Administrative assignments associated with a student

[maguire]

Has anyone used an administrative assignment associated with a student? For example, we have several courses where another faculty member (not the examiner) does an assessment of a student. For example, the contents of this assessment could be a fine-grained version of the learning outcomes for the course.  This assessment is input to the examiner for the final grade.

These assessments should not be visible to the student, although the person doing the assessment may discuss elements of the assessment with the student. It is important that this assessment is only visible to the teachers in a given course and that it be treated as an aid to memory, rather that as a formal decision.

The only approach to this that I see (at the present) is to make an entry in a custom column that contains a URL to a document (in Box or some other document storage system) which contains the assessment.

Has anyone else addressed this or a similar problem?

[kona]

I might be missing something, but why can't you keep the assessment unpublished (in draft state)? The teachers in the course could still access it and view all content related to it, but the students wouldn't even know it existed.

[maguire]

While your suggest might work in the case of a single instructor or a small number of instructors with a small number of students, it lacks the notification aspect of assignments. Ideally when such an administrative assignment is assigned the assessor gets a notification that the assessment is due and when an assignment is completed by the assessor the person who made the assignment of the assessment can be notified.

The course that I am trying to apply this approach in has ~30 examiners, >60 persons who might be supervisors and thus be assigned assessments to do, and >300 students. Worse is that different individuals complete the course at their own individual rates and with different starting times (as the work is done in an individualised projects either individually or in a group of two students).

[kona]

In Canvas teachers wouldn't get a notification that an assessment is due and the only way the assessor would get notified when it was complete is if they were listed as a teacher in the course, but then they'd get notified of everything in the course, not just that assessment.

As much as I hate declaring defeat, I don't see anyway to get Canvas to do everything you'd like/need it to do for this situation.

[maguire]

Kona,

I'm trying to understand better what you propose. Because an assessment is done for each student, I would expect to be able to see it in the gradebook. However, if the assessment assignment is unpublished, it does not appear in the gradebook; but if it is published, then the student can see it.

I tried making a new assignment group named "Not visible to students" and put the assignment into it, but it is still visible to students if it is published and not in the gradebook if it is unpublished. Unlike modules, where it is possible to set an item within a module as published, but unless the module is published - this item will not be visible to students; in the case of assignment groups there is no corresponding concept of the assignment group being published or not.

[kona]

This is correct. You can't unpublish an assignment group only individual assignments. This is by design because it relates to the gradebook and how grades are calculated; versus modules that has nothing to do with grade calculation. 

[maguire]

I tried creating an assignment for which the student cannot submit anything (but has a Complete/Incomplete grade - so that it does appear in the gradebook) and then added a comment to the assignment. Despite the fact that the student cannot submit anything, they do get to see the comment that is submitted. So this approach will not work.

As one can see from the student view, the comments are visible.

Fortunately, this was a self-assessment

In summary, it does not seem to be possible via assignments to make an assessment associated with a student and have it be invisible to the student. This suggests that the only way is to have a pointer to a file (or simply text) in a field in a custom column.

[kona]

If you're using an assignment for this then you would need to "mute" it. Students do not receive any information (nor can they access this type of information) when an assignment is muted - https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-2952?sr=search&searchId=4987adc0-5ad0-4814-b2a1-be1c80aa8b7...‌

[maguire]

Thanks for this wonderful suggestion. However, I should note that the documentation says "Muting should only be used to temporarily block grading work in progress from student view. It should not be used to conceal grades for longer than reasonably necessary." (quoted fromHow do I mute or unmute an assignment in SpeedGrader? ) So it appears that it is not designed to be muted for a long time; while in this case, it needs to be muted forever. Moreover, it would be disastrous if one instructor (accidentally) unmuted the assignment - since all of the students would then be notified and could access the assessments.

I have moved this discussion to https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/7957-assessments-associated-with-a-student .

[kona]

I think that quote is more for pedagogical reasons than technical reasons. We've been using Canvas since 2012 and there is no reason I can think of that you couldn't (technically speaking) mute an assignment and leave it muted indefinitely. Yet, yes, if someone accidentally un-muted the assignment that would be pretty bad.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @maguire ,

We are giving the Instructional Designers area a little bit of love and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[maguire]

The approach presented in the original question was to use custom columns, while  @kona   suggested muting the assignment and hoping that no one ever unmutes it. The first seems to really limit the amount of material that can be stored (or requires the use of another storage system for the material) and the later is really infeasible given the damage that we would be caused were the assignment to be unmuted.  Therefore, I think that the question is still open.

However, one method I have recently used is to create an assignment, but not publishing this assignment. This enables me to record information from an instructor without it being visible to students.  While this still has to rely on no one publishing the assignment, I think that this is a lower risk that counting on no one unmuting an assignment. Potentially this assignment could be put into a module that is purposely not published. I have used such modules for communication with other teachers in a course, but keeping the material unavailable to students. Perhaps this protection could be increased with the use of lock dates very far in the future (such as until 4000-01-02).