Annotation Notifications for Students

[DCK]

Is there a way that I, as the instructor, can turn of student notifications for annotations on an assignment? I know I can disable seeing their annotation notifications--I want to disable the notifications they get when I annotate their assignments. I was told today that they all receive notifications for every annotation I leave, and I leave a lot. They don't need to receive any notifications until the grade has been entered, though. So can I do this? 

[erik_lysbakken]

Has this been addressed? I have spent the last 30 minutes searching the community forum and there is a lot of feedback regarding this from the past years. Students do NOT need to receive 30-40 individual emails every time an assignment is graded... Please can someone from Instructure/Canvas comment on this? 

[erik_lysbakken]

BUMP

[TLiang]

I am shocked only 5 people also have this question.  I agree with the original author. Students should NOT receive an email for EVERY annotation comment.  Assignment comments, yes - please email the student right away.  Please point to where the solution to disable this feature is located.

[TrishaMeyer1]

Hi @erik_lysbakken and @TLiang ,

You will want to set your grade posting policy for assignments to prevent students from getting those notifications:

How do I use posting policies in a course?

"Alternatively, you can select a Manual posting policy for your course [2]. Assignment grades, grading comments and submission annotations are hidden from students until manually posted. Submission Annotations alone will not trigger the option to post grades; a grade or grading comment would need to be entered. Students can see peer review comments when assignment grades are hidden. However, students can only see instructor comments if the instructor posts grades or submission comments."

[TLiang]

Hello @TrishaMeyer1 

I appreciate the prompt response.  Yes, I have used the Hide Grades policy.  However, I have found that sometimes I have to click the hide grade option multiple times before it works.  I don't mind when students know when their assignment is graded and available to review, which is why I don't like using the Hide Grade.  But, can I suggest to Instructure/Canvas to disable the individual assignment annotation email notifications all together and only allow the assignment grading comment notifications?  I prefer students view all the annotations made while in Canvas looking at their submissions AFTER I have completed reviewing their work in its entirety.  They do not need to be notified of each one. 

Appreciate the information/feedback.

[khoke]

I also have my policy set to manual grade posting, and the assignments are displaying MANUAL in the grade book. As far as I can tell, this setting has no effect at all on the emails/notifications students receive as I make annotations on their submissions (using my iPad, accessing the submission through SpeedGrader). The students are receiving a notification for each individual annotation I make on the document, in real time. 

I have searched in vain for solutions to the issue, and this post is the closest. Is the issue that the grade book policy setting is broken? Will setting each assignment to Manual by hand address the issue?  

It appears that a lot of time is spent by endusers to debug Canvas. I appreciate everyone who recognizes this problem and its severity.

[erik_lysbakken]

Hi! I just testet an assignment with "manual" grading policy in my test course, and so far it seems like its working as expected for me. In my experience tho, if you have already given a student some feedback before you enable "Manual" policy, it wont work for that student. 

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@khoke wrote:

I appreciate everyone who recognizes this problem and its severity.

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- In my experience using Canvas over the past 8 years, Instructure unfortunately does not recognize this problem at all.. this "Issue" has always been there. The same goes for many of the other problems we have struggled with and reported over the years(Like the many issues with the group system). But the development pace for Canvas is so slow, or even non-existent. In my opinion the focus should be on improving the current system with quality of life updates before adding new features. 

[khoke]

THANK YOU! I see now where I had gone wrong. I had already given some feedback for one of my assignments. The policy setting is working as Instructure has designed it, even if it can be confusing. Here is the scenario:

I am defining "annotation" as using the Canvas teacher app on an iPad to "write" directly onto the student's submitted work. On the other hand "submitting a comment" is putting a comment into a text field in the comments/feedback side pane associated with the submission. Finally, "grading" is entering a numerical score for the assignment.

I have several writing assignments this semester. All had "manual" posting enabled from my default grade book policy. For assignment 1, I was in a hurry, so I made some general comments in the side pain and submitted those as feedback. I sort of realized that students would not see the comments until I "posted" grades, so  I did that step (even though I had not actually entered a grade). I then  forgot about it because the assignment still needed to be graded, and I planned to go back and give more detailed feedback later.

