U058 – Where are my students' submitted answers?

There is a variety of reasons why you might have trouble locating the answers your students have submitted to you. Please carefully review the following options one by one.

1. Result submission isn't supported for the selected widget type.
2. Result submission wasn't enabled for the selected widget.
3. Your students haven't actually submitted their answers.
4. The submissions ended up in an unexpected group or class.
5. The submissions ended up on a different account (possibly a colleague's).
6. Your shared access has expired.
7. Not every student submitted the same widget version.
8. Saving result submissions to your account is not enabled.
9. The answers pertain to a survey or exit slip.
10. For Smartschool users only: the widget has been shared inside Smartschool's Planner system

Result submission isn't supported for the selected widget type

Not all widget types support result submission. When creating a new widget, the various widgets are accompanied by symbols that indicate, among others, whether result submission is supported or not.

For more information, click here.

Result submission wasn't enabled for the selected widget

Please make sure that in the widget editor, the box Reporting > Enable submitting of answers is checked. Note that it is always possible that the option was disabled at the time a student made the widget, and was only enabled afterwards.

If so, you can still have your students submit their answers to you.

Your students didn't submit their answers

While it may sound silly, verify that your students effectively submitted their answers to you. Maybe they didn't complete the widget, were unaware that they were supposed to submit their answers, or forgot/didn't know they had to click either the "Send" button or envelope icon in the top-right corner of the widget.

If you've shared your widget within a Learning Management System (LMS, for example Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams,…), you can check for yourself whether students have sent in their answers. Read more about it here.

The answers ended up in an unexpected group or class

When working with an LMS, it is good to know that there is a distinction between the actual widget on one hand, and your LMS' assignment on the other. The difference can be compared to an email with an attachment: the LMS' assignment is like the email, and the widget is its attachment.

When sharing a widget in an LMS, the following two things occur:

• The widget is anchored to firstly you as a teacher, and secondly the course that you've selected.
• The LMS creates an assignment, to which the widget is attached.

In case you decide to move or copy the assignment to a new course, out of technical reasons it isn't possible to adapt the widget anchor anymore: it is still connected to the course it was originally shared in. For this reason, submissions by the new course's students will still end up in the old course. Furthermore, those will be marked by a warning message that indicates synchronisation with the LMS grade book is impossible: the students do not pertain to the same course as the one to which the widget is connected.

If you wish to reuse a widget in a new course, it is therefore important to Share it again with that course. Only that way, the widget is connected to it correctly, which ensures that your students submissions will be, too.

The answers were sent to a colleague

There are various potential causes as to why this happened:

• Within an LMS, you used an exercise that a colleague uploaded/shared. Since BookWidgets results are linked to the person who exported the widget to the LMS, they will receive the results.

This still applies even if you copied the exercise first (cf. previous paragraph).

• You received a widget link from someone, which you simply copied and shared with your students.
• You copied a widget that has been configured to send result submissions to someone else (through Reporting > Submission form), and you've shared this widget outside of an LMS.

If you suspect that a colleague might have result submissions for your students, ask them to have a look with the search function. Who knows, the results may have wound up in a course that your colleague hardly ever checks.

If your colleague is a co-teacher of the course, they can optionally enable sharing of answers with the course's co-teachers at the bottom of the result section.

Even if this option is not enabled, your colleague can still use the search function to send the missing answers to you.

Shared access has expired.

If you are collaborating with a colleague within an LMS, and your colleague is the one to receive the results but shares them with you, there is an expiry time on the connection between BookWidgets and your LMS.

Go to Review > My courses > [Name of your course] and look at the section that informs you about shared submission access for that course. If you see an option Refresh courses, try to click it. Your connection to your colleague's shared BookWidgets submissions is refreshed. This might be sufficient to make the results appear on your account.

Not every student submitted the same widget version

If you edit a widget after a part of your students has already submitted their answers, you create a situation in which different students work with different widget versions. It is not always possible for BookWidgets to display all submissions in the same overview, notably when for example the amount of questions has changed.

If that is the case, you will find a dropdown menu bar at the top of your grading dashboard. The menu contains the various widget versions, which will be labeled as 'Configuration 1', 'Configuration 2', etc.

You can unfold the menu and select a different version to view the corresponding submissions.

For more information regarding the possibilities of editing a widget after having received submissions for it already, click here.

Saving result submissions to your account is not enabled

In account settings, under Student Work, the option to store results needs to be checked:

The answers pertain to a survey or exit slip

Within an LMS, widget answers are linked to student IDs. However, survey and exit slip results can only be found on the BookWidgets website (specifically the  Review tab, followed by the button with the three dots in the top-right corner).

The widget was shared through Smartschool's Planner

If you shared the widget through the roster of Smartschool's Planner, you won't find your students' submissions if you search for BookWidgets results through your courses menu. Instead, open the widget inside the Planner again: you will find both assignment and submissions in one spot together.

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