[Courses] Teacher only notes for assignments, pages and discussions

[jclendenning]

Problem statement:

No teacher facing tools implemented that would allow the instructor to suggest changes or comment on lesson instructions order to refine curriculum the following semester. This is an issue because changing lesson details once a lesson, page or discussion post is published to students is not responsible or a legal practice. This is especially challenging for those whos courses have a lot of content and strategies required by law to accommodate special populations of students. In addition, If I receive feedback from students, other instructors, industry partners, or just see a need and want to make corrections, this is a very time consuming and complicated process to keep notes associated to these resources for modification next session. As a result, I often am not able to make the changes and only realize when it is too late, pushing the modifications off until the following semester.

Proposed solution:

Teacher suggested modifications and the ability to make comments on assignments, discussions or page instructions/content. Something like what is found in google documents would be useful. These suggestions and comments should not affect the current directions shown to current students nor should they be seen by the students. Having the option to apply all suggestions upon copying class content, or after copy, in each task direction, accept and/or make further changes. The suggestions should be allowed to contain links, images, and other such content changes as needed. The comments should be persistent until marked as completed.

User role(s):

instructor

[jclendenning]

The image below shows the desired functionality that only the teacher should see. Students would not see these suggested edits. And, only the instructor should be able to apply a suggestion or approve a comment.

These suggested edits should be applied in one of two ways: 1) a selection option during course copy, or 2) In the instructions themselves, one at a time. Comments should only be able to be approved one at a time within assignments.

[ellisonl15]

Problem statement:

Like many people with online courses, I develop a course and then reuse it again the next year. Once some students in a class have begun a quiz, I do not want to change it for the rest of the students, but there are often revisions that I would like to make before opening it to a new class. I use a lot of quizzes in my classes and trying to track the revisions to make elsewhere would be difficult and disruptive to the flow of working within Canvas, both to create the list and every time I needed to refer to it to revise for the next year's class.

Proposed solution:

Create a private comments box for assignments which instructors can use to leave notes for themselves. This would aid tremendously in course improvements since it would keep all of the information together, and allow notes to be made immediately and enacted immediately without having to maintain and track down a separate list.

User role(s):

instructor,designer