Addressing Your Feedback on Recent Discussion Checkpoints Changes

[SamGarza1]

This morning, we gathered our product team to discuss your feedback on the recent Speedgrader changes that apply to all Discussions in the Discussion Checkpoints feature. We heard you loud and clear – the update disrupted your grading workflow, especially for those not using Discussion Checkpoints. We understand how frustrating this has been, and we’ve decided to disable Discussion Checkpoints effective immediately until we can respond to your feedback and needs. If institutions would like to utilize Checkpoints before it is reenabled, they can reach out to their CSMs.

Note: If your institution has enabled Discussion Checkpoints, it remains enabled. Your institution can disable it by adjusting the feature flag. When the Feature Flag is disabled, Checkpoint Discussions will show a banner message informing instructors that it was disabled. Instructors will need to edit the discussion to update the due date. Points and assigned users will remain unchanged.

Here are the main concerns you’ve shared and how we are addressing them:

Speedgrader Changes Impacting All Discussions:

• The Issue: The updated Discussion experience in Speedgrader, designed to optimize the grading experience for Discussion Checkpoints, was applied to all discussions, even those without checkpoints enabled. 
• Our Solution: While our initial group of testers felt that these features would be beneficial to all Speedgrader users, we are hearing now that many others disagree. We will work to incorporate this additional perspective into an update that will allow users to choose either version.

Accessibility Concerns:

• The Issue: Concerns have been raised about the accessibility of the updated Speedgrader interface. More specifically around the newly added Previous Reply and Next Reply buttons, their placement on the page, and how they behave when navigating an individual user’s posts. 
• Our Solution: We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible learning environment for everyone. We’ll be re-testing the updated Speedgrader interface, making some UX changes, and quickly addressing any reported accessibility issues to ensure it meets the highest accessibility standards.

Addressing Issues in Large Courses:

• We are looking into the performance issues some instructors are experiencing with the changes to Speedgrader in large courses with high student enrollment. Our development team is actively investigating and optimizing the system to ensure smooth and efficient grading for all course sizes.

Benefits of the New Discussions Experience in Speedgrader:

The latest updates to the new Discussions experience in Speedgrader were developed in partnership with our users, who told us they were looking for these benefits:

• Enhanced Context: Instructors can now view student responses within the context of the entire discussion thread, including the original prompt and other replies, and reply directly from Speedgrader. This provides a more holistic understanding of student engagement and participation.
• Updated Navigation: The "previous" and "next" buttons allow for more efficient grading, especially for longer discussions with multiple participants.
• Seamless Integration with Checkpoints: The changes to Speedgrader provide a streamlined and intuitive grading experience for instructors using Discussion Checkpoints.
• Integration with Third-Party Tools: The integration with discussion checkpoints lays the groundwork for integration with tools like Turn-It-In or other AI detection tools to verify the authenticity of student work.

Discussion Checkpoints - Optional and Flexible:

• Discussion Checkpoints are completely optional. Admins can enable or disable them at the root level for your institution based on your teaching needs and preferences. The feature is turned off by default.

Moving Forward:

We are committed to addressing your feedback and continuously improving the Canvas experience. We will keep you updated on the progress of these improvements and provide clear communication about any upcoming changes.  Feedback will be collected through a Maze survey shared below. The survey is a follow-up to feedback given by Canvas Community members and will further explore issues related to how Speedgrader works with discussions, especially checkpointed discussions.

https://t.maze.co/337213163 

We believe that these changes have the potential to significantly enhance the grading workflow for discussions. We appreciate your engagement, patience, and understanding as we work to make Discussion Checkpoints a reality.

We encourage you to continue sharing your feedback and suggestions. Your input is invaluable in helping us shape the future of Canvas.

[jb2483929]

For those of us who do not have Canvas Data set up, can you tell us how we can find courses/discussions where this feature was turned on? What will this look like to teachers/students in Discussions where it was enabled; what about if some grading had already taken place?

