Add time limit to Assignments

[ShimonAgur]

With many institutions delivering exams online these days, it would be good to have time limit to Assignment so the clock start ticking when a student starts the assignment.

Quiz time limit + essay question or upload file don't give the right solution because they can't have plagiarism review (Turnitin in my case...).

[ryest]

For me either a time limit for assignments or annotation on quizzes.  

I teach math asynchronously.  I would like to give a timed exam.  I want them to take it when it's convenient for them, as my students have jobs, families, etc.  I give them the whole day 10a to 10p.  Some students don't have those limits on their time.  So they get twelve hours to take the exam.

Why don't I use quizzes?  There is no to adequately annotate the PDF submitted like there is with Assignments.  With math, circling the incorrect area and providing feedback on the spot is pivotal.

So my choice is between providing consistent administration of exams and providing adequate feedback.

[Stef_retired]

@ryest 

Thanks for your comment. Have you added your thoughts to  New Quizzes: Allow annotated feedback in Speedgrad... ? It sounds like that, if implemented, would also address your use case.

[jwillin]

Hi,

One of our instructors has used timed quizzes for this purpose but the only thing that quizzes offers over assignments is the timer. Every other aspect of the workflow in quizzes is less satisfactory for the instructor. 

In particular is the added time that it takes to work through the grading of the uploaded files because  you have to download them and you also have to put in the question points and then update the quiz score as opposed to just putting in the score as you do in an assignment. Not a huge difference maybe, unless you've got a 120 students, then every click matters.

We are working around the issue to some extent by using an essay question instead of a file upload question. We gave the students instructions on how to embed the file in the rich content editor and choose the 'expand preview automatically option' which eliminates the need for the instructor to download and open the file. So that will hopefully help a little bit but a timer on the regular assignments tool would be so much more satisfactory,

Thank you,

John Willingham
Emory University

[matt_price]

My experience is very similar to that describe by @jwillin . All the workarounds I can think of add significant complexity to the process & are inferior to the simple assignment-grading process, so if possible I'd like to be able to just tweak the latter. For me, this would be a significant life improvement.

I very much hope this gets implemented some day!

[jesslyn_boiscla]

I also want to echo @jwillin 's comment—we have a need for timed assignments with a bulk download option for submissions. The workaround of using an essay question with a submitted file embedded in the RCE with an expanded preview doesn't seem to work with New Quizzes (please correct me if that's not right). so we'd want to keep that in mind for the future once Classic Quizzes are deprecated. We'd definitely prefer to keep these types of assignments in Canvas rather than find another tool to handle this, so we'd appreciate this feature being implemented!

[ShimonAgur]

Hello Instructure team,

Again , this time of the year and we are approaching the exam term soon.

With many institutions still online and actually adopted the online exams for a longer range , this will be a huge addition if you can add time limit to Assignments like the Quizzes have.

Please can you update about that soon? 

thank you 

[KatieBertel]

Problem statement:

Instructors need the ability to add time constraints to assignments and enhanced options for releasing assignment details to students. Assignments allows instructors to specify an availability window but there is no way to limit how long students have to complete an assignment once started. Additionally, there is no way to restrict when students have access to an assignment's question, prompt, or template, thus students can access this information as soon as an assignment is available. Most often, these features are needed for take-home exams that are essay or math-based (i.e., show your work/thinking) and require students to upload their submission (i.e., doc, pdf, mp3, etc.).

Proposed solution:

Add a timer feature to Assignments that includes enhanced assignment release options. The proposed feature should 1) allow instructors to set a time limit for students once they start the assignment and 2) hide the assignment description until students click the “Start Assignment” button. Similar functionality is available for assignments in third-party tools like Gradescope.

The current workaround is to create a quiz using the “file upload” question type. In this workaround, the grading workflow for instructors requires considerable time and effort. Instructors cannot grade file upload questions from within SpeedGrader, which presents two cascading obstacles: valuable grading tools in SpeedGrader are inaccessible (e.g., DocViewer annotations) and instructors must download student submissions in order to view/grade them.

Even though instructors can bulk download submissions, they cannot re-upload submissions in bulk (like in Assignments). If instructors annotate the submissions offline, they must manually upload each annotated submission as a comment in SpeedGrader or email students individually. The simple need for enhanced assignment rules and functionality becomes an unnecessarily cumbersome task.

There are many ways these two features could be integrated with Assignments as they build off existing options in Canvas. The option to hide the assignment description could be a checkbox that becomes available only if the timer option is selected–similar to the expanded options for “Allow Multiple Attempts” in Classic Quizzes and “Group Assignment” in Assignments. Adding a timer also comes with the need to add extra time for students with accommodations–similar to the “Moderate Quiz” feature in Quizzes.

Alternatively, allowing SpeedGrader/DocViewer to open "file upload" questions directly in the browser rather than requiring instructors to download the submissions could address this problem.

User role(s):

instructor,ta

[ProductPanda]

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