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Assessments

Overview

Assignments are a type of Canvas assessment tool that allow students to submit work via text editor, uploaded documents/videos/files, or third party integration (like Panopto, Cengage, etc.). It puts all student submissions into one place for easy downloading, reviewing, and grading.

Tutorials

Overview

Discussions can be used either formatively or summatively to engage peers with one another on Canvas. Learn more about discussions and how to create them below. To view all Discussion-related Canvas tutorials, see the Canvas Instructor Guide.

Tutorials

Discussion groups may foster increased student engagement by making discussions more personal, allowing students to engage with a few peers rather than a large class.

Overview

There are two options for quizzes. Classic quizzes - what you're probably used to and turned on by default; and New Quizzes - a new option with some additional question types and new interface. New Quizzes is not fully done and still has some issues but you can turn it on and use it if you wish!

Compare what is available between the two. Eventually we will be moving to New Quizzes, but not until all the features we need are available. The tentative date for fully moving to New Quizzes is Summer of 2023. 

Tutorials

Classic Quizzes

New Quizzes

Overview

Rubrics are an excellent tool for making grading easier, less arbitrary, and give students more structure in knowing how to do the assignment. 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.

Rubrics, and their criteria, can be set up as scoring or non-scoring rubrics and attached to discussion boards, assignments, and quizzes(classic)/quiz questions(new).

Tutorials

Share a Rubric with Colleagues by emailing eLearning:

  • including a link (URL) to your rubric, or
  • the contents of your rubric

Importing a rubric is not native to Canvas. This requires the download and use of Tampermonkey and code that was written by others that may or may not work/be current. Use at your own discretion.

How to Import a Rubric | How to Import a Rubric

Overview

You can use surveys to receive feedback from your students or give them some extra points by responding to a survey. Graded surveys appear in the Syllabus, Gradebook, Calendar, and To Do Lists.

Notes:

  • Student Analysis for surveys must be downloaded as a CSV file. Item Analysis is not available for surveys.
  • The anonymous option can be enabled or disabled before or after a survey has received submissions, allowing a user with sufficient permissions to see a student's identity and responses. To collect fully anonymous survey responses, you may want to use a third-party survey tool.

Tutorials

Attendance

Overview

The Attendance (Roll Call) tool is an app in Canvas used for taking attendance. The Attendance tool can be used for online or face-to-face courses. The Attendance tool always appears as a visible Course Navigation link, but it cannot be viewed by students, so hiding the link in Course Settings is not necessary. However, if you do use the Attendance tool, students can view their attendance report through the Roll Call Attendance submission details page.

Before you use this tool - please be aware of all the issues:

  • Issues with cross-listed courses. You will need to take attendance separately for cross-listed courses. 
  • Can’t use it for grading without high potential for error
  • Can’t edit points without messing up the Grades
  • Can’t delete, rename or un-publish attendance assignment without causing Grade errors

Tutorials

Course Settings

Grades

Overview

The Canvas Gradebook is a useful feature for students to keep track of their performance in the class and quickly identify if they have missing assignments. For instructors, it is a great place to also track individual student performance in a class as well as review summaries of collective student performance on assignments, quizzes, assignment groups, and the total course grade.

Tutorials

Overview

Speedgrader is a feature found in individual assignments and quizzes. It allows you to quickly toggle between student submissions and provide feedback, either manually or using a rubric. It is useful because it really does help you grade...more speedily!

Tutorials

Groups

Overview

Groups in Canvas are a great way to foster collaboration in the on-line classroom and make it easy for students to submit singular items as a group and for you to grade the group collectively rather than at individual levels.

View an overview of Canvas groups Canvas Icon .

Tutorials

🚫 Mobile App

While Canvas does have a mobile app, many instructors have encountered serious issues with their courses as a result of students accessing their course through the Canvas mobile app. Among these issues is the ability of some students to access pages, files, and assignments that the instructor has hidden or unpublished in the course.

Because of this ongoing issue, it is recommended that instructors not make students aware of the Canvas app, but instead point them towards the Canvas website in cases where students need to interact with Canvas on a mobile device.

Outcomes

Overview

Best practices in alignment! Learn how to create course-outcomes and how you can then incorporate those outcomes into Canvas rubrics for assignments.

Note: If you're doing program or campus outcome assessment, make sure you've requested them added to the institutional repository and you're importing the institutional outcomes from there into individual courses.

Tutorials

Overview

These materials will discuss how you might integrate our campus-wide learning outcomes into rubrics and assignments of your course. This is typically useful for assessment purposes or to give students feedback of how they are doing when it comes to meeting degree outcomes.

Note: If you're doing program or campus outcome assessment, make sure you've requested them added to the institutional repository and you're importing the institutional outcomes from there into individual courses.

Tutorials