[Gradebook] Gradebook and Speedgrader dropdown: Visible, Invisible, and More Options

In New Gradebook, instructors intuit incorrectly that Hide and Post replace Mute/Unmute. They believe these actions affect future grades. They do not know to look for the Grade Posting Policy.

 

Improving Canvas Guides only helps people who think they don't know what they're doing and "stop and ask for directions." At my campus, the onus has been put on instructional designers and admins to try to get the word out that these tools don't function the way they seem like they would. Because we use a lot of adjuncts, we will need to continue this campaign for as long as the tool is like this in Canvas. It's not a case where we teach people once and it's fine. Every new person will have to be taught not to trust their intuition with this tool. 

 

This is unsustainable and erodes user trust in Canvas.

 

Therefore, I suggest making Grade Posting Policy and Hide/Post more intuitive in both Grades and SpeedGrader.

 

In both SpeedGrader and Grades (so they match), give three clickable options:

  • Visible [would make past and future submissions visible to students]
  • Invisible [would make past and future submissions invisible to students]  
  • More Options [would open a right-side tray]

 

Notice Visible and Invisible are not verbs; they are states of being. This is what instructors want: to know what state an assignment is currently in and to be able to easily toggle it. Depending on how the assignment is set, either Visible or Invisible will be checked. The eyeball can give an icon clue without even clicking into this menu.

 

For the small number of people who need more granular control over the visibility of the assignment, More Options can open a right-side tray (or a pop-up or whatever). This tray/pop-up can control more options for whether future grades are posted or not, etc).  

 

The benefit to this system is it keeps it clean and simple for the vast number of users who really miss the mute/unmute toggle, but it allows more granular access for advanced users who need it. 

 

Scenario:

Scenario 1

I click into SG to grade a submission. A quick peek at the eyeball shows that it doesn't have a slash through it, so I know it's visible to students. I click the eyeball, see the check is next to Visible, and click Invisible. I grade and click the eyeball again, change the state to invisible. 

 

Scenario 2:

I've graded two submissions and look to see, oh shoot! The eyeball doesn't have a slash through it. I quickly click on the eyeball, change it to Invisible, and (this is a major change from currently) can grade the rest of the assignment, knowing with confidence that no students can see their grades. 

 

Scenario 3:

I'm setting my gradebook up for the term and quickly scan through the assignments. The eyeball quickly tells me which items are invisible to students. 

 

Scenario 4:

Several students are late with their assignment. Against the advice of my instructional designer, who is worried about academic integrity, I want to release feedback for the assignments I've already graded. But as the assignments come in, I'd prefer to hold off on releasing feedback for the tardy people until those are graded. I don't see an easy way to do that, so now I know I need to ask for directions, either by asking my ID or searching on Canvas. I see the More Options feature, click on that, and from there can control who gets the feedback released. This is not something I anticipate having to do often, so I don't mind having another click to get there. 

 

Yes, I editorialized a bit in the last one, and that's because More Options would not be relevant to most people. It makes sense to have the intuitive option foremost, with the more complex, advanced options hidden behind a click. 

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17 Comments
vancej
Community Participant

Katie,

I appreciate the conversation as well. It is hard  to test out and the  "nooks and crannies" of such a robust LMS system. Now, I know how to train/guide my faculty on this feature at the moment. I am in support of your hope fro Canvas to read this conversation and other  ideas that have been suggested by  other users. If Canvas does not put back Mute/UnMute, then at least consider Steve's suggestion where the grading policy is included with the  Post/Hide options. When a faculty member clicks on  Hide, they should be  presented with choices on how to Post or Hide grades. In the case where the instructor has not entered any grades and the due date has not passed, then the Post option should be visible where the instructor is given the  option to Make Visible and Send Notification or Make  Invisible and Do not Notify. If Make Invisible is selected, then the Invisible or simply the eyeball slash icon is displayed. 

Jason

vancej
Community Participant

Steven,

"At least in my experience there is almost always at least one missing submission, and so hide/post is only unavailable to faculty until the due time passes. "

So wouldn't that mean, the faculty member would need to be trained to enable the Grading Policy at the onset? So when the zeros are inputted by Canvas, the column is already hidden.

Jason

venitk
Community Champion

Ideally, I agree it would be great if we could just train the faculty to understand the tools. However, I work with over a hundred faculty. It would be difficult to sit down with each to explain the nuances of the gradebook when they're also trying to earn tenure, serve on committees, mentor students, write recommendations, research, teach their other classes, etc, isn't something they have time for. I've tried to explain it over email, but it's really really complicated. My faculty, at least, need something simple that works as expected. I've been studying this new feature since July and I just learned about that missing grade thing. Most of the IDs I work with don't understand it. They didn't know about the difference between hide and manual. It's just too complicated, IMO. 

Thanks for engaging in this conversation,  @vancej  and steven

Steven_S
Community Champion

In general, requiring everyone to be trained to follow the same workflow you might follow is not practical.  We all have different courses designed around the needs of different subjects and different students. 

There are only certain assignments with manual grading where manual release even makes sense for my course, and so this is not something I would do for every assignment.  It seems to me that setting up manual release for just a few assignments way in advance is asking for some faculty to forget to release grades.  Hiding grades immediately before grading makes us more likely to remember that these grades still need to be released, and hiding grades before grading from within speedgrader is a useful common sense feature that previously existed with the mute/unmute feature.

 

Also in my own course, I would never set the manual grading policy way in advance.  The missing zeros are entered at the due date, and those zeros are there to inspire those students to submit during the short late-penalty period I allow.  I want students to see what those zeros do to their grades, and I definitely did not turn on the missing policy so that I would need to log in and release the missing zeros.  If I hid the zeros until I entered grades the assignment would lock before students saw the zeros, and those students would have no remaining opportunity to catch up with partial credit for a late submission.

Steven_S
Community Champion

Another semester and I've run into this issue again.  Even knowing that I needed to use the manual posting policy to "mute" while grading, and that "hide grades" is the only way to hide existing grades, I still ended up publishing a grade prematurely.  How?

 

I consciously chose to leave the zeros for missing submissions posted.  I did not notice that the one late submission, which I had previously excused from the late penalty, had already been "published" as a zero.  Therefore this student received updates and notifications in real time. 

 

That might seem like a small issue to many, but the assignment was muted so that I could save partially graded rubrics focusing on certain criteria the first time through and other criteria later. The published grade was only based on 50% of the rubric, because I thought it was hidden from students!

 

While I'm OK with the separation of posting policies and hide/post grades (as long as the controls are in the same place), there are two controls that should always be combined:  Setting a manual posting policy for newly entered grades should automatically result in a manual posting policy for edited or updated grades.

KristinL
Community Team
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KristinL
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