Canvas Survey Feedback: News & Clarifications

‘On Canvas discussion, when someone reply to a post, the replied comments used to appear as post while now are hidden in the specific post. This is problematic because unless you click under each post, you won’t see the comments.’

By clicking the Expand Thread button within a discussion forum, you can reveal all of the replies within a discussion. Recently, an addition to Canvas was made so the expand/collapse state you choose for a specific discussion will not need to be reset between viewings.

‘Uploading course material takes a long time because there are too many mouse clicks. On average it takes 2 minutes per file…Updating a newer version of file is also time consuming because the links need to be updated on each page.’

Uploading and checking files through the Modules page can take a bit of time. Fortunately, there is a way to bulk upload files and to replace duplicate files all from the Files page. Once all files are added, you can quickly preview and click through all of the uploaded files.

‘It would be convenient to default to overwrite existing files when I upload one of the same name. As it stands, repeated corrections result in a zoo of files with nearly the same name (as changed by Canvas).’

On the Files page, when uploading a file, if a file with the same name already exists in the folder where you are uploading your file, you will be asked if you want to skip, replace, or rename it.

‘I also don’t like the fact that you can’t hide the “assignments” & “total” grades and students get confused by them.’

If you are interested in hiding Assignment Group totals and the Total column, check out the Canvas guide How do I hide totals in my students’ grade summaries?

Note: Students will still see a line on the Grades page for each of the Assignment Groups, but there will be an eye with a line through it indicating that total is hidden.

‘For large classes, distributing grading tasks to multiple (many) course staff is an essential need and (as far as I know) Canvas is not good at it.’

While it is not on Canvas’ roadmap currently, the Canvas@Cornell team recently met with the Engineering Manager for Canvas grading and discussed this matter.

‘…improved security (e.g., with TAs & grades)…’

While it is not on Canvas’ roadmap currently, the Canvas@Cornell team recently met with the Engineering Manager for Canvas grading about developing more granular permissions for allowing grading on specific assignments without visibility to the entire Gradebook.

‘Grading quizzes could be improved by permitting grading by question’

Good news! Both classic Quizzes and New Quizzes allow grading of one question at a time. This focuses the SpeedGrader on the answer of a single student on a specific question and then allows you to cycle through students while still on the same question. It does not collate all students’ answers to a given question to the same page for seeing all answers at once while grading.

‘Giving extra credit is difficult’

Extra credit in a Canvas course can be added by generating an Assignment Group, using Weighted Grading, and making the extra credit assignment group push the total weighting over 100%. For more information, see Getting Started with Canvas Assignments and How do I weight the final course grade based on assignment groups?

Extra credit can also manually be added to an assignment/quiz/discussion by manually changing a grade in SpeedGrader or Gradebook. For more information, see How do I enter and edit grades in the Gradebook?

‘…when scoring discussion board entries when students comment on other students entries, it would be helpful to see the original poster’s entry with the responses when using SpeedGrader’

Beginning January 18, discussion posts will show in context in the SpeedGrader. The initial post for the student being graded will be highlighted for easy identification. Graders will be able to navigate between an individual’s responses using the Previous Reply and Next Reply buttons.

‘The groups feature is a bit underbaked (ie, I can’t assign a specific quiz to a specific group)’

The Canvas development team is actively working on a solution for differentiating content to specific groups of students in a course. If you are interested in providing feedback on early mock-ups of how this might work, check out Help Us Fine-Tune Differentiation Tags: Your Feedback Matters!

‘Posting course materials requires one massive work-around for me because Canvas wants “Module” to be “subset of course subject matter” and I want “Module” to be something like “Homework Assignments and Solutions,” “Extra Handouts,” etc…’

While we often recommend organizing Modules chronologically, there is nothing stopping folks from creating any kind of organization style they like in this area of the course. For instance, if you want to organize course contents in modules by Homework Assignments and Solutions and Extra Handouts, it’s totally possible. When you create a module, it can contain almost any content available in your course, can be titled anything you want, and can even be differentiated with icons/emojis.

‘…”Unpublished Module and all Items” does not work; it only unpublishes select items, which is frustrating to manually do at the start of the semester when last term’s course is copied over.’

