Student view: View submissions and comments for all submissions

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

 
Right now students can only view their most recently added submission to an assignment. This means that all previous submissions to the assignment are not available to students, including feedback that the instructors have provided. This is a big problem because students are losing critical information that could help promote learning and understanding.We need to eliminate this lossylearning problem and make all assignment submissions visible to students!
193 Comments
MsTia
Community Contributor

Oh, my -- you may just have rocked my world. A workaround for students seeing prior submissions? If prior teacher annotations are also available thru the app, I will sing.

catherine_carne
Community Participant

Yes, students can see the prior teacher annotations with the app. Whether they will look or not is a whole different ballgame. 

dave_perry
Community Explorer

that is a good start. But if I'm sitting down to do some serious work I'm sat at my laptop - and if it's a long essay with a lot of annotations, that's far easier on the eye than staring at even a big ipad screen!

rodger-ling
Community Member

Having prior submissions visible on the app and not the actual online portal where students do the work is definitely a workaround, but a limited one.  Very few students have a large screen iPad or tablet.  Every student in our school does have a laptop and that's where they are going to submitting assignments and viewing feedback. 

I know Canvas is complicated and there are always things to improve, but clearly given the years that have passed this particular issue just isn't considered important by the company.  Whereas if I were a king of my campus making the decision to implement Canvas today, this one issue might be the single biggest red flag I see.

dave_perry
Community Explorer

We have found this in 2 years of having it, so far. Frequently finding we can't do something, or that is flaky (e.g. the Course and People search as an admin). On the whole the GUI is nicer for end users. But simple things like not being able to use Sections to police who can see what (e.g. tutors delivering a course want to stagger how their groups of students see the content that's relevant, and you can't date unlock a module by section). Simple things in moodle, which we had before!

melanie2
Community Participant

This request has been on the table for as long as we've been using Canvas. It is mind-boggling that teachers can see all submission and students cannot, especially since it's the students that need to learn from feedback on prior assignments.

MsTia
Community Contributor

Ha! Exactly. Mine will. And if they don't . . . well, that's how it goes. Works for me! Off to update my syllabusessssss.

Hooray, hooray, hooray.

bludlow76
Community Member

I would just like to echo the need for students to be able to view their prior submissions and the annotations of those submissions. 

I will gladly vote for this feature request, just point me in the right direction.

cmonson5
Community Explorer

Students submit a rough draft and a final draft to the same assignment and I would like students to be able to see the past submissions just like an instructor can. 

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

We thought the participants in this conversation would like to share their thoughts with Matt Goodwin, Senior Director of Product Management, about the work being done on assignment submission history. Check out his post over at Assignment Submission History