagha]

I agree with the above. With remote learning, we use daily assignments to help us collect the students' submissions, which means that every day we have a new assignment. Maybe not the best method but it works. You could imagine with over 200 days of lockdown in our state how many assignments there are. 

Have there been any other resolutions here?

[jjjkkk]

Can there be an option to hide assignments that have passed from students' thread screen without having to delete them? Or, can we have the ability to unpublish an assignment after student work has been submitted? As the semester goes on, the list of assignments on the students module screen gets very long.  The assignments need to stay in the course and published, but don't need to always be visible to the students. It would very helpful to be able to unpublish various assignments for the students (even if work was submitted and graded) so that it lessens the number of items visible to students.

[russell_monagha]

Can someone just clarify for me, If I move my assignments to an unpublished module, will the assignments still not show up in the marks section? Our issue is a cluttered modules page AND a marks section that is hard for parents to find what they're looking for with so many assignments.