It is technically possible for you to bulk unpublish all content in a module, but this requires you to be using the File Copyright feature (which requires listing usage rights for each and every file you make available). Bulk unpublishing does unpublish everything except for files when not using the File Copyright feature though.

‘I would like quizzes to only be available after certain items are viewed (e.g., students need to view prerecorded lectures before the quiz, but as of now students can simply take the quiz without even opening the lecture file).’

There are a couple of options here. Depending on the types of questions utilized for the quiz, you may get by with using a Kaltura Quiz or Panopto Quiz. These allow you to add questions directly within videos.

Another option would be to use module requirements, module prerequisites, or a combination thereof. If you’d like to discuss how this might work for your course, please feel free to reach out for a consultation.

‘Under Modules, I’d like more than just one level of materials. For example, Required Readings followed by the list/links and Supplemental Readings. Right now it is all at the same organizational level.’

At this time, this specific feature is not on the Canvas roadmap. Beginning in 2025 though, the Canvas development team is going to be reviewing module functionality for a major overhaul. If you are interested in taking part in providing feedback on your Modules experience, please submit this form.

‘New Quizzes still don’t support CSV download.’

Beginning January 18, New Quizzes will improve feature parity with classic Quizzes by adding a Student Analysis report that is available for download as a CSV. In the Student Analysis report, instructors will be able to access a range of student data, including: time elapsed, submission attempts, student responses, points earned, and more.

‘I wish there was a way to code SDS time extensions on quizzes once as opposed to having to do it for every single quiz.’

While there is no way of adding accommodations en masse for classic Quizzes, New Quizzes does allow for setting a flat amount of additional time or a time multiplier across all New Quizzes.

‘At my former institution, we had an add-on…that allowed us to customize the course layout/content more. This made Canvas way more engaging for students then just the defaults.’

Beta testing is now available for the Block Editor, set to release early next year. This new experience allows instructors/TAs/admins to create well-designed, responsive content without relying on HTML, using a simple and familiar block interface. Click here if you are interested in viewing an early beta version of the Block Editor.

‘A class meeting object (a Page with a date and time), that unlike a Calendar event can be part of a module. I’ve figured workarounds, but those took a lot of work.’

Pages in Canvas can be added to the student To Do list with a specific date and time. This will also add the event to the course calendar and under the Course Summary of the Syllabus tool.

‘I wish there was a way to tell who is on the waitlist for class vs. enrolled. I have a large, popular class with large waitlists. Students think they are enrolled, teaching assistants are confused about who is actually in class. I have to log into faculty center to double check constantly during add/drop’

The Canvas@Cornell team is currently working with the Office of the University Registrar to develop a new Waitlisted role within Canvas, so that faculty and TAs can quickly refer to the People page to determine which students are on the waitlist.

Note: Students will only receive the Waitlisted role if they join the waitlist from Student Center. If you manage a waitlist outside of Peoplesoft and manually add these students to oyur course, you will also have the option of adding them in this new role.

‘Canvas has many problems scaling to large classes (student names appear as a single field “Firstname Lastname” and are sorted by first name, as opposed to two separate fields to facilitate sorting by last name)’

On the People page, there is currently a single Name column. By default, this column is sorted by last name. In the Gradebook, the default is the same, but this can be changed. In the Gradebook, you can sort a single Name column by the last name, A-Z or Z-A, with names either displayed First, Last Name or Last, First Name. You can also select to Split Student Names from the View Options tab of the Settings menu (gear icon) that will then generate Student Last Name and Student First Name columns. You can change the order of these columns as desired and sort A-Z or Z-A in either of them.

‘It is also not helpful that questions and answers cannot be previewed in a quiz/test if there are more than 25 questions.’

While this is true of classic Quizzes, the Canvas design team heard this feedback and changed the experience in New Quizzes. When building a New Quizzes quiz, all questions can be viewed with all possible answers, including an indicator of the correct answer.

‘It is not uncommon for student submissions to quizzes to be lost.’

It is actually rare that the Canvas@Cornell team encounters this issue. If you have any reports of this, please reach out to us immediately so that we can investigate and follow up with the Canvas development team as necessary. It may also be useful to remind students to not open a quiz in more than one tab/window at a time, as this has led to some answers being lost in the past.