[james_whalley]

@SamGarza1 When is “immediately”? We want time to make a decision and contact the CSM if we need to keep it on. This is our first week of semester and people are already building discussions with this feature.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Thank you for listening Instructure!  That's wonderful news.

@jb2483929, I tested turning off checkpoints in Beta, and all graded discussions retained their scores.  The discussion due date was lost though.  Will that be the same if Instructure disables it everywhere?

Also, once checkpoints had been chosen but disabled at account level in Beta, a message appeared at the top of the discussion about asking the Admin to turn it on, The message appeared to students as well, at least when I masqueraded as a student.  I hope that will not appear to students.

[mwolfenstein]

Thank you @SamGarza1 for the clear and concise update. Is there a reason why Checkpoints wasn't rolled out as a feature option at the course level? If there's any way that it could be, it would definitely provide the best option in the short run since you'd be giving faculty users the agency to decide whether they like the new SpeedGrader experience or are willing to deal with it as a trade-off.

Additionally, I'm a little concerned about any graded discussions that faculty may have created with the checkpoints feature in the meantime, especially if they have already entered grades. which is probably less common but definitely not impossible.

[James]

The survey is pretty good, but the first main prompt is basically so open-ended that I felt it was asking for everything that was wrong. I typed a lot, just to realize that you later asked about those very items I was complaining about in the first message (for example, having the "reply x of y" status). There is no back button to go back and fix the earlier prompt, but it would be nice to warn people about how it's laid out and what to expect. Then, at the end, it would be nice to have the "is there anything else?" prompt in case we forgot something at the beginning or the prompts along the way made us think of something else.

[olssond]

Great news! When this returns, you may want to consider this being a course-level feature option.

[james_whalley]

@SamGarza1 I found in my testing that shutting off the feature in beta cause all due dates from all Discussions using Checkpoints to be removed. Furthermore, the discussions I checked that already had posts before removing the feature then did not display current or future posts in the SpeedGrader. Discussions that didn't have posts and then received posts only after the removal displayed fine in the SpeedGrader. Re-enabling the feature brought the posts back to the SpeedGrader.

[AnnLoomis]

Thanks for this info @james_whalley. Our campus went ahead and disabled Checkpoints yesterday, and I also found that dates disappeared entirely from Discussions that had been using Checkpoints. However, I was not aware that "the discussions I checked that already had posts before removing the feature then did not display current or future posts in the SpeedGrader". If this is the case, this is a huge issue, and Instructure needs to address it immediately. 

[SamGarza1]

Hi All, @jb2483929 @james_whalley @Nancy_Webb_CCSF @mwolfenstein @James @olssond @AnnLoomis 

Thank you for your patience as I work to answer your questions.

If your institution has enabled Discussion Checkpoints, it remains enabled. Your institution can disable it by adjusting the feature flag.

When the Feature Flag is disabled, Checkpoint Discussions will show a banner message informing instructors that it was disabled. Instructors will need to edit the discussion to update the due date. Points, assigned users, and existing submissions will remain unchanged. Please report any issues to our support team.

We're looking into what reporting we can offer institutions. 

And thank you to those who've participated in our survey. Please feel free to share it out to others as it will remain open for the next couple of weeks. 

[james_whalley]

@SamGarza1 I did some further testing regarding SpeedGrader visibility of posts. If a student has posted to a discussion before the checkpoint is disabled and makes no more posts, those posts are not visible in the SpeedGrader. If they make more posts after the change, all posts show in the SpeedGrader.

[cheryltice]

Hello, @SamGarza1,

I appreciate the transparency in your post. At the same time, I'm concerned about an emerging pattern. This situation echoes issues with the Discussions Redesign rollout, where rushing to production without adequate workflow testing led to disruptions that still persist in the community today.

Now we're seeing SpeedGrader changes impact our already challenging discussions interface. Both cases suggest a need for more thorough testing and attention to community feedback before deployment.

