Word count for Speedgrader (DocViewer) grading

[gsaltveit]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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It would be extremely helpful for student submissions to also include a word count when we are correcting them on Speedgrader through DocViewer.

Thank you!

Comments from Instructure

Per comment:

Hello, all! Just a quick note to share that this idea is currently being worked on. There are a couple things to consider in this request and we will need to address them in iterations.

Our first step is to add word count to SpeedGrader for text entry assignments. Our currently plan is for this to be available in November.

Our next step is to do some additional scoping for how to accomplish this with files uploaded and viewed through DocViewer. More to come on this as we look into if this can be accurately and consistently made available.

[lewisale]

I hope Canvas adds this feature because the process of downloading a document just to check the word count takes time when considering how many assignments we grade.  I was wondering if anyone has heard any feedback from Canvas about this idea?

[roniabusaad]

I'm also astonished they have yet to integrate this feature. In the

meantime, I've installed a Chrome plug-in called Word Count that at least

allows me to highlight and right click to see how many words there are.

>

[Steven_S]

 @bcarnes when you are logged into this site there are voting buttons near the top of the page.  It looks like this:

[Steven_S]

A word count integrated into speedgrader would be very helpful!  I have seen ideas that canvas directly rejects, and since that is not the response here, I doubt the delay in adding this feature is caused by a fundamental objection. 

In the meantime, most submissions that require a wordcount, also need to be checked for plagiarism.  Many plagiarism checkers also provide a wordcount, and so encouraging canvas integrations with plagiarism checkers could accomplish both.  I believe there are already integrations for programs like turnitin and unicheck, if the word count calculated in those is not displayed through the speedgrader, perhaps an idea to add that to the display would help solve whatever problem is in the way of canvas directly providing a wordcount.  Also, here's an idea for adding an integration with grammarly, because that's the program we use https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/15901-grammarlyedu-integration 

[tcarroll1]

This would be very helpful, especially for PDF documents. It doesn't even need to be 100% accurate. Anything within 5% would probably be good enough for most of us!

[JamesAshby]

Hi everyone. I developed a simple browser enhancement, driven by TamperMonkey, that adds a word count directly into Speedgrader. Check out the install guide and let me know if it helps: Speedgrader Word Count.

[jfryer]

Please help us by adding the word count feature to discussions for students and teachers. I’ve seen multiple customer requests and support posts asking for this. As educators, we would be incredibly grateful, as our students would be in a much better position to be successful. Thank you in advance for addressing this and taking action with solutions.

[mcphersona7]

I couldn't get it to work, I tried to debug and found that since speedgrader was being loaded in an iframe extensions such as Tampermonkey (and even custom Canvas theme JS as the JS in my case is hosted on some other instructure domain) could not touch any of it due to Same-origin policy - Wikipedia which only appears to be able to be turned off by running Chrome with a flag that kills this security feature. Since extensions run locally to the user Chrome seems to still kill access to iframe content.

Does your TamperMonkey script still work for you or has a change to Canvas/Speedgrader killed it? 

[JamesAshby]

Thanks for the heads up! Let me look into it and get back to you.

[jknox1]

This would be a simple option to include and would be very helpful as assignments often have a word count minimum. Having a page minimum is too easily manipulated with font, margins, etc.