Canvas issues

[moorepants]

• Entering in rubrics sucks. It is especially annoying that if you change the points in one column it changes the points in other columns. It takes a tons of tries to get the points selections that you want.
• The rubrics do not allow you to define your own equations to govern the score to points relationship. I'd like to be able to enter integers form 1 to 5 as the score for each criteria and have this map to a score of 50-100.
• You can't see a count of # students, tas, and instructors on the people page.
• Need easy way for TAs to see their grading stats of an assignment compared to other TAs, so they can see if they are grading similarly.
• Spellcheck doesn't seem to be available in the rubric text boxes.
• You can't reorder rows of rubrics.
• There is no way to save drafts of rubrics after the assignment is published.
• There is no way to reuse portions of other rubrics or combine them.
• Speed grader says it doesn't work with Firefox!
• Can't grade offline.
• Students can't access the materials after the course is over.
• Crodoc constantly tells you you need to reload or lose work.
• It is very difficult for the students to view the inline pdf comments.
• The rosters in canvas do not reflect the rosters in photorosters.
• Announcement emails do not retain formatting: embedding videos, tables, etc
• The attendance report is useless. It is just a complex csv file.
• How can you display all thrusdays as columns in attendance feature? Or just class days? Takes forever to scroll through days.
• Your Crocodoc session is expiring soon. Please reload the window to avoid losing any work. is super annoying in crodoc.
• Allow submision of only 1 pdf.
• crocdcoc rahes and loses whoel rubric
• save draft of score is needed
• save lets students see grades before you are finished
• multiple graders have to save intermittedly
• kenny hit save 3 times on rurbirc and it crashed
• want to just check which rubric items will be tied to abet outcomes
• grader commenter should be anonymous
• needs to work in firefox!
• canvas does have a way to view stats of assignments and overall grade

[ixjlyons]

These are the main ones I can think of at the moment. I'll come back and update if I come up with more.

• No way to save progress in grading with a rubric without students getting notified. Makes collaborative grading awkward.
• If there was a way to save grading progress without releasing the grade to students, progress could be auto-saved in case a crash or internet disconnect occurs. Losing all scores and comments in a complex rubric is unacceptable.

[moorepants]

• box doesn't have linux client (somewhate related)

[moorepants]

This is the email I ended up sending:

xxxxx,

As I mentioned to you a month or so back, I have collected a number of technical comments/issues that my TAs and I ran across with extensive use of Canvas this past school year. In particular, we developed 20+ comprehensive rubrics and used them to asses assignments in my mechanical design, mechanical vibrations, and mechanical capstone courses. Overall Canvas is a nice piece of software and provides a more modern interface than our previous very old version of Sakai. I think it is a move in the right direction. But there are lots of things that could be improved. There are a bunch of great new things that I haven't included in this list, I'm mostly focused on things that need improvement below. I've cc'd some people from the meeting today that this info may be useful to and also xxxxx xxxxx who told me I should send issues to him too.

General

• I've heard few issues about Canvas from students, so my hypothesis is that it works for them pretty well.
• I get warnings about using Firefox, e.g. in speedgrader. It was also mentioned today that we should be using Chrome. Canvas should fully support the most popular browsers and not force users to use a non-preferred browser.
• My #1 complaint is that our paid support deflects issues and feature requests. Most of my support calls, chats, and emails end in them telling me to submit to their community site to see if my idea will get voted for by the canvas community. This site includes non-paying users, other institutions, etc. I do not want to or have the time to start a campaign to convince others that my issues and features are worthy. My opinion is that UCD should collect all bug reports and feature requests from the campus community and then periodically submit these to Canvas as an official priority ranked support request from the university. It would be helpful if UCD canvas users could communicate about our needs separate from Canvas's broader community competition for attention. It feels like Canvas asks you to submit these things to a black hole on their community website, leaving us with no support for UCD needs.
• The people page should show total counts for the number of students, TAs, instructors, etc. I have to go to photorosters.ucdavis.edu to head counts.
• Photorosters.ucdavis.edu (both rosters and prereqs) should be integrated into canvas.
• Students cannot access the course after the course end date (it seemed that I had to have an end date).
• The rosters in Canvas to not match the roster on photoroster.ucdavis.edu. It is difficult to tell if students dropped, added, etc in the first few weeks of class. This needs to sync better and remove students that drop.
• Announcement emails do not retain formatting. If you take time to format announcements in canvas the emails ignore this and are often unreadable. Try an html table for example.
• The attendance report is useless. It is not formatted in a way that is easy to interpret.
• We should be able select the week days which our class occurs in the attendance tool so we don't have to scroll through tons of non-class days. This is especially annoying for classes that meet once a week.
• Please add google drive or dropbox integration alongside Box integration. Box is the only one of the three that does not have a linux desktop client, so it is not very useful on linux.
• I have been disappointed that UCD did not provide feature parity wrt smartsite. It is very frustrating when a major software change is forced and there is no alternative to previous methods and features.
• The discussion board in canvas is very lack luster. Piazza integration in smartsite was far superior. The piazza ceo told me personally by email that she has offered to work with UCD but that there are continual hurdles. I've had a hard time getting clear answers about this from UCD personnel and get different takes from piazza and UCD.
• Smartsite offered a way to display an external course website on the smartsite page. This allows those of us that want to have a public course website to have it integrated into the LMS. I get continual complaints from students that they don't like going to so many websites, e.g. course website, canvas, piazza, catme, and any other tool I may use. Please let us load other sites as iframes in canvas tabs as a simple workaround to this issue.
• It needs to be easier to have a multiple quarter course with one canvas site. Editing the name of the course would help and the ability to turn off the second quarter's course. There is a conflict with being able to set the course end date past the end of the first quarter and have the students access the course past the course end date.
• I'd like the ability to enable custom canvas plugins. This would allow me to implement some features myself and use them in my classes.
• The roster export does not include last name, first name, student id, and email. Photorosters does.

Grading

• I really like the ability to have a rubric open and do inline comments in a submitted PDF document in the speedgrader app. This is a very nice addition over Smartsite. This only works well with reports though. It still seems impracticable to grade engineering problem sets that are done on paper. I also had great difficultly when homeworks were partly pencil/paper and partly programming exercises.
• Setting up groups is a pretty nice feature for project classes.
• Setting different due dates for different groups or students (typically based on their lab sessions) is not that easy to do. The interface leaves a lot to be desired. I'd really just like to have groups of groups that I can set different due dates for.
• For classes that have multiple TAs we need a simple way to compare the grading distributions among the TAs. It'd also be nice to have a way to normalize grading among TAs if the TAs grade differently. This will help give feedback to the TAs in grading.
• Grading when offline is not possible. With paper assignments you can grade offline, it'd be nice if Canvas offered this for digital grading.
• Speedgrader constantly warns you to reload or lose work, but relaoding seems to loose the grading work. "Your Crocodoc session is expiring soon. Please reload the window to avoid losing any work."
• It is not obvious at all to the students that there are inline pdf comments and the interface for the students to see this is horrible. The window is tiny and it's almost not functional.
• Assignments need a restriction on number of files. I'd like to specify that only a single pdf file can be submitted.
• No way to save progress in grading with a rubric without students getting notified. Makes collaborative grading awkward.
• If there was a way to save grading progress without releasing the grade to students, progress could be auto-saved in case a crash or internet disconnect occurs. Losing all scores and comments in a complex rubric is unacceptable.
• The new version of speedgrader doesn't seem to have a download button in the pdf viewer.
• I can no longer find a way to download the assignments with and without the pdf inline comments. This used to be a feature.
• We need a hierarchy of grading percentage breakdowns. For example if my exam is worth 50% of the grade and five homeworks are worth 50% I have to create a two groups, one for the single exam and one for the 5 homeworks. It would be nice if I didn't have to create groups for single items. Second example is if I have a project worth 40% of the grade and then there are five parts to the project : report 50%, memos 25%, and presentation 25% there is no way to do this grading percentages in canvas. it was possible in smartsite, which offered numerous grade breakdown possibilities. The lack of this forces me to use spreadsheets or programs to do all my grade calcs.