Some questions:

1. How is testing done? Are instructors with diverse class sizes included in the process, or is testing primarily developer-driven? How are community comments incorporated into the testing process?
2. What concrete steps will Canvas take to more effectively integrate community feedback before major feature rollouts?
3. For future updates, how will you implement a rollout schedule with clear benchmark dates to protect existing workflows? 

While we value Canvas for its reliability and ease of use in teaching and learning and appreciate innovation, I think that stability and workflow preservation must be prioritized. I strongly encourage establishing a more rigorous pre-release testing protocol that gives appropriate weight to community concerns. 

Looking forward to hearing your plan to address these issues.

Thank you!

Cheryl

[ACook-RVCC]

@james_whalley , so based upon your tests in a Checkpoint-enabled Discussion, if every student were to just go back in and post one more time AFTER Checkpoints are turned back off, it will cause all previous posts to become visible again in Speedgrader?

[james_whalley]

@ACook-RVCC From my limited testing, yes.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

@james_whalley, does the speedgrader problem (student posts not appearing) only apply to discussions where checkpoints was turned on?  If the discussion didn't use checkpoints, do all the posts appear?  Thanks!

[james_whalley]

@Nancy_Webb_CCSF My testing showed that discussions that never used checkpoints were unaffected and showed fine in the SpeedGrader. I didn't run tons of tests, but it makes sense to me that this would be the case.

[RebeccaLarge-Sw]

I find the new speedgrader version not very speedy. It is cumbersome and I would prefer to use the prior version. My co-teacher and I give feedback on every post. We have already read the discussion threads so the new version does not help us at all.

Rebecca Large-Swope

Manage School Libraries SCHL 5160

[jmurray6]

@james_whalley , @ACook-RVCC , @Nancy_Webb_CCSF 

Regarding the posts not appearing in speedgrader issue. At this time, I have at least one faculty member with 4 courses utilizing discussions with checkpoints. Thus far, we have NOT disabled the feature (we're currently polling our faculty to see what the consensus is). So, in these 4 classes - the checkpoint feature is active and she has enabled checkpoints on her discussions. She has her gradebook rules set to autopost 0s on assignments with no submissions. As her discussions closed on Sunday, she got several contacts from students asking her why they got 0s when they did complete the discussion. Upon investigation - speedgrader said those students had no submissions/posts for that discussion forum, but if one went to the forum and searched for the posts - they were there. So it appears that the "posts not appearing in speedgrader issue" may be more widespread (and somewhat random) that what has been discussed here so far.

It wasn't every student - only a few in each course, and thus far I can't identify a pattern that might give some insight into why.

[james_whalley]

@jmurray6 I was not aware that there were issues with posts not showing in the SpeedGrader when the Checkpoints feature is still enabled. I hope you submit that case to Canvas support. Please keep us informed as to how that unfolds.

[daysih]

Hello @SamGarza1 

Thank you for the update, but I hope this gets fix soon.

This morning I was made aware of the issue by several instructors in campus. The Benefits of the New Discussions Experience in Speedgrader only apply if the discussions are fully in texted. This is not functional when students share images and videos. 

[james_whalley]

@daysih I just tested in Beta and found that the images showed just fine in the SpeedGrader. Can you share screenshots of the issue and let us know the process you are using to create the issue?

[JuliaL]

I lack the words to express how much I hate this "upgrade." The new SpeedGrader makes it so much HARDER to grade discussions! It takes me three times as long. I can't just quickly see all of a single student's posts in one place. Having to wait for the entire discussion to load when I'm just trying to see one student's posts makes everything take longer. I can see students' posts in context when I have the discussion open in one tab, and I have SpeedGrader open in another tab so that I can see all of the student's posts collected in one place--or, at least, I used to. Is it possible to make this "upgrade" optional and let those of us who can't stand it have the old format back?

Also, this "upgrade" doesn't work with Firefox. I can't expand replies or reply to a post without getting an "Oops, something broke" message. It's ridiculous. The discussion forums are virtually unusable. Please, fix this!

[JuliaL]

Another problem with the whole discussion loading in "Speed"Grader (truly a misnomer now): when I scroll down to read one student's post, the post below it gets marked as read even though I haven't read it yet. So, I can't even keep track of what posts I have/haven't read.

