Import Grade Comments

[johnpj]

Problem:

Instructors need to upload comments for each student for an external assignment and have it displayed in the gradebook view for students.

Use Case:

This is especially significant when uploading assignment scores from an external system (student response "clicker" tools, Scantron services, external learning assessments). Often those external tools have a comments field with important details regarding the student's performance. In some cases the external system includes critical item information (e.g. "You answered A; The correct answer was B").

Proposed Solution:

1. Allow a comments field (column) in the gradebook import csv file.
2. Display the comment in a similar way that assignment comments are currently handled.
3. BONUS POINTS: Allow the comments to be exported in the Gradebook export csv

[jsraquet]

Thanks Ben.

I (we all, I assume) expect some flaws but the fact that the producers/manufacturers see these flaws as something to be addressed in the future (when it appears to have been ignored for a year already) implies that the producer does not actually understand the problem. My impression is that this is not a good tool for "large" classes but I do not even know what size is considered large...We used our previous LMS for a number of years and along the way I attempted to make my classes work with the tool, now that we have changed the tool some of the methods I thought I optimized may need to be revisited??? Why do tools that are supposed to "make our lives easier" end up using more of our time and effort with less benefits? We are having the same type of problem with our classroom response technologies. Are we supposed to put more time into learning the tools and managing data and less time in the actual course material?

Thank you for the effort you are putting in to solving, or at least addressing, this problem.

Just wonder if our predecessors had it right: just post the grades on the wall outside your door:\

[benjamin_reynol]

Hi Jeff,

You are definitely right to say we all expect changes and flaws.  We adopted Canvas in 2014 and I was one of the proponents for the change as the marketing of the tool seemed to suggest less flaws especially since Instructure touted the functions within Canvas for managing multi-section classes.  I was actually the faculty member who was convincing many of my angry peers to give this new LMS a chance since it sounds like it had lots of great potential (we had just barely finished a 2 year switch to a different LMS when Canvas was abruptly adopted out of the blue and thrust upon us). Of course, like anything you purchase, you just don't know what is really in the box until you are stuck with it. The great thing about software especially in organization-level adoptions is that there is no return policy.  If I could stick Canvas back in a box and take it to the return desk at the store - I would. Nonetheless, we are stuck with it as an organization, at least on the 5-10 year cycle of either the market hold of the software before Instructure moves onto the corporate world and leaves education alone, or when a change occurs in our upper administration such as the VP for libraries or director of IT who often make these decisions for faculty.

As far as size, we have tried to explain this to Instructure on numerous occasions.  Since they built the original architecture of Canvas for K-12 classrooms, the notion of anything besides 1 'teacher' and 30-50 students was not what their engineers built the core architecture around.  They certainly have not spent much effort within their development efforts addressing anything different than that original teaching premise.  Indeed, that works for many faculty who teach one or two small upper division or graduate classes and Instructure seems fine as a company shoehorning their software to reach such a low bar of expectation. 

For those of us working with large lower division courses - the world looks different.  In my world of large, our institution has roughly 25,000 residential undergraduates so we are reasonably big, but not in the largest in the country. In my world, I am a coordinator who oversees courses for which - by the time they graduate - 65% of the students at our entire institution will take one of the courses with my name on it.   For instance, this fall we had nearly 6000 new freshman/1st year students and nearly 4000 of those will take one of my courses.  As far as our IT group is concerned and vendors like Instructure - I am just n = 1 faculty member.  However, the courses I design and the tools that I use will impact 65-70% of the students at my institution (most in their first year of college).  To accomplish that, I have an army of graduate teaching assistants actually in the classroom with the students.  Thus, my 'large' course world comes out to ~4500 students per year, 6 separate courses (different LMS structures), 75 individual teaching assistants, 10-12 staff/support personnel, and 1 overall coordinator (me).  I am responsible for management of the personnel as well as design and implementation of all curriculum for those courses (just as if I taught a single 30 student class - but I live at a different scale).

To manage and coordinate all of that - I have the LMS.  I agree with you - the claims are always that the tools are supposed to be making our lives easier - they certainly do not and Canvas is definitely not the tool for larger courses and definitely not multi-section courses with TAs and/or multiple instructors.  Instructure simply never thought about this before they designed the basic core architecture and they certainly have only been focused on superficial feature fixes in the years since this was identified as a problem.  I have been on conference calls and spoken with many other faculty and support personnel from around the country - the problem is well known, Instructure has just not been timely or attentive to dealing with these fundamentally basic problems in large higher education institutions. 

