Advantages of Rubrics
Designing Rubrics
Creating Rubrics
Adding Rubrics
Outcomes

Advantages of Rubrics

Rubrics are a great way to communicate assignment expectations to your students and let them know up front how you are grading their Discussions. Rubrics are also a huge time saver for faculty and make grading a lot easier!

What are the advantages of using Rubrics in Canvas?

Rubrics can be used for all types of assignments in Canvas: discussions, assignment drop-boxes, and quizzes.
Rubrics are quick and easy to create and add to graded assignments.
Rubrics are available to students before they submit their assignment (and after), so the student can see exactly what is expected of them and where they might have fallen short.
Rubrics also show up along the right side of the assignment you are grading in SpeedGrader. This makes it easy for the instructor to read the student's submission and quickly check the appropriate box on the rubric.
In Canvas you do not need the same number of ratings (columns) for each criteria (row). For example in the rubric below, three of the criteria (Quality of posting, Quality of Reply, & Understanding) have three ratings, but Timeliness only has two ratings.

Example Rubric

Below is an example of what a rubric looks like in Canvas.

Designing Rubrics

Rubrics are typically comprised of rows and columns. Rows are used to define the various criteria being used to assess an assignment. Columns are used to define levels of performance for each criterion.

It will save you time to design your rubric in a Word document or on paper before creating it in Canvas. Why? It's not that easy to make huge edits to your rubric once you start creating them in Canvas.

Steps to Design a Rubric

The following handout will guide you through five simple steps in developing assignment rubrics: Five Steps for Creating a Rubric

Example Rubrics

Here are some example rubrics to give you some ideas and help get you started!

Discussion Rubrics

University of Wisconsin - A+ Rubric
Online Course Development Program - Discussion Assignments Grading Criteria

Essay/Research Paper Rubrics

Essay Writing Rubrics
ReadWriteThink - Essay Rubric
IVCC - English Composition 2 Essay Rubric
Berkley - General Essay Rubric

General Collection of Example Rubrics

AALHE - Sample Assessment Rubrics

Creating Rubrics

Once you've designed your rubric the next step is to create it in Canvas. Canvas makes it super easy to create rubrics!

Resources

Adding Rubrics

In Canvas you can add a rubric to any type of assignment: Assignment, Discussion, and Quiz!

Resources

Outcomes

Outcomes allow instructors to track mastery in a course. Instructors can import Account, State, and Common Core Standards into your course. You can also create nested outcomes by dragging and dropping outcomes to create structure. In general most of the time outcomes are linked to rubrics, but they can also be linked to a question bank.

For more general information see the following guide: What are Outcomes?

How to access Outcomes

Click on the Outcomes link located on the Navigational Toolbar on the left side of the page.

Why use Outcomes?

Instructors can access outcomes to:

Focus students' attention on the most important skills and activities in your course
Align Quizzes and Assignments to different kinds of mastery
Run reports at the account-level about student artifacts of learning mastery
Align accreditation or other standards to programs of study, courses, or student assessments

How do I setup Outcomes?

To create outcomes for your course, refer to the following guide:

How do I create an Outcome for my course?
How do I edit or delete an outcome or outcome group in a course?
How do I move outcomes and outcome groups in a course?
How do I find an existing outcome to add to a course?
How do I align an outcome with a rubric in a course?
How do I align an outcome with a question bank?
How do I view all aligned items and artifacts within an outcome?
How do I view the outcome results report for an individual student in a course?

Reminder!

After reviewing the information from each tab above click on the Next button to continue with the training!