[jmurray6]

@james_whalley Working through the process now. However, one thing I've since considered (and my faculty member can't 100% confirm but thinks is possible) is that this particular discussion in several of her courses was already active with posts when she switched it over to a checkpointed discussion. So, I'm wondering if it's almost a reverse of the situation you found in your testing. If a discussion is switched to a checkpointed discussion while it is active with posts, then posts from before that switch wouldn't show in speedgrader (unless perhaps the student comes back and posts again after the switch). 

[jcd11060]

In a long discussion with a lot of images, the Speedgrader simply didn't work--it did not bring me to each student's initial post. I want to use the Checkpoints when you get them figured out, but I still want to be able to see all the posts for a single student on 1 page.

I did like being able to set up 2 due dates. However, somehow doing that got rid of my group settings, which was frankly a disaster. 

[daysih]

@SamGarza1 I would also like to add that this needs to be tested for group discussions as well. It's very buggy in the speed grader's new update, causing issues to grade students posts. 

[jmurray6]

@daysih @jcd11060 

My co-administrator experienced issues with group discussions while working with our Nursing and Allied Health faculty last week. She posted in a new thread about those issues, linking here for reference: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Group-Discussion-with-Checkpoints-is-not-wo...

[daysih]

@jmurray6 

Thank you for this information. Unfortunately, I have an instructor who is unable to grade some students using SpeedGrader. The discussion is set as a group discussion with no checkpoints. Due to the SpeedGrader update, the instructor cannot grade certain students. In the gradebook, you can see that the students have submitted their work and are waiting to be graded. However, when you select SpeedGrader, the students’ replies and comments do not appear.

The only way to see the students' replies are through the discussion page.

Additionally,  the discussion page does not display all of the students' responses, even after switching groups.

[James]

@jmurray6 

This sounds more like an issue with group discussions than anything related to checkpoints. For years (well before checkpoints), if a student is not part of a group and makes a post to a group discussion, their results don't show up in SpeedGrader. I cannot remember if it is just discussions made before they were put into a group or any discussion made while not put into a group. But that sounds more like what you're describing than checkpoint-related.

[jmurray6]

@James There are a couple of different things running through this thread at the moment and we've been experiencing slightly different versions of both.

The first I was talking about where some student's posts weren't showing in speedgrader (and were getting 0s autoposted) is a checkpointed discussion, but NOT a group discussion.

Then we've also experienced group discussions not working at all with checkpoints - which is what my co-admin was talking about in the post I linked and what @jcd11060 seemed to be experiencing.

It wasn't until @daysih 's latest reply that I realized they were talking about a group discussion that is not checkpointed.

[cmount]

"The "previous" and "next" buttons allow for more efficient grading, especially for longer discussions with multiple participants."

No they are not. Not in any way is this true. I cannot believe that anyone else who has used this nonsense agrees. I used to just click on student in speedgrader and see all that student's post and replies in one location. I didn't have to click next and wait 30 seconds or more just to load another reply. This is singularly the worst "upgrade" I've seen from Canvas in the fifteen years I've been using it. Just awful.

[james_whalley]

If you had enabled Discussion Checkpoints and have since disabled, you may be wondering how you can find the affected users. Thanks to a friend in the Community Coaches group, I was able to find affected users here at Cornell by using the has_sub_assignments field that was added to the assignments table in Canvas Data 2 and looking for assignments where that value was true.

[KelseyMaki]

The “improvements” to Speedgrader in the discussion forums are a nightmare. This makes grading and seeing each student’s initial post and response extremely difficult, especially in composition courses that require robust posts and replies. The main reason I preferred Canvas to Angel when we switched was Speedgrader in discussions. PLEASE restore the prior version.

[MarciaKL]

I prefer the older version of Speedgrader in the discussion forums because it is more direct and provides each student's post and responses on one screen. The robust discussions require a great deal of time and analysis. Please restore the prior version as soon as possible.  

