Community

I just have to add one more comment on this suggestion that I made five years ago, that gets a positive comment every few months, and that has not, I believe every gotten a negative comment, and that I think is obviously a good feature.  I am in the middle of running an in-person course that suddenly had to become an online course because of COVID-19.  In the last few weeks of the semester, we normally discuss readings giving arguments for different views on the morality of abortion.  In a normal semester, I help students understand the arguments in class, and there is discussion involving some of the students.  Not everyone is willing to discuss the ideas, but as long as a student is in class, they get the benefit of hearing other students challenge and discuss the reading.  In this case, I have substituted Canvas discussion for the discussion part of my class meetings.  I require students to participate in discussion in order to get credit for "attendance", because otherwise there would be no way to verify that they were engaged with the discussion at all.  I have been using Canvas discussions for a couple of weeks now, on other topics, and it's not ideal, but it works acceptably, and for some students it has been a very good experience.  Now we are covering moral issues concerning abortion, and some of the students are very uncomfortable.  I have less participation, and two students said in one of the discussion forums that they are uncomfortable saying anything definite because it is a "touchy" subject (their word).  I need anonymous discussion to properly teach this topic online.  That is a real loss, in my opinion.  It doesn't need to be this way, and I am saddened that some of my students will be losing out on a deeper engagement with an interesting topic because Canvas does not support the option of anonymous discussions.  It's not a sufficiently good tool for this purpose. ... View more

It's great that this feature has been on the "radar" for the last two years.  However, I find myself frustrated.  There are three or four reasons for feeling frustrated.   The first reason is Canvas is an educational tool, so I feel that the team should be thinking about pedagogy before the users even complain.  An anonymous discussion option just seems obviously useful.  The second is a point I've expressed elsewhere before:  Whether a feature is eventually added should not depend on a scientifically invalid survey method (voting in this forum) which requires too much effort from busy users.  I know that the forum is not the only method that you use for gauging the validity of a  modification, but it's the only method of communication that we are given.  (For example, help desk personnel refuse to take suggestions and pass them on.)  The third reason is that I think that apart from the obvious usefulness of anonymous forums, to the extent that the proposal's value is gauged by what happens in this forum, the rationale for allowing anonymous forums has been and continues to be clear, not only because of the number of votes and comments, but because some of the uses described in some of the comments.  The fourth reason for frustration is a bit different. I understand that you have a lot of requests for changes, and that you have other changes you might want to make, and that Canvas is a complicated software product.  I don't know your code, obviously--but as someone with professional programming experience, if the code was designed well in the first place, I don't see why adding anonymity to forums would require an inordinate amount of work.  It might not be trivial, but I wouldn't think it would be that hard.  I also don't think your code is likely to be poorly designed, in fact, because given the complexity of what the product does, it's likely that would have had serious problems over and over again in the past if it were.  This is all speculative on my part, but if I'm right, the point is this: If a feature is clearly a good thing to add, and it's not that hard to add, it seems like it should be an easy decision to prioritize it. ... View more

It's great that this feature has been on the "radar" for the last two years.  However, I find myself frustrated.  There are three or four reasons for feeling frustrated.   The first reason is Canvas is an educational tool, so I feel that the team should be thinking about pedagogy before the users even complain.  An anonymous discussion option just seems obviously useful.  The second is a point I've expressed elsewhere before:  Whether a feature is eventually added should not depend on a scientifically invalid survey method (voting in this forum) which requires too much effort from busy users.  I know that the forum is not the only method that you use for gauging the validity of a  modification, but it's the only method of communication that we are given.  (For example, help desk personnel refuse to take suggestions and pass them on.)  The third reason is that I think that apart from the obvious usefulness of anonymous forums, to the extent that the proposal's value is gauged by what happens in this forum, the rationale for allowing anonymous forums has been and continues to be clear, not only because of the number of votes and comments, but because some of the uses described in some of the comments.  The fourth reason for frustration is a bit different. I understand that you have a lot of requests for changes, and that you have other changes you might want to make, and that Canvas is a complicated software product.  Because it's complicated, you have to be careful about making changes so that you don't inadvertently introduce a new problem.  I don't know your code, obviously--but I do have professional programming experience.  It seems to me that if the code was designed well in the first place, I don't see why adding anonymity to forums would require an inordinate amount of work.  It might not be trivial, but I wouldn't think it would be that hard.  I don't think your code is likely to be poorly designed, either, because given the complexity of what the product does, it's likely that would have had serious problems over and over again in the past if it were.  I'm not aware of such problems!  So I think the code is well designed.  This is all speculative on my part, obviously but if I'm right, the point is this: If a feature is clearly a good thing to add, and it's not that hard to add, it seems like it should be an easy decision to prioritize it.  Thanks. -Marshall ... View more

I think it's crucial to support anonymous discussions (anonymous to students but not to the instructor) so that students can feel freer to say what they want and try out new ideas (but the instructor can make sure the conversation doesn't get nasty). ... View more

