Discussions and SpeedGrader – What’s Going On?  

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You may have noticed that SpeedGrader is now looking a little different for discussions. When you opened SpeedGrader, you’d see all of a student’s posts on the left and have your grading tools on the right. If you wanted to see context for their responses, you could toggle the view and see the discussion in its entirety. When Canvas added discussion checkpoints (see Canvas Update: Multiple Due Dates for Discussions for full details on this feature!), they also tweaked how SpeedGrader works. Now, when you open a discussion in SpeedGrader, you’ll see the entirety of the discussion on the left with the student’s posts highlighted. In your grading panel, you now have “previous” and “next” buttons that you can use to cycle through all of the students posts. 
 
With this change, you can no longer see all of a student’s posts together as a default view in SpeedGrader – but there is a workaround. In the discussion window, scroll to the top of the page and click into the “search entries or author” box. Type the name of the student whose posts you want to grade, and Canvas will filter the discussion to show only that student’s posts. Unfortunately, you do have to take this extra step of typing the name for each student.  

Canvas has received a significant amount of feedback about this SpeedGrader change, and they’re working on implementing a fix. We currently do not know exactly what this fix looks like, or when it will happen (it looks like they’re trying to complete it by the end of February, but this is not confirmed).  

If you have thoughts about how SpeedGrader currently operates with discussions, you can easily give feedback to Canvas and help influence future changes! You can do this by completing their survery on discussions and SpeedGrader – and you can also participate in the discussion about the changes by commenting on their recent blog post. 
 
Questions? We’d love to help – drop them in the comments or email us at ctl@cedarville.edu!