Tips for Rubric Management/Clean-Up

[JessicaDeanSVC]

Hi folks! I am working with an instructor at my college who wants to do some clean-up of their Canvas account. They've been using Canvas for seven years, teaching multiple classes nearly every quarter, a member of lots of groups/committees that use Canvas, you get the picture.

One of the areas they want to clean up is their Rubrics. I know that rubrics are unfortunately one of the worst systems in Canvas and the best we can really do is go through each and every course and clean up the rubrics in that course; there just isn't the ability for mass rubric management. That said, I'm wondering if anybody has some tips or maybe some sneaky way of helping with rubric overload. 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[SusanNiemeyer]

I expect that the Canvas development team will soon be providing us with a "roadmap" on how and when they intend to improve rubrics. Rubrics was the #1 vote getter among the "Ideas and Themes" for product improvements and development.

I would suggest that the instructor import the rubrics into a dedicated "development" course to work on them rather than go back into a myriad of old courses. The key would be to sit down and a fairly standard set of criteria that could be adapted for different assignments.

[JessicaDeanSVC]

Thank you @SusanNiemeyer; we probably will go the dev course route!

[bbennett2]

Yeah, this is a pain point for sure. I think Susan is right, moving them to an empty shell will help you see them compared to one another, but the "Find a rubric" tool in the course still pulls from any existing course you may have, including the rubrics.

If you want to delete old ones, I would open the "Find a rubric" tool and just go course by course down the list rather than searching blindly through each class.

Another method might be to have someone in your IT department help with a script using the Canvas API to pull a list of rubrics for the user into a spreadsheet. It wouldn't be hard to write and it would allow you to work through the list directly.

[JessicaDeanSVC]

An API script is definitely an interesting idea... I'll have to chat with my IT team and see if this is something they would have the capacity to create over the summer!