Thanks, Stefanie for the explanation. The links in the email worked, but they took me to pages that seemed to have little information. I tried clicking on things on those pages I thought would lead to more info, without success. Must have missed the right links. Thanks- Marshall Marshall Abrams, Associate Professor Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham http://http://members.logical.net/~marshall Email: mabrams@uab.edu<mailto:mabrams@uab.edu>; Phone: (205) 996-7483; Fax: (205) 975-6610 Mail: HB 414A, 900 13th Street South, Birmingham, AL 35294-1260; Office: HB 418 ... View more

It would help if emails of this kind explained what a Canvas Live event is. (I can guess, but why guess?) It would also help if somewhere easily findable there were a description of the “adjust all assignments …” proposal. Again, I can guess about what this means, but I’d rather have more info. It sounds wonderful from my point of view, but since I’m not entirely sure, I’m not sure whether it’s wonderful or not! Finally, I understand that having an online discussion can be valuable to you as a way of sorting through ideas, but I think it’s important that you don’t expect all or most people interested in a change to participate in events of this kind. (I have repeatedly felt that Canvas wants me to spend way too much time on improving Canvas, rather than on improving my teaching and research. I repeatedly worry that if I don’t spend more time interacting with your online forums, etc., that my concerns about Canvas features won’t get heard. I’ve been told that online participation is not the only thing that you think about in developing changes, but I still have the feeling that you depend on user participation to determine your decisions about what to change about Canvas. That’s not a good way to serve customers--with a product that’s designed to save them time! It conflicts with obvious statistical sampling principles.) Marshall Abrams, Associate Professor Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham http://http://members.logical.net/~marshall Email: mabrams@uab.edu<mailto:mabrams@uab.edu>; Phone: (205) 996-7483; Fax: (205) 975-6610 Mail: HB 414A, 900 13th Street South, Birmingham, AL 35294-1260; Office: HB 418 ... View more

Thanks Stefanie--useful suggestion, but following people in Canvas is not for me.  (Finding particular solutions, yes.)  Too many other things I follow in the rest of my life. ... View more

The Canvancement userscripts tool looks very useful.  This is the first time that anyone has mentioned it.  If I can use it without any special permissions or rights in my university's Canvas system, it might be what I need.  I still think there ought to be an easier tool.   Not everyone will be willing to do scripting. ... View more

Thanks Robin and Meredith.  I knew I couldn't be the only one! Stefanie, I checked the link on adjusting dates, but there doesn't seem to be a info about adjusting times.  Without that, copying a course is of limited value.  I have explained other drawbacks of copying a course in my original post. A more general solution would be to allow us to specify a list of dates and times and a list of parameters to change, and to use these to create a large number of assignments at once.  Even if there were nothing to adjust but dates and times that would not allow me to copy between a Monday/Wednesday/Friday course and a Tuesday/Thursday course very easily. ... View more

Background: In every 100-level class that I teach, I require students to submit online summaries on the day's reading assignment before class begins.  This means that I have to set up about 30 assignments per class, every semester.  All of these assignments are identical except for the due date and due time (which is the time that class begins).  In a given class, each summary concerns a different reading, but there's no need for me to specify the reading within the assignment; I communicate that elsewhere. The problem:  Setting up 30 identical assignments  per class every semester is tedious and error-prone. It's been suggested to me that I might be able to drag assignments from the calendar of a previous semester's class into the calendar of a new class if I give assignments generic names ("reading summary 1", "reading summary 2", etc.).  However, this is still pretty tedious, and unless I taught the new course in the same time slot as the old course, I'd have to go in and edit all of due times--that's hardly any better.  Also, if I use generic names, that means that if I try to collect all of the reading summary assignments as links on one page, the dates won't be displayed (unless I included the due date in the name of the assignment, in which case I would have to edit the names as well as the due times after dragging the assignments from an old course). To me this seems like a basic need for a sophisticated LMS.  Although many instructors won't need this capability, I'm surprised that others aren't clamoring for it.  Perhaps I am unusual in creating so many similar assignments, but I suspect that if the capability existed and was not difficult to use, it would get used a lot by some instructors. A solution: I think that what's needed is one of the following: (a) A built-in function provided by Canvas that would allow someone to automatically generate a series of similar assignments.  One way to do this would be to allow someone to set up a template assignment, in which certain choices were fixed, but other choices, such as dates and times, could be specified in a list to be applied in sequence to assignments, or as "every wednesday".   You'd also have to be able to specify a list of titles for the assignments to be given to assignments in sequence as they are generated.  Some instructors would no doubt like it if you could also specify a list of descriptions, etc.  This could all be done with a new user interface, but I would suggest taking the existing single-assignment user interface and enhancing it to create the new assignment template interface. (b) Convenient ability to script new Canvas functions.  Then I could write some code that generated the assignments I want automatically.  (I see here The Canvas LMS Open Source Project on Open Hub  that Canvas is written in Ruby, Coffeescript, and Javascript.  I'm comfortable with the latter and would be happy to learn the other two for this purpose.)  Is this a viable possibility? ... View more