Option to Disable Student submission comments in Assignments

Is there a system-level or course-level way to disable student assignment comments in Canvas? To my knowledge and testing, faculty are not notified of these comments. Please let me know if there is a way to immediately notify faculty when a student posts an assignment comment.

Recently this is causing us problems, as students are posting questions before or when they submit an assignment and expecting a reply and faculty are not seeing them until they go in and grade.

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VAWilkerson

My understanding is that the teacher must set up that Canvas notifications forward to their school email. Otherwise, the notification sits in Canvas until teacher sees it.. basically at grading time.

RupertRussell

This function may be appropriate for courses with one teacher and 30 students but we have courses with over 2000 students enrolled in the same Canvas course and 60 markers. If a student replies to there assignment there is no way that the reply will be read by the marker who marked their submission.

GinSellers

I, too, am interested in the comment section being disabled. Students will "submit" their assignments in the Comment section to avoid the late penalty. Any help here would be appreciated.

mbmacdonald

FYI, people have been asking about this on Community since 2019, perhaps even earlier. For some reason I never really noticed this "feature" until today. Students are putting links to Google docs, uploading files (with the wrong format) and even just typing their "response" into this comment box. Worse still, they can do this after the assignment is officially "closed!" This is perhaps the most egregious oversight I've encountered in my 3 years on the job so far

AnonymousProf

In the same boat…this needs to be disabled. Students use that section to hand in late work which they should not be able to do.

vshevchenko

It is time for Canvas to do it. So many times teachers asked for that simple feature. There is no reason not to do it. Again, make it as a setting checkbox, so teachers can choose most appropriate option for their class. I do not see any single reason not to do this improvement to support teachers.

TinaKoeppe

Please provide a way to either disable the user comments on assignments -or- let us edit the text that goes with the comment box. My team uses Canvas for adult asynchronous professional development trainings in both English and Spanish. We have +10,000 learners take trainings from our catalog every year. All the assignments in our courses are completed via SCORM interactions. All assignments are automatically scored. There are no submissions. The assignment comment box causes a LOT of confusion. It is being used by our adult learners to:

Type random emojis
Add extra information that is not requested. Learners spend unnecessary time attaching files and typing information into the comment box because they do not understand it's purpose and/or they think they will get points for extra effort.
Make comments on technology issues that are encountered. We have a tech support system, and an email address shared throughout the training where learners can ask for help. When learners ask for help using the "assignment comment" box, we don't see their request until the next workday morning.

As a result, we receive a long list of notifications each morning, of which 5% require a response, but still involve one of our team clicking on and opening each comment box text. It is not uncommon for us to wade through a huge list of notifications featuring happy face emojis, heart emojis, and random comments such as "finished" and "done" before we get to one that requires a response from our team. We frequently get random documents attached and sent to us via the assignment box feature which requires one of us to open and review.

This design flaw creates a lot of unnecessary confusion for our learners and a lot of wasted time from our team as we still must go through and read all of the assignment comments/attachments just in case there is a learner that needs help or has important feedback.

One solution may be to allow us to edit the text in the assignment comment box to better communicate its purpose.

Thank you for your attention to this issue.

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