[ARCHIVED] Sort Students Names by Date of Submission in Speedgrader

[camshaft54]

I've noticed that Canvas sorts submissions by the students names alphabetically A-Z. I would prefer to have submissions be sorted by date submitted. I know you can change it in speedgrader under options, but is there a way for it to be the default across an entire organization/school. Is there a way to do this in the admin settings? I'm not an admin, I just want to know if its possible. Thanks!

[James · Accepted solution]

@camshaft54 

This is a course level preference and cannot be set globally.

There is a network call to /courses/xxx/gradebook/speed_grader_settings that is used, but it is not exposed through the API, so you would have to be logged into Canvas to send that. Theoretically that can be done with a headless browser or some similar tools. You would want to do that as soon as the course was created, because it really is an instructor's preference, not the administrator's preference.

I'm not sure that would help, though. I went into one course and set it to by the date submitted. Then I went into another course where it was alphabetically, reloaded the page, and it was set to by date submitted.

In other words, Canvas is writing something that makes it persist across courses, even though the network call to save the setting is course specific. That appears to be browser specific. If I change the setting within one course in Chrome, it persists to other courses in Chrome, but it doesn't propagate through to Firefox when I reload. This is true even for the same course, just in different browsers. So that makes it sound like even though you're changing the setting at the course level and it should persist across browsers, it isn't. That means that setting it ahead of time for everyone may not make a bit of difference.

But since it seems to be browser specific, that means that it's either stored inside a cookie or inside the web storage. I went into Chrome and looked the local storage for our Canvas instance and found an 12345_eg_sort_by key, where 12345 is the user's Canvas ID. That is not keyed to a course, it's keyed to a user. There is a similar key in the local storage of Firefox.

If you had control over all the browsers that were being used by the instructors and had a way of writing that key for the user ahead of time, then you could modify the preference. But if they ever use their home computer or another one not under your control, then it would not persist.

A better way to handle this would be to educate your instructors as how to change it.

They only have to change it once per browser. If you are logged into Chrome, then the local storage is synced between computers, provided the user is logged into Chrome.

There are benefits to having it both ways and I would hesitate to say that it's always best to set it one way or another, especially when making that decision for someone else. I typically use submission status rather than date of submission. Sometimes I go alphabetical when I'm trying to look up a student by name.