One of my faculty members bumped into an issue for an open ended course. This is a course where students join and complete their work at various times, not at a set start/end timeline or due dates. When grading exam submissions, she mutes the assignment until she has gone through and insured her grade and comments are all in before the student can see it. She does this to insure all grades the students see are 100% accurate when submit is hit and there's no chance an incorrect grade is shown to the students.
All of that said, when unmuting assignments, ALL students receive notifications that the assignment is unmuted. This includes students who haven't started taking the exam (I was able to duplicate this on our instance of Canvas and she experienced it on a separate instance of canvas). For clarity, I'm saying, every student enrolled in the course receives a notice each and every time the assignment/assessment is unmuted.
Testing this notification on our instance, the notification seems to be tied to the grading options.
According to one student's claim, the notification received created confusion and made the student feel she was late submitting an assignment.
We have 2 questions/requests
- Does anyone have a better practice for situations like this, rather than muting/unmuting? After several conversations between administration and this student, the instructor is now weary about using the mute option at all and feels she is now going to be required to grade off line.
- Is there a way to turn off the notification of mute/unmute? If not entirely, restrict it for students who actually have grades in the assignment, not the entire roster.
Brandy, so the Instructor is muting and unmutimg per individual or a small number of students when they grade? If so, then yes, that would be a lot of unneeded notifications.
1. How often does the muting/unmutimg happen? Could you provide more information on what the Instructor’s current process is? How many assignments does the Instructor usually grading when the muting process takes place? Does the Instructor look back and forth at the grades and comments for other students when determining final grades? Just grading one student and wanting to make sure the grading is accurate and comments are ok is not normally a reason to mute an assignment, so I’m trying to figure out
more of what’s going on.
2. Not that I’m aware of. Canvas doesn’t provide admin oversight for notifications - they are built into the system. If there is something that could be be done it would have to be done on the backend coding of Canvas.