Why Can't We Decide Whether or Not to Unpublish a Course/Assignment?

Question

I LOVE Canvas, I really do! In spite of that, I have one major frustration that creates trouble for me on a very regular basis! The majority of our courses are year long so they have 2 learning periods. We want our teachers to unpublish all modules and assignments from the first learning period after the first semester report cards have been published. The first learning period rules and averages impact the second learning period; there is not complete separation between the two learning periods! This does not make an ounce of sense to me and it is causing a lot of exasperation with our teachers and students.

I put in a help ticket and reached out to our CSM and the response I got was that we cannot unpublish anything that has a student grade in it because it compromises the integrity of the assignment. WHY???? The first semester report cards have been printed and sent; this is identical to the end of the second semester when the course ends. Why can't we completely close out the first semester when it is finished?

Furthermore, I find it pretty insulting that Canvas can tell me what does and does not compromise the integrity of the assignments at my school. They don't work here1 They don't know how we do things! Why should they get to override our decision to unpublish all semester 1 modules? Also, we aren't deleting them, we just want to hide them so that they aren't impacting the second semester assignments, if we need to go back and reference them we can; they're still there.

Finally, our students and parents are confused when they can see both semester grades and we have had multiple students try to turn in assignments from Semester 1 after the end of the semester or parents coming in months after the end of the first semester still mad about some 3 point assignment from the first semester. If we can hide the first semester it will be out of sight and out of mind.

Thanks you for considering a change to this rigid configuration!

Dianna · Answer

Hi @TKARachelHirota  - You've gotten some great tips from @Noah and @melodyc_lam but I wanted to offer another option that we employ.  Our teachers regularly unpublish whole modules but students can still see their grades.  In our K12 environment, our teachers do not have to put all assignments into Canvas.  Instead, all assignments and grades go into our SIS (PowerSchool).

Grading periods are helpful, but an additional step we took was to also hide totals in the grade summary which precluded our students (and parents) from assuming the course grade was something that it was not actually.  That additional step has been very helpful for us.

Good luck!

Dianna

melodyc_lam · Answer

@TKARachelHirota In addition to @Noah's suggestions, have you considered having your district create Grading Periods as well?

With Grading Periods:

* Assignments outside the current grading period are locked, which means students can't submit assignments
* Grade views can be set so that students can't see totals across both grading periods
* Grading periods can be weighted (if needed)
* Teachers can filter their course gradebooks by the periods.

Here's the community article for Grading Periods in a course:

https://community.instructure.com/en/kb/articles/660827-how-do-i-use-grading-periods-in-a-course

Noah · Answer

Hey @TKARachelHirota ,

I fully agree with you on this! What I used to do in the past is either move assignments I wanted hidden into an unpublished module, or if I wanted the entire module hidden I'd just unpublish the entire thing. If students saved the link to the assignments, it will say it's unavailable since it's not in a published module and they won't see any details or anything.

In some cases too, I copy everything over to a build (sandbox) course and save it there and remove it off of the main course so the grades are also hidden there, too.

I also usually hide the assignments link, too, that way students can't somehow pull it up a second way. Do you think that can help you in some way? I know you want to fully unpublish them from the course but those are some work arounds that worked for me.