Why has the menu option to show rubrics in Canvas discussions been hidden?

[mchild76]

We encourage faculty to develop rubrics for all graded activities in our online courses. Accessing the rubrics for discussions has always been somewhat more challenging than assignments, but once you know where it is - problem solved. We also often check the option "Users must post before seeing replies" if reasonable given the nature of the discussion prompt. 

After a string of concerned emails from faculty yesterday, I discovered that students no longer have access to the menu which provided the option to "Show Rubric" in the discussion. It does reappear for students that have made a post. Since we encourage students to review the expectations set by the rubric in advance, this forces a change. 

I'm curious. Since this seems to relate to the relationship between the "Users must post before seeing replies" option and the availability of the menu - Is this a permanent change or a temporary glitch?

Note: You can only witness the loss of the menu in student view.

[kmeeusen · Accepted solution]

Hi mchild76

We have been told that this is a known issue and being worked on, and we have been asked to advise folks to submit a ticket about this unexpected behavior.  This way, you can be notified when it it fixed!

Kelley

[themidiman]

I didn't know about the show rubric feature not being available when the learner has to make an initial post to see other student posts.

As to why the rubric seems so hidden to the learner in general, I've wondered about this myself over the years, and I think it's Instructure's UI/UX team that has made the determination that displaying the rubric inline with the discussion prompt like they might display with an assignment description is clunky as far as the discussion UI is concerned. 

I agree that making a graded discussion activity provide information up front to learners as to how they will be assessed is best practice for the learning process, but so far nobody's come up with a good way to make this user-friendly. Maybe a feature suggestion submission for way to make the rubric still tucked away but come out from hiding when the learner wants to see it is in order, such as a button that says 'View grading Rubric' at the bottom of the discussion prompt regardless of whether the option to make a first post to see the entire list discussion responses is selected by the instructor/designer or not.

[jmr6463]

We are also experiencing the problem.  And, we have a serious problem with our workaround - posting a copy of the rubric in pdf format.  Pdf formats are not readable by text-reading machines and applications, and so are not accessible to students with visual impairments.  It would be difficult to format a rubric in Word that would be accessible, as well.