Some common problems: not being able to upload a set of text feedback or comments (the focus of this forum thread), add a simple alphanumeric column into the gradebook that is not attached to an assignment, create a simple calculated column in the gradebook that is not an assignment (such as 'sum/subtract,multiply/divide' a set of raw scores to generate a calculated score), show and download basic stats/analytics (min, max, mode, median, average) by assignments and/or by sections for large classes that are multi-section.  As Carole pointed out, these are pretty basic features, but the nature of the way Instructure has setup their product development efforts has certainly created a severe hindrance to improving any of these fundamental flaws and limitations in the Canvas interface.

I wish I could share great solutions with you.  This week is not the week - classes for us start on Tues and I can say my colleagues and I have shared many Canvas horror stories this week trying to setup our courses for the semester.  Never once did we glow about how great Canvas is and -  Instructure is like any company - the best employees are in marketing - they turn excrement into gold and can spin any statistic.  Just look at the glowing 'adoption rates' for Canvas - never mind that faculty have zero choice of LMS when an institution adopts them - thus, of course the adoption rates are high.  The implication is that the users/faculty actually chose Canvas willingly- no, it is really a 'forced adoption rate' with the decision usually made at the administrative and/or IT level.  Faculty may have some random opportunity to provide thoughts and feedback but, at the end of the day, someone who is likely not in the classroom made the decision to buy into Canvas and thus forced the rest of us who teach in the trenches to follow along.

Within my institution, I started as a great proponent of Canvas and, 3 years later, I have certainly become one of its major detractors and vocal critics (in case this tome doesn't make that obvious).  That decadence in my view of Canvas over 3 years was due to the complete lack of effort on behalf of Instructure to correct these fundamental flaws and lack of basic features in their software.   I went from the faculty member convincing others to give Canvas a try, to the faculty member who is working with other companies looking for alternatives.  I can certainly take my courses and stop using our LMS (nothing at my institution demands I use the LMS for my 4500 students per year).  Thus, if I can find an alternative to adopt - I will take it and remove my classes from Canvas. Of course, I don't take that decision lightly and I absolutely hate that it will cost students money since an alternative would require students to purchase software access each semester when our institutional costs cover the LMS core. 

Finally - yes, I think you might have hit the nail on the head - just post the grades on the wall outside your door and file folders of master copies for students to take to the copy machine and make their own handouts. If Canvas sends us backward - maybe we should follow its lead.

Cheers!

-Ben

[evankendall]

Ugh. How is that the professional software designers who pitched the state of California on their capable system are not able to more quickly resolve obvious deficiencies? This is the second feature that I have voted on that needs to be included. And it shouldn't be that hard to do.

[Renee_Carney]

This idea was moved from Under Consideration stage (no longer in use) to the Product Radar stage.  

This change was made as part of a feature idea process evolution.  Find more information, and contribute insights, by joining Focus Group: DRAFT Feature Idea Space. 

[bryanjos]

While this feature gets developed, I have come across an interesting workaround.  Canvas assignments allow you to download all the students' submitted files at once, then re-upload the files again.  I didn't fully understand why this re-upload option existed until I realized that you can add comments or feedback to the files, save the files with the same filenames, and re-upload them, creating file attachments as part of your grading comments (it doesn't replace the original files but uploads them as comment attachments).

The interesting part is that you can save a file with the same filename as the original file, plus add a .pdf to the original extension (e.g., OriginalFileName.OriginalFileExtension.pdf).  So for instance, you could save a PDF file with the file name OriginalFileName.OriginalFileExtension.pdf and then ZIP it up and re-upload it to Canvas.  Canvas claims to trim off the .pdf extension because it was not part of the original file name, but when I download the new file, my computer recognizes it as a PDF file named OriginalFileName.OriginalFileExtension.pdf!  This helps my workflow by letting me save PDF files of comments in an automated fashion, then re-upload them so students can see their feedback.  I'm not sure if this works with other file types, but I expect it could.

[RobDitto]

Re-Upload Submissions is a great, underutilized feature. It does work well with PDFs, albeit less well with other file types. I have opened a case with Canvas Support about "corrupted file" error messages seen when Re-Upload Submissions is used with Microsoft Word .docx files. I encourage other affected users to do the same, or to report a problem at their institution which can be escalated by administrators to Canvas Support.

[andrew_chen]

Just as an alternative workaround for some of the other participants in this conversation, for our largest classes we have opted to upload the marks to canvas, and use mail merge to e-mail the comments out to students in order to avoid copy-pasting them into Canvas manually.

[James]

I like this use case  @tbunag  and have seen similar requests a few other times in the Community. I had an idea for a Canvancement on Tuesday evening that might help with this issue. This feature was actually a by-product of the original idea, but it quickly followed. I'm glad to see there's a demand for it.

[James]

 @vkg ,

Would it have to be a CSV upload? Could a copy/paste of the contents of the spreadsheet work instead?

