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Canvas' notes are not remotely a workaround as there is only a single note per student.  If I need to leave a comment for Exam 1, Exam 2, Exam 3, and Homeworks 1 through 20, the notes column will balloon and become generally untenable.  I'm looking for a way to provide comments on each individual assignment that are not visible to students themselves. ... View more

Hi Erin,  I ended up going with a totally different solution because in all cases, it turns out, it's impossible to visually hide locked assignments until available like I could do in Blackboard, and when testing with students it turned out to cause substantial amounts of confusion. I have had no luck with the popularity contest that is feature requests, so I will respectfully not waste my time with that.  I'd highly encourage Instructure to focus on feature parity and flexibility rather than voting.  Design by committee (as it effectively is) is never a good thing. ... View more

The problem is that I've got three pre-quizzes, each of which expand to four separate exams.  Each pre-quiz and exam is set up in its own module.   There is no way to consolidate the exams into three. We are trying to make things clear and easy for students, but displaying all exams and feedback pages is the exact opposite.  I'd like to visually hide locked assignments and pages (so students don't even know that they exist) until (and if) they are made available. it's increasingly looking like rather than automate everything, I'm going to have to individually enable each exam for students and give manual feedback, which is a LOT of extra time and effort for me, given that we're doing placement exams for the entire university. ... View more

The biggest problem with Canvas is that it assumes that all of our courses and all of our teaching and grading styles and philosophies fit the One True Model™.  As I've used Canvas over the past year now, I've found that hands down, Blackboard is much more powerful, although it has a higher learning curve.  Canvas has a low learning curve, but that enabled because it is far too simple to handle many tasks.  The gradebook is, perhaps, the shining example of that, but sadly it's quite pervasive. ... View more

I appreciate the time you took to try to find some solutions for me, but to be able to do it with a single 25% homework category would assume that each chapter has either (a) a single assignment or (b) an equivalent number of points.  Neither is necessarily the case, so it doesn't work.  Consider three chapters in the 25% category: Chapter 1: 3 assignments, 10 pts each. (30 pts total) Chapter 2: 2 assignments, 20 pts each. (40 pts total) Chapter 3: 7 assignments, 5 pts each, one assignment at 15 pts.  (50 pts total) Now, I want it to treat each chapter equally and within the homework category.  If I just lump them all in, Chapter 3 is weighted more heavily than the others.  To have it work out correctly, I must make three separate assignment groups, each at 8.333333%.  Or I could set the assignments with similarly adjusted point values.  In either case, it's possible, but more work (my assignments are necessarily this neatly done, they idea is that I should be free to organize within each chapter is optimal) Your method for assigning for the multiple hour course does not work for me in that instance either — it is an open module format, where students choose (X* hours-registered) modules out of Y modules to complete the course. I could query the students, and go through manually an unassign them from from the (Y - X * hours-registered) modules, but that's a *lot* of extra work. I mean, I suppose I could create all the assignment groups in triplicate, have them self select for groups, or something crazy solution like that, but again, when Blackboard makes it easy, it's ridiculous that Canvas doesn't. I took a lot at Canvas APIs, and I believe in order to implement it I'd need to work directly with my Canvas administrator.  Maybe they'll give me access, but making users create basic functionality that every. single. other. LMS. has (particularly given how much our universities are shelling out for Canvas!) it really, truly, wouldn't kill them to have an intern spend a few hours reaching basic feature parity. ... View more

If a feature is too hard for someone to use correctly, it doesn't have to be used.  But it would be nice for things to be possible for those of us that do. Otherwise, you end up with professors doing everything in Excel sheets that can be externally reviewed by course observers and do not give students up-to-date grade information. ... View more

Unfortunately, no.  I am fully aware of Canvas' ability to weight assignment groups.  It does not help me for things that I was able to do in Blackboard fairly simply.  Assignment groups cannot themselves be grouped, which requires me to manually calculate numbers and add excess assignment groups (imagine, if you will, having homework being 25%, two tests at 25%, and a final at 50%. Congratulations, now you have to have nine top level assignment groups at 3.57142857143: 3.57142857143:3.57142857143:3.57142857143:3.57142857143:3.57142857143:3.57142857143:25:50. Oh, yeah, that's kind of messy.  And Blackboard made it very simple.  You had a calculated column for homework, that was made by averaging the calculated columns for Chapters 1-7.  No figuring out that 25 ÷ 7 = 3.57142857143… and needing to hope there's a no rounding error that would make a difference for a student. Now combine the same situation for a course that has a variable hour registration.  If you have some students registered for 2 hours and needing to do 3 chapters, and others that need to do it for 4 or 6 hours and need to do a different number, the Blackboard solution works out fine: you tell the assignments column to ignore the chapter average columns without assignments in them, or you could even create separate assignments average columns based on registration type (in Canvas, it is impossible for any assignment to be in two calculations at once).  In Canvas, there is simply no way to do it. Full stop. I once again make my offer to Canvas to implement it for free.  I have a full spring break and summer available to do it.  But the fact that it won't be implemented shows that Canvas doesn't actually care about usability. ... View more

I think I'm going to take this route as well.  It's pretty ridiculous. I'm at the point where I'll offer to develop it for free for them if they'd give me access to the source.  It would probably take me all of about an hour or two once I understood their DB structure.  This is literally coding 101 stuff. ... View more

Stephanie, that is not helpful.  In other LMSs, it is possible to have the same assignment included in more than one calculated column, and then have calculated columns based on other calculated columns (or groups of calculated columns).  That is literally impossible in Canvas (try putting an assignment in two groups — there is no way). ... View more