[Rubrics] Finding Rubrics

[tyler_mckell]

When a teacher wants to add a rubric to an assignment, they currently have to search through all of their courses to find the right one. This may require them to scroll down a long list before they find the right course. While it is helpful that rubrics are available to use from other courses without importing them, it would be more efficient to have two options on a menu or tabs:

1) Rubrics from this course (Default view)

2) Rubrics from other courses

This would allow teachers to add rubrics from the most likely place and also allow them to search through their other courses if they wanted.

[kassandrac]

I like your idea Christopher Casey. Even adding a 3rd option to the original suggestion so the choices are

1. From this course

2. From all my courses (where "my" = the same teacher value)

3. All courses

[James]

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on where the user script should go. I've finished it, tested it on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and deemed it good enough for release. That is, it works for me and hopefully it will for other people, too.

Here's the announcement and installation instructions: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11001-sorting-the-find-a-rubric-dialog 

In addition to putting the current course at the top, it also allows you to sort by multiple keys and so you can sort by name first and then by term or term first and then by name, or by other orders like the full course name using a custom sort. It adds a title attribute so that the full name of the course shows up when you hover over a link. It also allows you to hide certain information, like courses that ended more than X days ago or courses that belong to a term with no end specified (this is the Default Term for us and contains things that aren't really used for teaching courses). Everything is configurable except for the moving of the current course to the top.

If you find any problems with it, please leave the comments on the other page.

[tyler_mckell]

Very impressive work! Trying it out right now. Thank you  @James . 

[CraigOgden]

I would like to see a default rubric on the course level.  Probably about 90% if all my assignments use the same rubric. I hate having to assign the same rubric to all of them.  Have a default that can be changed.

[ShereeW]

I would like to see the default course be the current course. That seems like the logical design. Currently, an instructor might have a long list of courses with the same title and no way to tell which one is which.

[kona]

A00274597‌, agreed! For now I'd definitely check out this work around - https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11001-sorting-the-find-a-rubric-dialog - it will do exactly what you are wanting. 🙂

[SethBattis]

Coming late to this conversation, but broadly (aggravatedly) in support of anything that makes the rubric management process better, here's the feature request that I just wrote related to this, that got archived because this exists:

So, right now, when you go to import a rubric, you get a scrambled list of all the other courses (listed by course code, btw) you've ever taught that have rubrics associated with them:

When I raised this issue to support, they said "The find a rubric page within Canvas is not designed with a discernible sorting design. The find a rubric page was designed to grab all rubrics tied to enrollments for a teacher in all of their courses and load them as they are located. This is why you will be seeing the rubrics list of courses in this order."

I know that others have faced this problem in the past: Sorting the Find a Rubric dialog‌

And I've written a hack that's running on our Canvas instance: https://github.com/smtech/canvashack-plugin-sort-rubric-import-contexts (it has to do some jQuery gyrations to get itself bound and unbound appropriately).

tl;dr: The course list in the "Find a Rubric" dialog should be sorted in some reasonable manner. 

I suggest employing a sort similar to that discussed around terms, here: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1248-more-intuitive-term-sortingpresentation?sr=search&searchI...‌ — active first, alphabetically, probably with the active course on top, followed by older courses ordered by term or course date.

[ChrisMedina]

I would like to add it would also be nice to be easier to manage them too. I have an instructor who would like to delete old ones but has to do it one at a time. not very user friendly. 

[ShereeW]

That's the same issue we have. We don't know which HIST-1301 course we're looking for. The longer we use Canvas, the longer the list of courses gets and the more difficult to find the rubric we're looking for.

I'd like to see the rubrics listed default to the current course and then also have some way of distinguishing the courses from one another.

[hfchen]

Having some sort of terms here would be critical for us as well. Our system is setup to allow them access to past courses for a whole year after they are done teaching it. So often times instructors will have access to 3 "Math 200 A"s with no clear indication as to which is which. It's even more confusing because find a rubric dialog box currently order the courses seemingly arbitrarily (Math 200 ZA followed by Math 200 A (past semester) followed by Math 107 A followed by Math 200 A (current semester)

Defaulting the "Find a Rubric" box to the current course just seems like good practice. What  @James ‌ has done would largely address this concern if released at a system wide basis. Not all instructors are receptive to the idea of installing greasemonkey scripts on their browser.