Notes Columns or Check-in Tracking in Gradebook

padgett4

Hello! My university has self-paced courses where each student begins at different times and completes all their coursework within a set timeframe. Instructors monitor their students’ progress throughout the course to ensure they’re staying on top of their assignments and achieving their unique personal learning goals. Instructors keep track of their communication check-in’s and specifics about each student’s needs by enabling the Notes Column in Gradebook, this feature is AWESOME. This is essential in really large classes, so instructors can maintain strong personalization and care for each student.

My question is - Is it possible to add in multiple Notes Columns into the Gradebook? (sometimes the Notes get pretty long and it would be helpful to have another field)

And, are there any other features like this (for tracking student progress at an individual level) that are visible from Gradebook or another overview page?

Thank you so much for your help and suggestions!

petern

To answer the question about multiple notes columns, the answer is yes.  However, you can't do it through the website.  You can do this through the Canvas API.  If you've not used APIs before, I would suggest asking the admin to do this or your customer success manager.  If you want to use the API yourself and haven't done anything like this, the following steps will get you what you want.  

1. Get your API Token.

Add a new access token by following the steps here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-manage-API-access-tokens-as-an-instructor/ta-p/1177 

2. Python

Lots of ways to access the API, but I think python is simple.  Download python.  In the terminal or the command line run

pip install canvasapi

 

3. Edit this and run

Create a new python file and copy & paste the following code.  This will add an extra column to your grade book.  You need to change the URL.  You need to replace "TOKEN" with whatever your token is.  You need to replace 1234 with the course id.  You can find your course id in your address bar: https://schoolname.instructure.com/courses/1234/gradebook

from canvasapi import Canvas

API_KEY = "TOKEN"
API_URL = "https://schoolname.instructure.com/"

canvas = Canvas(API_URL,API_KEY)

my_course = canvas.get_course(1234)

my_column = {
    "title": "Test column",
    "position": 1,
    "read_only": False
    }

my_course.create_custom_column(column = my_column)

 

Here's what it looks like when it's complete: