Assignment Enhancements: Allow students to add comments when grade posting policy is set to manual

[leward]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please see the Change Log section of  Canvas Deploy Notes (2021-04-28) 

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In the legacy assignments tool, students could post comments at any time, regardless of the grade posting policy of the associated gradebook item.  Now it appears that students can only post comments when the grade posting policy is set to automatic.  I submitted a ticket for this issue and was advised to submit a feature request (which suggests that Instructure does not regard this as a bug).  The support engineer also provided this workaround--students can post comments by navigating to the assignment via the Grades tool instead of directly from assignments.  This is counter-intuitive.  If students can't post in comments in the Assigmments tool, why would they think to try posting by going to the Grades tool.  Also, the only reason this works is because the Grades tool takes the student to the legacy version of assignments.  Presumably that will change at some point.

I can't think of a good reason to prevent student from commenting when the grade posting policy is set to manual.  The legacy tool prevents students from viewing instructor comments until grades are posted and that makes good sense.   The restriction on student commenting does not make sense.  If this is not a bug, can someone from Instructure please explain why students are not permitted to post comments when the grade posting policy is set to manual.

[kdellis]

Please - we need this.

[jcyoung7]

+1

[amaksl]

+1

[evansda]

I find it sad that so many bugs are considered requests for change by Canvas. As a past developer, if something that worked before no longer works after your change, that's a BUG! Please correct this bug.  +1

[drrainbo]

+1

[kdscholl]

Especially with the last year in mind, we need more ways to communicate with students... not less! Schedules going from in-person, to online, to hybrid, and back and forth, there has just never been a more important time to make communication between students and instructors as easy as possible. This should be one of the highest priorities right now.

[sagates]

Please allow students to leave a comment at anytime.  It is important for students to be able to leave a comment about an assignment.  It allows them to communicate problems or concerns about a specific assignment. Students will not think to go to the gradebook to make a comment when there is a comment section included in the place where they submit the assignment. My students utilize the comment feature regularly when problems arise. We need more communication not less. Please fix this problem. 

[bowenap]

This would be beneficial.  

[kmurday]

There is no justification for this change, nor why we should have to "request a change" to fix this, in my opinion. This just complicates something that was simple and straight forward.