Courseware Support uncovered a bug with the publishing feature for assignments. If an instructor publishes and then unpublishes an assignment, it cannot be re-published if a student submitted work during the period when the assignment was published. When this happens, the Publish button will appear greyed-out and will not respond if clicked on, and the publishing-status cloud will produce this message when moused over:
“Can’t unpublish if there are student submissions.”
Although the message implies the assignment is published, it is not, nor is it unpublished; rather, the assignment is stuck between being published and unpublished.
We have reported this issue to vendor, who has assured us their engineers are working to fix it. In the meantime, if you encounter this bug, we recommend this workaround—re-create the assignment, have students who submitted to the now non-functioning assignment re-submit to the new one, and delete the non-functioning assignment.
Please contact Courseware Support at canvas@pobox.upenn.edu if you have any questions.
Last Updated: 21 Jan 2015