Timed release, grouped pages with no gradebook entries

[rgbatduke]

OK, so I have a specific, rather simple need.  I've searched the archives and been brought up short.  I teach team-based physics with an in-class team based problem solving segment, ungraded.  Students access an in-class problem set (out of roughly 50 total), work the problems in class in teams but with mentoring support, and then we e.g. resume lecture or do something else.   After they complete the day's work, the solutions to the in-class set is posted so that they can check their answers and not incorporate errors into their understanding built upon the work if any.

I would like to release the problem sets all at once at the beginning of the semester, but load up the solutions to be released one at a time on a given prespecified date/time.  And there's the problem.

Canvas would enable this to work under "Assignments".  I have (playing around before the spring semester starts up in a week) created an assignment group called "In Class Problems" (a de facto folder, from the point of view of organization).  I can upload a copy of the ICP 00.1 set, mark it so that it doesn't contribute to their grade, and set a release time.  I can do the same thing for the ICP 00.1 solution set, timed to become available at the end of the day this set is scheduled.  However, this creates two columns in the gradebook and an unhidable summary column. This both makes the gradebook far larger than it need be and is somewhat silly, since there is no need for a gradebook entry of any sort.  My gradebook will be plenty long and difficult to navigate without 100 extra columns in it NOT containing a score for UNGRADED work.  Scratch this approach, unless anybody can tell me how to create assignments with no gradebook column at all (or, if a very simple checkbox could be added that enables the column addition step to be skipped!)  I would be super-fine with this last suggestion to be implemented -- the archives make it clear that a lot of folks would like this functionality.

OK, so gradebook doesn't permit this; how about pages?  The course design modules clearly indicated that it is desirable to set up a class with content "like" this released on a timed basis.  So fine, I went to pages to try -- that way, no gradebook entry! -- and learned that one cannot create folders, or assignment-like groups, under pages.   The earliest request for this functionality was made many years ago, and as far as I could tell from the thread, the request was rejected in favor of doing something "right" at some future time that never happened.  It was re-requested repeatedly up to 2021, at which point AFAICT folks just gave up.  Timed release was added (super-good) but no form of sub-layer organization exists, as far as I can tell.

Again, it is undesirable  to create 100 or so timed file releases under pages "in general".  It would make it pretty much impossible to use it for anything else that might need to be timed and obviously makes finding anything at all much more difficult.  This too, could be fixed, without making pages any more of an "index page" than assignments already is, by adding groups similar to the assignment groups to pages.  Note that I'm a coder myself and appreciate the need to reuse code wherever possible, and maintain a sort of consistency to the interface. 

So, developers -- don't like folders?  Don't want it to be an "index page"?  Fine.  Canvas already has the code and objects required to create, display, and manage groups under the "Assignments" top level page.  Indeed, one could prototype this by simply copying the "Assignments" tree, renaming it "Pages", adding a group membership object to the structure linking up the pages, and just remove the bit in assignments that, y'know, makes them an assignment with gradebook entries and linkage to the inline grading tool etc.  Or just move the group part to the existing pages code.

Either one would solve my problem and would improve the consistency and functionality of canvas in multiply requested ways.  Or, maybe there is a rational way to do it already there, one that doesn't involve spurious gradebook entries for ungraded work including a summary gradebook column.  If so, please help me discover it.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @rgbatduke,

I think this can actually be done in assignments, you just may have been looking at the wrong option.  When setting up the assignment, you can set the "Display Grade as" option to "Not Graded", which will then create the assignment without adding anything to your gradebook.  I'm pretty sure this is what you're looking for, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

One other thing I wanted to quickly mention about the assignments page is that even though you as the teacher will always see things displayed under the assignment groups, the default view for students is to show things by date in auto-generated groups such as "past assignments," "overdue assignments," "undated assignments," etc...  Students can switch to the "show by type" view to get the assignment groups view you have as a teacher, but I don't know how many will do that.  You can check this out by using the "student view" button on the assignments page if you'd like.  Just wanted to make sure you were aware of this so you don't rely too much on the assignment group design purely for organizational purposes.

-Chris

[rgbatduke]

Thanks,  Chris, I'll give that a try.  It does still seem to leave an unwanted empty column in the grade book (so far, I'll see if I can get rid of this as well) but I can live with that even if it never goes away.  The student view is fine -- I can suggest that they use the show by type view but as long as they can find the "content of the day" one way or another it's fine by me.  Being able to group things by type helps me out regardless as there will be at least three distinct categories of routine work -- in-class problem solving (ungraded), homework (graded) and lab (graded).  Lab assignments will be handled by the lab instructor(s), while I manage the other two.

I still think it would be spiffy (and stylistically consistent!)  if the Canvas developers cloned the grouping structure from assignments to pages and thus satisfied a longstanding request.  Tree structured organization helps everyone -- there is nothing more nightmarish on the web than a single large flat directory containing all sorts of content.  But for now, this ought to suffice for THIS class, and sufficient unto the day the evil thereof...