Assignment / Assignment Center Updates Coming

Michael Morrissette

Hey EAP Participants -

It'll been a little while since we put the survey in the product, and we've been getting some common feedback rolling in that we're wanting to take some action on. I just wanted to outline some of those changes so that you all are aware. The goal is to have them all in the product by the end of November.

Assignment Not Satisfying When Submitting or Resubmitting

We've heard from a couple of schools that students are sometimes confused as to where or not their assignment submitted successfully. This is especially true for the resubmit process. So, we'll be making a couple of UX enhancements to make this more apparent for students.

• If an assignment does not allow for resubmit, when the student submits their attempt, the submit button will then disappear
• If an assignment is submitted/resubmitted successfully, the student will see a ‘success toast’ once the assignment has submitted. This will take the form of a small popup on the bottom right of their screen
• If an assignment can be resubmitted, the student will see the Resubmit button in a disabled state unless they change something (Add/Delete a file, or update the Text box)

We think with these changes it'll be more apparent to students when an assignment can and cannot be submitted, coupling that with getting the additional visual indication of a successful submission should give the student a more apparent and satisfying submission/resubmission workflow.

Assignment Submissions ‘Disappearing’ From Teacher View

When the student submits an assignment and that assignment is allowed to be resubmitted, if the student changes anything on their end before resubmitting, the first “Submission” becomes unavailable to the teacher. This causes a situation where it looks like the student submitted something on their end, but the teacher sees nothing on when they go to evaluate the student. We're going to make a couple UX tweaks for both students and faculty to help with this issue.

• If a student changes something on their assignment, and given that assignment allows for resubmissions, a banner will display for the student letting them know that the teacher can no longer see their first submission and that they must click Resubmit for the teacher to see their updates.
• If a student begins the resubmit process, when the teacher goes to the evaluation screen for that student, they will see a new icon. It'll look like the current submission icon, but with a yellow background instead of a blue.
• If a student begins the resubmit process, when the teacher goes to the evaluation screen for that student, the Text and File boxes will now display a new message letting the teacher know that the student is in the process of resubmitting.

Assignment Center Overdue/Missing Bucket Is Overwhelming

We've heard that students sometimes have a lot of assignments in the Overdue and Missing buckets. Not all assignments are actionable, however, and often some assignments simply serve as a reminder to the student. In these instances, a student would need to manually change the status of the assignment to Completed to get it out of that specific bucket.

• The Missing and Overdue buckets will be collapsed by default.
• Adding options to allow the student to determine which buckets are open or closed by default in their assignment center settings.

Assignment Center Class Color Coding vs Status Color Coding

There was a shift in the color usage between the old and the new assignment centers (Status vs Class). We believe some of this feedback is growing pains with having to shift a mindset, but also seeing the status of work at-a-glance is valuable and important. The current status labels and icons are proving to not be apparent enough. So, we're looking into how we might be able to add more color to the new assignment center to make it easier for students who need to quickly know the status of their assignment.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on the above or if you're hearing anything else from your faculty or students!

-Mike

Mikhail Lovell

@Michael Morrissette
One “feature” that has been requested by several students is to be able to select multiple assignments at once to change the status more quickly. However, we did roll this out after the semester had started so there was already a backlog of assignments they needed to change status on. It may be different come next semester with a fresh slate of assignments.