[bryanjos]

Yes, I've just started using mail merge.  The problem with my approach above (i.e., re-uploading PDF files) is that it only works for Assignments.  Canvas Quizzes do not allow you the option to re-upload.  But my primary purpose in uploading feedback was to give students feedback on quizzes.  I don't want to use an Assignment for online exams because then students would be able to upload multiple attempts and could always download their exam file.  This is not a good option when you have multiple sections taking the exam over multiple days.  So instead it's nice to be able to upload the grades to Canvas where they're accessible to each student privately (no FERPA violation) but upload the PDF feedback files under randomly generated numeric filenames to a publicly accessible server (you want to use a server host where you can control the filename and simply upload through FTP or cPanel, etc., instead of getting a crazy server-generated hashed filename).  Then use mail merge to e-mail each student a link to his or her unique filename.  If you keep each PDF completely anonymous, and use a sufficiently large random number range, you can make it difficult for students to discover another student's feedback file and, even if they do find one, they don't know who it belongs to.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think FERPA would be upset about this?

What's more, if you want to get really fancy, MailChimp (and probably others) allows you to embed unique images into each e-mail, so you could even include the feedback in the e-mail itself.  I hadn't thought about including unique comments in each e-mail through mail merge, but this should be pretty straightforward too.

[tbunag]

I'm curious about how you use uploaded comments for quizzes and why.  Could you provide a bit more explanation of your process?

[bryanjos]

Hi,  @tbunag ‌,

Yes, I teach an engineering graphics class with about 240 students, and I administer the exams through Canvas.  Some exams have multiple-choice components, but they all have drawing components done with AutoCAD.  Previously I and/or a grader would grade the drawing components by hand, but this is a very time-consuming and tedious process.  We'd end up spending the most time grading the students who had the least understanding of the skills (because they had the most errors), when often these errors were repetitive and based on simple misunderstandings of the concepts.  Hence the move toward more multiple-choice questions, which assess their understanding of the concepts and can be automatically graded.  Nevertheless, students need to learn how to draw using the software, and they need to understand what they missed points for.  At the moment I have a workflow that automatically evaluates their drawing against a solution drawing (using Octave, but I can explain more of that if you're interested), then produces PDF files (think MATLAB plots) with visual feedback indicating which portions of the solution drawing were missing or incorrect in each student's drawing.  When I used Blackboard in the past, I could upload text-based comments indicating what each student missed, but this was a fairly clunky way to give them visual information.  The PDF visual feedback appears to be much more helpful in showing them what they lost points for and what they should take a closer look at.

Does that answer your question?

Josiah

[tbunag]

Yes, perfectly.  Thank you!

[caleb_kemere]

In my electrical engineering project-based course, all of our assignments require students to turn in various project files in addition to answering questions. It's incredibly frustrating to manually enter grading comments, particularly when students work as a group. So annoying that instead of using Canvas, I have resorted to creating my own submission portals. 

[bryanjos]

I think it would be nice for Canvas to allow comment importing, but the workaround I described is not bad.  You might consider uploading CSV comments into MailChimp merge fields, then e-mailing each student with his or her individual comments.  As I'm learning, securing against FERPA problems is one of the biggest challenges in any of these online approaches.

[caleb_kemere]

I completely agree, but then what is the point of paying large amounts of money for an LMS if I am supposed to use Google forms and mail merges to manage grades? We already use Piazza for online discussion and announcements, so I'm not sure what would be left for Canvas to be doing...

[bryanjos]

Got it...  I don't know what your particular needs are, but Canvas can do the discussion and announcements, as well as managing homework submissions and administering quizzes/exams.  Plus it helps keep grades secure for FERPA.

[jhlieth]

What is the status of this feature (to be able to upload a comment along with a grade into the gradebook). I really need this feature.

[jsraquet]

Is this adding comments to the files, then returning (uploading) the commented files? The files my students work with do not offer the opportunity to add comments (these are three dimensional models for engineers). Even if they could it would take the same exorbitant amount of effort - I just need to upload an extra column from the spreadsheet with feedback. Students have been asking about their grades (what and why). I used to be able to have the comments attached to the grades - guess I should tell them to contact CANVAS...

Really looking for a way to add a column of text next to a column of grades...It just does not seem to be something that would be that hard.:smileyangry: 

[jsraquet]

The last status report appears to have this idea "in Product Radar" (February).

My understanding of "Radar" is that it is under review but it may:

"stay in Product Radar, indefinitely...
eventually move into other stages including In Development, or Complete...

or not to implement and moved to Archived."

It needs to make it through or restated because: "Resubmissions of Product Radar ideas will be archived"

This is my interpretation (see the link/explanation at the top of the page) so please let me know if I am mistaken (Canvas).

It has been on the table for more than a year and a half 😠