Canvas Essentials: Grading Assessment and Monitoring Learning Outcomes

Personas:

1. Coordinator: Dr. Sarah Lim  
2. Marker: Shane Turner 

Part A: Sarah Lim is the coordinator of a first year course: Foundations of Engineering. She wants to streamline the process of benchmarking the remote marking team’s efforts while ensuring the team keeps on top of assessments and deadlines. Sarah would also like to monitor several course-based learning outcomes and demonstrate to the marking team how outcome data and the Learning Mastery calculations can be used to monitor student performance.

Part B: Shane wants to understand how he can mark and  grade student work in Canvas. He prefers to mark and annotate assignments on his tablet and wants to understand if there are any limitations when it comes to using a mobile device. Occasionally, Shane works from locations with unreliable internet access, and wants to know what options are available for offline grading.

Scenario:

Part A: 

In this video, we’ll show you how a course coordinator can easily tailor assessment tasks, streamline the benchmarking process, and monitor student performance against learning outcomes.

Sarah Lim is a course coordinator who’s just received access to her first year Foundations of Engineering course in Canvas. 

Sarah accesses the course from her dashboard, where she can see all of the assessment tasks within the course. 

To check all assessment due dates, Sarah simply clicks ‘Edit Assignment dates’.

She updates the due dates for several assignments, and then clicks on the first task to make some additional changes.

Firstly, Sarah enables plagiarism detection. This means the Canvas assignment tool will automatically send any submissions for plagiarism detection processing.
Institutions can integrate with their choice of third-party plagiarism detection services in Canvas. 

Sarah then enables Moderated Grading, so she can specify how many reviewers she’d like to grade each assignment. As the assigned moderator, Sarah can then determine the final grade and release the grade and feedback to the student in one simple step. 

For this assignment, Sarah wants to use a rubric aligned to Learning Outcomes that she designed last year. She finds this rubric in the Rubric Library, and assigns it to the task. 

Once the assignments have been graded, Sarah can evaluate individual outcome data in the Learning Mastery Gradebook. She can view a summary of how students are performing against each outcome, apply filters, and export the Learning Mastery data to a CSV file.

The Learning Mastery Gradebook shows Sarah that her students are achieving low levels of mastery in the ‘Communicate engineering solutions’ learning outcome. Sarah uses Canvas’s messaging tool to provide this feedback to her marking team, along with steps outlining areas they should focus on to help improve student outcomes in subsequent tutorial sessions.

Part B: 

We’ll now demonstrate just how easy it is to mark an assignment on a desktop or mobile device, provide rich feedback, and release grades to students.

Shane is a member of the marking team for Foundations of Engineering. His course coordinator has assigned him a number of student assignments to mark. 

Shane sees these ungraded assignments in his Canvas To-do list. 

He accesses SpeedGrader straight from his Dashboard to mark these assignments. 

 As Shane’s institution has enabled a plagiarism detection tool, each student assignment includes a  Similarity Report. 

Shane grades these assignments using a rubric. He can leave annotated comments, files, and even multimedia feedback for the students. Everything saves automatically.

When Shane finishes marking an assignment, he simply clicks ‘next’ to continue. If the assignments aren’t being moderated, he can also choose when and how to release grades to the students. 

Shane wants to carry on grading submissions on his commute home. He opens the Canvas Teacher App on his tablet  and picks up where he left off, providing feedback and progressing through the ungraded assignments.

From the app, Shane sees contextual information about how each student is performing in the course.  

As Shane is traveling to a remote region with unreliable internet connection the next day, he downloads a zip file of the remaining assignments to grade and annotate offline.  He can re-upload the assignments to Canvas in bulk when he’s next online.