How do I submit an assignment for a student?

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francishatstat7
Community Novice

A student was unable to submit an assignment direct to Canvas and emailed it to me (Word Doc).  How can an instructor submit it to the Canvas site for the student?

3 Solutions
kblack
Community Champion

Hello  @frank_hatstat  Welcome to the worldwide Canvas Community. We're happy to have you here, and thanks for the question.....which, alas, is a relatively frequent one.  There is currently no way to do this in Canvas, though it is still out there as a Feature Idea that is on the Product Radar and one that can still be voted up and commented upon here:  https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1124-submit-an-assignment-on-behalf-of-a-student .  The only other alternative at the moment is to have the student re-submit it in Canvas (assuming you have not set an "Until" date).

Not the answer you want to hear, I imagine, but I hope it helps a bit.

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Thanks again for your follow up.  You are correct.  It is not the answer I wanted to hear but still good info for the future.  I also voted this up as a desired feature.

Thanks again,

Frank

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Sadly, as mentioned previously the developers do not seem very interested in instructor suggestions that should be fairly easy to code and are often regular features in most commercial LMS offerings as well as in Moodle (which has had this particular feature for about 6 years now). Simple things have languished for many years on end in favor of features the coders find fun and interesting but may not be particularly useful from the instructor's perspective. It is simply a fact of life with Canvas, and as instructors we just have to play the hand we are dealt without any recourse, as most of us do not get to choose the LMS for the institutions where we are employed. /rant

One half-baked workaround for the submit-on-behalf-of-student problem that I have often used over the years is to upload the file sent to me by the student as an attachment to an assignment comment in Speedgrader. It still means I have to open the file locally to do any markup on it, vs using the tools in Speedgrader, but it serves as a note to me that the assignment was at least handed in. Better than nothing. Found a video on this here, if needed.

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