Instructor access to the Canvas submission details screen

Back in February I noted that line breaks were stripped from assignment feedback comments made in Instructure Canvas when accessed by the student through the Recent Feedback link on the student's Dashboard. In that article I noted that by changing from the Card View to a List View on the Dashboard, the student could access a Submission Details screen that retains the line break formatting entered by the instructor. I had not seen this screen before and I was unaware of whether instructors also had access to the Submission Details screen via means other than manually editing the link. Today I learned of one slightly circuitous way to that screen for instructors.

The Canvas Inbox does not just display messages sent to students and from students, the Inbox can also show all comments that have been made on assignments across all courses, as seen above. This view is only available in the desktop version of Canvas.

When a Submission Comment is selected in the left hand panel, the comments for that assignment appear in the right hand panel. At the top of this panel is a clickable link to the assignment as can be seen above.

Clicking on that link takes one to the Submission Details screen which includes comments made on the left. The link appears to link to the submission on which the comment was made, but shows all comments that have been made on the assignment. Thus the above submission is actually a second submission by the student, the comments on the right were made on the first submission of the assignment (the first draft).  Because this link is to the specific submission, and each submission has its own submission link, there is no way to see the other drafts from this particular screen.

For assignments where there are multiple submissions the SpeedGrader interface provides access to all submissions of the assignment as seen above. For most faculty the SpeedGrader interface will be more functionally useful.

The Submission Details screen does provide the ability to add a comment, although this could also have been done by using the Reply function in the Inbox: Submissions Comments screen. Note that if one intends to Reassign the assignment, then this has to be done from the SpeedGrader interface.

The Submission Details screen is of limited usefulness as there is no way to navigate to submissions made by other students from the screen, nor does there seem to be a way to retrieve other drafts of the assignment already submitted by the student. But the screen can be accessed and seen.