When it came time to evaluate Assignment 2, I made extensive annotations on each student's submission. I also went back and finally fully annotated Assignment 1.

Students received a ridiculous number of Canvas notifications for Assignment 1 because that one had been previously been "posted". I would learn later they did not receive any notifications or see annotations for Assignment 2 at that time. But I could not see anything different on my end for Assignment 2 from Assignment 1. How odd.

It made so much more sense when I got to Assignment 3 and was able to test things on a student by student basis. I also went to enter actual scores for Assignments 1 and 2 and finally was able to see a difference for the two on my end.

Here is what was tripping me up: Just putting in annotations (again, by "writing" with a stylus/pad) on each submission will NOT trigger any alert to the instructor that these "handwritten" comments are hidden. It is also not possible to "post" such annotations alone. Posting is only an available option when a grade is entered OR a text comment has been submitted as feedback in the comments pane. Further, after either of those two things are done, the crossed out visibility symbol appears in Gradebook, and the submission's comments side pane shows "Hidden" in an orange box (until the instructor "posts" the grade/feedback).

Again, writing annotations on the submission alone does not trigger these visual cues that the feedback/grades are hidden. So I am sitting there very confused why both Assignment 1 and 2 looked like they are set up exactly the same way, when in fact, Assignment 2 was still Hidden, just not labeled as such. Interviewing students more closely revealed they were only get Canvas notifications for each written annotation for the Assignment that I had previously posted feedback. Once I started entering grades/comments into the side pane, then the hidden flag shows up in the side pane and the not-visible icon shows up in the grade book (until I post).

I guess my new workflow adaptation (because we all know Instructure won't fix anything) is to always submit a brief comment in the side pane whenever I am doing my written annotations. That then will trigger the visual cues needed to remind me that students can't see my annotations yet. Or if the cues are absent despite a submitted text comment from me, then I know that if I go back and annotate the submission then that poor kid is going to get a ton of notifications (and so I can consider the time of day/night).

Honestly, I can't even say this is the goofiest Canvas thing of all, but it might be nice and consistent if using Annotations also triggered the "it is still hidden" cues before posting if Canvas is going to also treat them as something that requires instant notifications after posting. 

[khoke]

And looking more closely, I could have checked the options in the Gradebook for each assignment. This would be the popdown menu accessed from the column header for an assignment in Grades. The displayed options to Post/Hide Grades will be reflective of the current state of the assignment. This would also be how and where to "mute" feedback to the students when making new comments after previously posting other comments, if the instructor remembers to go to Grades (and not SpeedGrader) to do so. 

Overall, I would have preferred a global "mute notifications" button for a course, perhaps with a timer for automatic reactivation of grade/comment display at a later time. Then I could do big grade book changes or extensively annotate assignments without generating a bunch of notifications for students.

In any event, there is just no good reason for using Annotation to generate so many notifications from a single session of marking! It is irritating the extent to which instructors have to "program" Canvas to avoid ridiculous outcomes.

[erik_lysbakken]

Hi! 

Thank you for the reply. 

We are aware that manual posting is a thing, but most of our staff prefer to have this set to automatic. In our experience, manual posting causes some frustration among the students due to some teachers either forgetting to post the grades or posting them unresonably late. 

I just cant understand why every single comment/annotation should generate a new email notification to a student when having this set to automatic. In what context would that be useful for the student? In my opinion having these notifications bundled up in one "daily" notification or similar just makes a lot more sense. 

Again, thanks for the reply, but i would really like to see Instructure improving this. 

[geores]

This is exactly the problem we have.  Why should students get an email every time a teacher makes a single pen stroke while doing annotations?!  We can't see why it would ever be helpful.  Please adjust this, Instructure!

[EliseMatton]

Thank you for raising this issue again! This problem has plagued me for years — I have tried to move most of my mark-up of essays for example to be within speedgrader and DocView, but it frustrates both me and my students when they get pinged sometimes hundreds of times about these annotations. The only solution I can think of would be to have students turn off submission notifications altogether, but this isn't great because I rely upon them seeing my submission comments for other reminders and issues to easily communicate about a specific assignments. 

It seems incredibly unintuitive to me that Canvas wouldn't disaggregate the notifications for ANNOTATIONS from the notifications from SUBMISSION comments, which seem entirely different.