Downloading and printing the "Assignment comments" box

[giusco81]

I marked for the first time using the SpeedGrader and I was wondering whether there is a way to download the "Assignment comments" box which is in the sidebar, together with a student's submission, as it is possible in Turnitin. Alternatively, is there a way to print the Assignment comments box, without simply copying and pasting into a Word file?

[fhernan · Accepted solution]

I have been commenting all the assignments of my students, only to find out that there is no way to download my own feedback! I know that I can download individual comments, one by one. It would be much easier to download a table with all the assignment comments, all at once. We need this for accreditation of engineering programs. C'mon, Canvas! It's such a basic feature! Everyday I'm more disappointed about Canvas and the absolute lack of technical support.

[kona]

 @giusco81 , Welcome to the Canvas Community. In response to your question, no, there is no built in way to download things posted in the assignment comments box. So no way to do this with the submission or without. Yet, if you added the comments directly to the assignment submission via DocViewer then you could download comments as part of the submission. See the following guide for more information on this - https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-12948-4152719763 

Hope this helps!

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello there,  @giusco81 ...

I have been reviewing older questions here in the Canvas Community, and I stumbled upon your question.  I wanted to check in with you because we have not heard back from you since you first posted this question on January 16, 2018.  It looks like  @kona  gave you some feedback later that day.  Have you had an opportunity to review Kona's response?  If so, did it help to answer your question?  Or, are you still looking for some help from members of the Community with this question?  If you feel that Kona's response has helped to answer your question, please go ahead and mark it as "Correct".  However, if you are still in need of assistance with this question, please post a message below so that someone from the Community might be able to help you.  For now, I am going to mark your question as "Assumed Answered" because we've not heard back from you and because there hasn't been any new activity in this topic for almost four months.  However, that won't prevent you or others from posting additional questions and/or comments below that are related to this topic.  I hope that's alright with you, Giuseppe.  Looking forward to hearing back from you soon.

[krhughes]

I would very much like to be able to export the comments on my speedgrader assignments. Right now I have to copy/paste them or rewrite them to track follow up with students. 

[jeffrey_weimer]

I am just facing this issue. I have to make assessment reports. For those in the know, these are ABET documents for accreditation of engineering programs. The documents are to include snapshots to demonstrate how we grade our assignments. As it is, we have no direct way to print out assignments with comments made in SpeedGrader. I am going through convolutions that are more trouble than had I graded off-line by hand and scanned the documents.

Sadly then, the failure to include a way to export annotations as margin notes essentially makes SpeedGrader in Canvas a serious burden rather than a helpful tool to use.

[idefeo]

I would like the ability to download SpeedGrader too into a PDF. There are certain instances where we have students print graded copies with comments. In those instances, I will not be able to use SpeedGrader.

[jeffrey_weimer]

I will offer a work-around of sorts.

* Download all submissions as PDF files
* Do the annotations and mark-ups with a local PDF editing app
--> DO NOT CHANGE THE FILE NAMES
* Upload the marked up and annotated submissions back to Canvas
* Add comments for each student's work in the comments area
* Assign the grades

We can start an entire thread on the best local tools to use to annotate PDF files in a way that streamlines the tedium in the steps to complete process. On the plus side is the fact that, by doing the annotations locally, you retain a complete record for later accounting purposes (e.g. ABET).

[fhernan · Accepted solution]

I have been commenting all the assignments of my students, only to find out that there is no way to download my own feedback! I know that I can download individual comments, one by one. It would be much easier to download a table with all the assignment comments, all at once. We need this for accreditation of engineering programs. C'mon, Canvas! It's such a basic feature! Everyday I'm more disappointed about Canvas and the absolute lack of technical support.

[werner_huysman1 · Accepted solution]

Hi, I use this workaround:

• go to https://canvas.school.com/graphiql
• paste this query (substitute the assignment id) in the query field:
  

  query MyQuery {
    assignment(id: "70422") {
      submissionsConnection {
        nodes {
          commentsConnection {
            nodes {
              comment
            }
          }
          user {
            email
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }​

• press the 'run' arrow
• copy the resulting JSON that appears in the field on the right (all of it!)
• go to https://konklone.io/json/ or another online json2csv converting service, paste the JSON, and you get a nice table with student emails and matching comments

Not ideal, but faster than copy & paste the comments one by one.

[KathrynCatlin]

Hi, thanks!  I've built on this code to get it to spit out rubric comments as well (along with some other info): 

query MyQuery {
  assignment(id: "356219") {
    name
    pointsPossible
    submissionsConnection {
      nodes {
        user {
          email
        }
        grade
        turnitinData {
          score
        }
        rubricAssessmentsConnection {
          nodes {
            score
            assessmentRatings {
              criterion {
                description
                longDescription
                ratings {
                  points
                  description
                }
                points
              }
              comments
            }
          }
        }
        commentsConnection {
          nodes {
            comment
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

[KestonMurphy]

This works however, I'm not getting the comments for second/ additional attempts made. Only the comments for assignments with the initial attempt.

[fhernan]

Can anyone explain to me how to run the code? I'm not that familiar with programming.
Thanks in advance!

[LBDLCanvas]

Thank you for this workaround! It is so hard for non-coding people to find solutions they can successfully execute. Got any workarounds for printing Canvas pages without URLs? Thank you!

[ChristopherMain]

So clumsy to do what every teacher needs to do in less time and effort. Baa!