Canvas Feedback Tutorial: Finding and Responding to Feedback

Challenge / Context

Canvas’s grades list doesn’t automatically expand to show which assignments have feedback, and feedback itself can live in several different places — rubrics, comment boxes, or margin comments in an attached Google Doc. With feedback scattered across so many locations, I was never confident students were actually finding and reading it, or which students genuinely couldn’t locate it versus those who simply said they had.

Approach

Part 1: Comment Boxes & Rubric Feedback

The screencast shows the exact clicks needed to reach the comment box where I’d written individualized feedback. I then required students to respond directly in that same comment box to a prompt asking how they’d prepared for the assignment and whether their strategy had worked.

Part 2: Finding Comments in a Google Doc

Design Rationale

This required response accomplished several things at once: it gave me a genuine formative check on which students could actually navigate to their feedback versus those only reporting that they had, it prompted metacognitive reflection on their study strategies, and it built familiarity with writing assignment-linked comments — the channel I wanted students using for assignment-specific questions, rather than email. Tying the response requirement directly to the feedback location, instead of just telling students to go read their feedback, turned a passive expectation into a verifiable, reflective task.

Outcome / Reflection

This closed a gap that’s common with LMS-based feedback — students not actually reading it — by converting it into an active retrieval and reflection task tied to real evidence rather than self-report. It also reinforced a consistent communication norm I wanted for the class: keeping assignment-specific conversations attached to the assignment itself, where context lives, rather than scattered across email.