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Jeff (or others grading with a stylus on the Surface Pro), are you using the web version of Canvas or the Speedgrader app?  Is the experience better on one or the other. (including  @cstellre ‌ for her information) Thanks for your time! ... View more

I don't have a better workaround, Pamela.  I can absolutely see the pedagogical value you describe. ... View more

With his knowledge, I'm adding in a comment here that Professor Keith Riles from the University of Michigan posted last week on the recently archived idea 6831.  Thanks. new comment by Keith Riles View all comments on this idea I am one of the UM instructors who does not wish to do these manipulations in Excel. Being able to weight assignments in a "group" as we please and being able to drop a set of lowest scores have been the norm here for at least a dozen years. If Canvas cannot manage to implement this change promptly, I will conclude that its software is already too ossified to be a reliable platform for our future and will lobby the IT higher-ups to reconsider the recent migration to Canvas. It's not rocket science to incorporate arbitrary weighting; if Canvas thinks this is a difficult undertaking, some start-up company will eat your lunch. Please try to impress us with your commitment to making this change before the end of the semester and then succeeding rather than reinforcing the impression that we have made a dreadful mistake in signing on to Canvas. I find it very disconcerting to read above that: "Let me do some more searching, as I am pretty confident that we have seen this idea before." Good ideas that help instructors do their jobs better should be promptly implemented, not filed away for future consideration (or lost). I realize I sound a bit harsh, but it's dismaying to me that we have regressed a dozen years with respect to a key feature of our online grade book. ... View more

Renee, here's a first draft of a use case describing in more detail the problem we're seeing at my institution.  This doesn't affect every instructor here at the University of Michigan but in some of our more complex classes -- ones with solid pedagogical approaches, using lots of small assignments and in some cases external tools -- are faced with difficult workarounds.  These classes need the ability to grade questions by points but to weight assignments *within a group* separately from the points. *** U-M classes have groups of assignments where: Numbers of questions across assignments vary Points per question are consistent across assignments in order to grade effectively (e.g., all questions worth 5 points, arithmetic mistakes = one point deduction, not showing equation = one point deduction) Number of points on a given assignment does not correlate to desired impact on grade (weight). Requires that assignments are in separate assignment groups. Lowest scores within the group are dropped (e.g., drop the lowest two grades).  In some cases this is because students can elect which assignment to complete (e.g., attend lecture 1 or 2, each of which has an in-class assignment).  Requires that assignments are in the same assignment group Given the conflict between ##3 and 4, some instructors at U-M are unable to calculate final grades in Canvas and instead must recreate gradebook logic in Excel, with all the concomitant risk of error and the loss of transparency for students. ... View more

Agree with what others have said about it is precisely the largest courses that need this.  I have a large class today that believes grades are disappearing from Canvas. I would like to rule out the possibility that the various TAs in the course are overwriting grades .  But without gradebook history I don't have a way to discover whether or not this is true myself.  The answer I got from Instructure was that I should go through as an admin and view grades for each student one-by-one. ... View more

What I hear most from instructors is that they want to have assignments muted by default.  I saw in a separate idea thread that Instructure is not planning on adopting that approach.  At first I thought, well, fine -- having a checkbox to mute the assignment at creation would be fine.  But on further reflection since many of our instructors *copy* their assignments from term to term I think they would typically NOT create the assignment each term and never see the checkbox in the normal course of events. Given this, wouldn't it be better to take a different workflow approach entirely? ... View more

This feature request is now closed for voting but I wanted to add to it that at U-M we see the difficulties in printing content -- discussions and other parts -- as an accessibility issue.  Some course participants can more easily assimilate information from print rather than on-screen and we'd like them to have fewer barriers to using the method that lets them learn best. If anyone has any suggested workarounds for how best to accommodate people with print needs now, I'd love to hear them. ... View more

There's a new (active) feature request for this idea -- .  Closes for voting on Feb 3, 2016. ... View more

I'm still seeing a need for this at the University of Michigan, especially when instructors are simultaneously teaching two courses:  a small course as the sole instructor, and a large course with a team of TAs.  In this case, faculty want to receive ASAP notifications for the small course, but not the large one (where their TAs handle more of the student contact).  This is a big issue once you have classes taught by a team of instructors with different expectations for who will do what.  We'd love to see this in the next few months, since many of our largest courses have held off on switching to Canvas. ... View more

I'm still seeing a need for this at the University of Michigan, especially when instructor are simultaneously teaching two courses:  a small course as the sole instructor, and a large course with a team of TAs.  In this case, faculty want to receive ASAP notifications for the small course, but not the large one (where their TAs handle more of the student contact). Any update on when this might be added to the Canvas roadmap? ... View more

Here at the University of Michigan our instructors could definitely use a more nuanced view of announcements, particular a way to distinguish as a glance (without having to use the test student) which announcements are pending and which are already visible to students. ... View more

Here at the University of Michigan we see some classes where they'd want to mute/unmute by section and some where they'd want to mute/unmute for all sections at once.  To accommodate both, perhaps if a TA is restricted to grading his/her section only s/he could mute/unmute by section but if someone with who is NOT restricted mutes/unmutes it could apply to all sections. ... View more

Adding my support for this feature here -- I've worked with at least one instructor here at Michigan who grades the anonymous peer review itself and who needs an easier way to manage it! Deactivated user​, is there any chance that improvements for grading peer reviews would be rolled into the Speedgrader 2.0 work currently on the Roadmap?  ... View more

Totally following you and you've been very generous to answer, Brian! But I'm finding that I'm getting a course state of "available" for courses where the associated term has ended (and therefore instructors can no longer write content).  I want to get "completed" but my testing didn't show that!  If other folks are using just the status field ="completed" to mean course is still available to instructors to write content, I'd be interested in hearing that.(it's always possible my testing was faulty). ... View more

Hi, Brian.  So, we want to determine this via the API because we're developing at LTI tool that lets instructors create users in our instance of Canvas.   The tool seems to silently fail if the course is closed/no longer in a state where users can be added via the People tool. (Why are we developing this tool?  Here at the U of Michigan, users authenticate to Canvas with their UMICH password -- but we have a pre-existing system that lets people *without* UMICH email addresses set a password to get access to certain UMICh resources.  In some cases, instructors want to let someone w/o a UMICh address into their Canvas course but can't because they have no underlying Canvas account.) ... View more