[daysih]

Sorry, last comment: students are seeing the entire discussion when they view discussions on their grades page. They don't have a 'previous/next reply' button, so they would need to scroll through replies or search for their names using the search bar. I think adding a button that says 'Show My Replies' could help students, or perhaps switching it back to the previous layout for them. 

[dgreene]

I may be in the minority, but I don't see a problem with the new checkpoints speedgrader. I actually like seeing what the student has replied to and I like having their replies highlighted. I also really like being able to set two due dates for discussions. I would love to have it working better in the app and I would like to be able to assign checkpoints to group discussions. 

[HeatherRevesz]

This "upgrade" has made it harder to grade discussions and takes double the time. 😠

[mpaoletti]

@dgreene , my colleague who does all her grading on campus also enjoys it. Those of us who grade from home are experiencing significant slowdowns in productivity, which seems at least a tiny bit connected to network and computer processing speed.

[rkahn]

Since you are looking for feedback, Days Late expressed as 0.243566 is distracting and unnecessary. Rounded to 0.2, 3.1 etc is a more sensible design.

[cmount]

@mpaoletti - I'd accept the network and computer processing speed as a potential reason if I wasn't using a high end gaming pc and gigabit+ internet at home.

[mpaoletti]

@cmount good to know! I'm amateur sleuthing around 😉 Can't wait til these issues are resolved. 

[dbrace]

I am looking forward to the (hopefully near) future when the process (for multiple due dates in discussions, aka 'checkpoints', and the upgraded SpeedGrader) work together in unison and without any flaws. 

-Doug

[JennyDruckrey]

@SamGarza1  - I appreciate you posting the survey for feedback, however, I'm wondering if there is any update on when the issue will be resolved?  We turned on discussion checkpoints to allow instructors to incorporate the feature at the beginning of the term.  We received tons of negative feedback with the SpeedGrader adjustments but didn't want to turn the feature off for students and instructors already using the enhancement.  We've directed our faculty to your survey, but now we're getting a lot of follow up questions about when the issue will be resolved.  We were hoping Instructure would at least roll back the SpeedGrader portion of the update or change checkpoints to a course-level feature.   

[mwolfenstein]

I wanted to follow suit with @JennyDruckrey. I hate to be that user, but is there any update on when in February faculty will have the option for how they view discussions? I didn't see anything about it in the 2/15 release notes. We need to know if it'll be available by 2/18 when our spring term starts, because if it isn't we need to turn off Checkpoints prior to term start and not turn it back on until faculty can use their preferred view in SpeedGrader.

[AletheaTyner]

SBCC History prof here -- I'm so disappointed and frustrated by the changes to the Discussions functionality in Canvas. It is terrible. No one on our campus is happy about this. The speed grader functionality is so broken and clunky now. It's impossible to see the writing a single student has produced -- main post and replies-- in a quick view. It takes at least twice as long, and their writing is fragmented across several views. The so-called "benefit" of seeing their work in context is absurd -- none of this makes our grading life easier. None of this benefits the students.

Who thought that changing this was a good idea? It's quite obvious that whoever designed this wasn't in the trenches, grading hundreds of Discussions every week. This so-called update added nothing except frustration and angst. There is zero upside.  You should make it possible for instructors to use the previous modality instead of this one. The "Checkpoints" feature (who even asked for this????) is NOT worth breaking the Speedgrader functionality. 

[mwolfenstein]

@AletheaTyner as a community member who has been here a while, I wanted to address the "who even asked for this" questions. I'm not defending the implementation of either checkpoints or the change to SpeedGrader, but checkpoints (aka milestones or multiple due dates) has been the most requested feature by the community going back to something like 2012. The community site got reworked with a different system, so we don't have the old feature requests with up/down vote tallies, but the ability to assign more than one due date for students to engage in a discussion is something that a huge portion of Canvas users have wanted for a decade or more.

