[SpeedGrader] SpeedGrader should open pdfs in DocViewer for New Quizzes

When students submit their work as pdf documents for quizzes, then the instructor need to download the pdfs for grading. When students submit their work as pdf documents for assignments, then DocViewer will open them for grading and commenting, which makes grading easier. I just want the same feature for quizzes.

Hence please add the following functionality:

SpeedGreader should open pdfs in DocViewer for grading quizzes.

Added to Theme

82 Comments
jtillerson
Community Member

yes please make this available

cvalle
Community Participant

Math and science teachers need this ASAP! 

jennifersimpson
Community Member

This is such a desperately needed feature.  I purposefully avoid this style of question because it triples the amount of time it takes for me to grade, plus all the time to go through my downloads folder and delete all the submissions.  New Quizzes has many great features, but there is room for improvement and this is one of those improvements.

Canvas20202
Community Member

It seems like the only way to make Canvas implement this in a timely manner is through our schools. Please talk to your IT departments and ask them to talk about this feature in their meetings with Canvas representatives.

Also: just commenting here is not doing anything, Canvas check the number of votes (as of now there are only 97) - they consider implementing only the suggestions with the highest number of votes. In other words: this suggestion, unfortunately, does not have any chance to be implemented if there is no pressure directly from our schools.

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

@Canvas20202 The number and quality of the comments are of great importance to our developers: all ideas are considered equally, regardless of their ratings. Please read through How do idea conversations work in the Canvas Community? for details.

Canvas20202
Community Member

@Stef_retired This is not what one of your colleagues wrote me: "Our engineers can't create all the suggestions made on the community at the same time so they prioritize the suggestions with the most votes."

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

@Canvas20202 I'm sorry that you received that incorrect guidance from a colleague; the feature development and ideation process is fully documented here.

gcrouch
Community Member

This is crazy - I can imagine no use-case where it is preferable to download each file for grading within a quiz. There is no ability to markup and it's confusing for students to have multiple parts of an exam. This kills assessment for free answer STEM courses...

Greg

watsonnk
Community Participant

I'd not realised that the behaviour of Quiz/Assignment file uploads and timing were as they are until today. This is either a breaking feature or bug, depending on your viewpoint.  It cannot be an intentional design feature, presumably an accidental inconsistency arising from bolting together things that were not originally so.

This just make no sense, as @gcrouch and others have pointed out.  The use case is:

1. Need to have a students do an assessment under timed conditions (therefore has to be a Canvas Quiz, as assignments don't have timing capability) within a larger time window (time zones and flexbility in general, individual circumstances);

2. Need to have be able to view/annotate submitted work using SpeedGrader, also limit filetype of uploads to .pdf (therefore has to be a Canvas Assignment).

We cannot start downloading work, grading online, and re-uploading... and although there are some creative workarounds involving use of assignments and quizzes in parallel, these are exactly that, not what we should expect students to do under exam-like conditions.

Given this and similar discussions have been going on for quite some time, and that there is a need for this to just work now more than ever, it's a little disappointing that Instructure has not implemented it.

I do understand the feature development workflow, having tried to get another very basic feature implemented (no gradebook history for large courses) a few years ago, and I do appreciated the community input approach to guiding development.

However, for something as basic as fixing a hard-to-understand inconsistency between the way Assignments and Quizzes behave, plus the evident need for such a feature, I think the feature development workflow itself might benefit from some review.  For this one, I would hope Instructure might want to lead by reviewing what seems necessary and pragmatic rather than following sheer weight of numbers. Also, it's just too slow to be honest.

At some level, if there are other platforms that are better suited, perhaps the pragmatic approach is not to use Canvas for assignments that need timing?

Best regards

        Nigel

lucy_p_hobbs
Community Member
 

Assignment submissions are no problem to grade using the Speedgrader annotation tools, especially on iPad. However, the problem comes in when having to mark assessments in quizzes. I need to be able to annotate directly onto the quiz submission in order for my marking to be meaningful to the students.

Because Quizzes does not have this feature, I have to download and save every quiz submission as a pdf, mark it using a pdf annotator and then re-upload as a comment attachment in speedgrader. This is very time-consuming when there are 300+ papers to grade.

Canvas has so many great features but it seems that this vital feature has been overlooked. Please add this feature to Quizzes, I know many language and humanities teachers at my school would be SO grateful.