Disaggregate "submission annotation" notifications from "submission comment" notifications

[helena_ribeiro]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the  Canvas Deploy Notes (2021-07-21).

As a faculty member teaching asynchronous classes, I rely on "submission comment" notifications to communicate with students. For example, because Canvas won't register that late responses have been added to a discussion post, I request that students leave me a note in the comments when they have submitted late responses. This way, I receive a link to their submission and can update their grade right away.

Sometime in the last couple of months, Canvas has added "submission annotation" notifications, which are lumped together with the "submission comment" notifications. This means that every time a student leaves an annotation for another student in a peer review, for example, I get a separate notification email for EACH annotation. Often, this means getting dozens and dozens of emails in a short period of time, as each student might leave 10 or 12 annotations on a single assignment, times 3 essays per student, times 75 students!

Not only does this create a distressing amount of emails, these notifications have a very similar subject line to the "submission comment" notifications, and they are difficult to filter out via my email client, or to delete in bulk without potentially losing the notifications I DO need to see.  I would love for these two different kinds of notifications, which are useful in very different ways, to have their own on/off toggle, rather than be lumped together.

[Anna_Shaver]

Cf this description of the issue caused: 

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Question-Forum/Instructor-Receives-Notifications-for-Student-Peer...

And the discussion on the new "streamlining" announcement:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/The-Canvas-tl-dr/Streamlining-Canvas-Push-Notifications/bc-p/4446...

[mbs12]

Yes please!  I'm hearing from students that if they have the "submission comment" notification set to right away for my course, which is what I have always required them to do in order to be able to let them know about a problem with their submission (wrong document submitted, missing a page, etc.), they now receive a notification every time I leave an annotation on a draft of their essay in a Canvas assignment. That's 30 or so notifications they get within a 60-90 minute period from me. That's nuts. 

[concofme]

Please fix this.  I'm receiving emails EVERY TIME a student submits an annotation on another student's draft. This seems so unnecessary. Thank you!

[HBreazeale]

I have this problem as well. Please fix this! Thank you!

[sherry_cisler]

Yes, please resolve this issue, which began occurring last November with no provocation on my part.  I have no idea how or why the issue presented itself. 

Unfortunately, the only work around at present is to receive an end of day notification message with all comments listed, both annotations and submissions, then sort through potentially 100's of notifications to find any submission comments. Again, the earliest one can receive this message is end of day, which for me occurs around 6:30-7pm.  Of course, this is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is having to respond to any comments at night after a busy workday.  However even more problematic is this example:  A student may post a comment on Monday, I'm notified Tuesday night, whereas I may not get to a response until Wednesday.  The response time is far too long here.  Teaching within an asynchronous environment escalates the need and desire to respond to student inquiries in a much more timely manner.

Please address and resolve.  Thank you!

[RachelBr]

Agreed! Every time my students complete peer review, I have to halt notifications from Canvas on my phone/email because my inbox is completely overrun with peer review comments. It's very frustrating because I do not want to miss submission comments from students, which often include questions. We should be able to separate notifications for submission comments and submission annotations. It's just too much to have to receive these annotation comments every time someone completes a peer review. With multiple classes and instant notifications turned on (again, because of submission comments, this immediate notification is important), I am getting literally hundreds of these emails/notifications every day during peer review. 

[oBurgess3]

@Stef_retired I have seen that a fix for this issue is meant to currently be in Beta (to be released with the 07-07 Deploy), however, I am still receiving email notifications from Canvas about Submission Comments for individual annotations in Student Annotation assignments.

From my testing, I believe there is a Bug in the fix, whereby users will still receive notifications when the Assignment has multiple submission types. So when an Assignment  has Submission Types: Student Annotation AND Submission Type; File Upload, then graders will still receive email notifications for individual annotations that are made using the Student Annotation submission option.

[Stef_retired]

@oBurgess3  Whenever you find that functionality is not working as described in deploy or release notes, please ask Canvas Support to investigate it on your behalf. If they find that the functionality has changed relative to what's in the notes, the support agent will escalate your case to our engineers for further action.

[erinhmcmillan]

@oBurgess3 notifications are not supported in the beta environment, so you would not be able to confirm this change until it was deployed to the production environment. I have noted another ticket related to this issue for our upcoming July 21 deploy (and placed it in the notes being published tomorrow). On July 22 take a look and see if the behavior is still occurring for you—if so, please let our support teams know.

Thanks,

Erin