Rubrics

• Note that creating canvas rubrics quickly became my most loathed task in teaching this year due to how many issues it contains. The assignment rubrics seem like an afterthought and not fully implemented. In general they are quite painful to use.
• Rubrics do not allow you to define equations that map the values selected for the criteria to a number of points. I prefer my rubrics total score to be from 0 to 100, to be able to weight each criteria, and want to be able to enter in integer values 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 for the individual criteria scores to keep cognitive load low for the grader. This requires some math to make the scores work out, which is very easy in a rubric created in a spreadsheet.
• Changing points in one column causes changes in the other columns. It seems like Canvas tries to correct your scoring but is wrong most of the time. We need to be able to simply enter the corresponding point value that we want and the others don't change. For example, for a criteria with three columns you may have to edit the score values like 6 times to get it correct. This is quite frustrating.
• The browser spell check does not seem to work in the rubric text boxes.
• It doesn't seem possible to reorder the rows of a rubric or insert new rows. This is extremely annoying because it often takes a very long time to enter in a rubric and redoing them is only option to modify them.
• There is no way to save a draft of a rubric after the assignment is published. We need to be able to edit rubrics at our leisure, incrementally and then when done enable it on the assignment.
• There does not seem to be any way to mix and match rubric rows to create new rubrics or modify existing ones. We need a collection of criteria and the ability to select a set of them and turn them into a rubric. Otherwise rubrics are able to be reused among assignments.
• Speedgrader crashes often and will lose all unsaved rubric data. This is extremely annoying that you can't easily save your rubric. It takes me 1 to 2 hours to read reports while I have the rubric open.
• I co-grade with my TAs. We generally take turns grading sections of reports. This means that we need to save the rubric score before we finish grading. But this shows the score to the students! The students get notified that their score is posted and if I come after the TA to finish grading they see that I lower or raise there grade. This is a very big issue.
• It isn't clear if two graders can grade the same document at once. It doesn't tell you it is locked if someone else is grading and it also doesn't seem to merge the two grades. This causes lost grading.
• Saving the rubric has caused crashes.
• Editing a rubric should be just like editing a spreadsheet. Making rubrics in spreadsheets is a pretty painless process. I'd even prefer to make my rubrics offline in a spreadsheet and just upload them to canvas.
• I use rubrics to grade poster and oral presentations collaboratively with my TAs. We use google sheets for the oral presentations and paper rubrics for the posters. Canvas grading and rubrics system is not suitable for live collaborative presentation grading. Maybe you could do something with a tablet but I doubt it would work like google sheets.
• We should be able to associated existing rubric criteria with ABET outcomes instead of having to add in these odd new generic criteria. i do not find the super general abet statements useful for me or the students because they are so ill defined. But I can create well defined assessments for my assignments that could contribute to a particular ABET criteria.

Thanks for the meeting today. It was helpful hearing what others are doing and seeing what works and doesn't.

Jason

[moorepants]

Look into muting an assignment to prevent the students from seeing the grades before you want them to. This may be able to solve our collaborative grading issue where the students see it before we are done.

[moorepants]

Notes on new speed grader:

• You can simultaneously add embedded comments into the PDF if co-grading but you have to refresh your browser to see the other comments that were added at the same time.
• You can't score a rubric simultaneously, if you do you can overwrite the other's work. Refreshing the browser can show you if someone has edited and saved a rubric scoring.

[moorepants]

On canvas quizes, embedded images do not show up on the canvas app, only on the website version.

[moorepants]

To add a person after the course is completed you must set the course end date to sometime in the future, save, unselect "users can only participate in course between dates", save, add the user, then change the dates again to close the course again. You can do the unselect and dates simultaneously or in the opposite order, has to be the order above.

Course dates seem to be quite restrictive...

[moorepants]

More on assignments:

• Allow editing of the text of the assignment and the rubric at the same time.
• Let me load in single rows from other rubrics.
• Adding a new criteria (row) requires too much button clicking. It now opens an extra dialog option that seems useless. It just slows you down.

[moorepants]

• students can trick the filetype restriction on assignments by renaming the extension
• students had trouble uploading 20+ pdfs for an assignment submission