As for the SpeedGrader UI change, there was also a lot of interest expressed by the community in the ability to both grade and engage with discussion posts at the same time, and to be able to better see the context when students were replying to each other. It didn't have quite as much support as checkpoints, but it was still a heavily requested feature. The implementation is nothing like what I think most of us had in mind in relation to the actual user need. It does meet those desired functions, but it does it in a way that's relatively computing resource intensive, and that (more importantly) makes a massive trade-off in actual efficiency in grading. This is pretty ironic since the reason people wanted context on replies and the ability to reply while grading was specifically to have a more efficient process engaging with discussions and posting replies to students.

[ckeigher]

Yes, I totally confirm @mwolfenstein post as it relates to the longstanding desire for multiple due dates.

An idea for speedgrader on this... what if discussions opened by default the 'old way', and somewhere there would be a link to 'view posts in context' enabling that feature/view by demand, only when desired.  Maybe in speedgrader options menu.

[mwolfenstein]

@ckeigher Instructure has confirmed that there's a fix incoming that allows us to choose the view we want but it will be at the account level for all discussions. You'll be able to switch, but it won't be a switch you can quickly do while reviewing a single student's submission.

Just to further the conversation here, I made this extremely ugly wireframe showing roughly what I think users actually want in order to glean context and reply when grading without sacrificing efficiency.

Obviously this is missing a lot of the UI elements, but I think the idea is reasonably evident. A grading user wants to be able to see an individual student's posts in the order they were posted (the numbers on this wireframe are for reference, not representations of the UI), they want to be able to see the post a student is responding to, and they want the ability to reply to the post of the student whose work they are currently grading. If they find they need more context (i.e. additional posts from a thread), at that point there's not a huge amount of time saved by having the whole discussion in SpeedGrader compared to going to the full discussion.

[AletheaTyner]

@mwolfenstein 
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I was clearly upset when I ranted my frustrations above, and naturally, I can see how having "multiple due dates" for Discussions would make good pedagogical sense in some instances. I can also see how educators may have requested this of Canvas in conversations to which I was not privy. 

Yet I still stand by my fundamental criticism: whatever has been "gained" is in no way worth the cost of what has been "lost" in this calculus. Canvas implemented this change sloppily, with little apparent concern about how it would affect our grading efficiency. Yesterday, I spent 3 hours providing detailed personal feedback for students in fifty Discussion assignments, a task that had previously taken me at most 90 minutes. Add that up over the semester, and it amounts to a lot of unnecessary, uncompensated labor that, quite frankly, I find offensive.

 @ckeigher, your recommendation is exactly what I have asked of our FRC (Faculty Resource Center). Bless them, our FRC has the misfortune of fielding faculty complaints and attempting fixes for every unhelpful tech update we are compelled to contend with. I was told that there was no way to do what you suggested above without causing a cascade of other problems. 

In any case-- I appreciate everyone taking the time to speak up about this. Maybe someone at Canvas cares and will make the requisite improvements? 

[mwolfenstein]

@AletheaTyner they definitely care and they held listening sessions after the initial rollout was such a mess. We're still waiting on a date for when they'll implement the option in SpeedGrader settings to choose which way you want to view discussions, but the Product Manager for this feature who is actually really awesome said in the listening session that they were working to have it in this month. I'm confident that even if it's delayed beyond the 28th that they're doing their best to get a fix in as fast as they can.

I'm a Distance Education Coordinator so I share your frustration as I've had a lot of very frustrated faculty contacting me to relay the same issue you're experiencing regarding the inefficiency this has introduced to grading. I'm also frustrated that Instructure really missed the mark at the start of both the fall and spring terms with work that they're doing on Discussions. That said, when it comes to remediating the problem once the initial error has taken place, I do have to respect that the scale they're operating at is huge, and it's not necessarily easy to implement things that seem like a quick fix for those of us on the outside. For now, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that they get the fix for this implemented in the next couple of weeks.

[MarcySatterwhit]

I want to be able to grade discussions without the check points in my course.  This should be a "course level" feature instead of a "campus" feature for those that want to use the check point feature.

Thank you for listening to our concerns.

Have a great day!