Using and maintaining a rubric on multiple assessments in 1 course

[Denham]

I'm trying to determine the best practice with rubrics.

My usecase is a course with discussion tasks which use the same rubric. 

we can either:

1. Reuse the rubric

but if you need to update it you have to unlink it from all (you can leave 1 connected) then make the update, then relink to all of them, BUT academics will see that stupid error message when attempting to do the settings on the rubric to say it's to be used for marking 

the error message "You can't edit this rubric, either because you don't have permission or it's being used in more than one place. Any changes you make will result in a new rubric based on the old rubric. Continue anyway?"

(note that checking the "Use this rubric for assignment marking" option does NOT cause a duplication of the rubric)

2. Duplicate the rubric

Which isn't as straight forward as you'd hope, because there isn't a duplicate button in the rubrics area, you have to either go through the share with yourself, or course copy process.

Also means if you need to make an update, you have to update in all the duplicates.

Neither of these provide a good workflow.

[ProfessorBeyrer]

@Denham, you have identified some of the challenges with working with the Rubrics tool in Canvas. What's effective for me is to make the rubric wording inclusive so that it can be reused throughout a course with less reason to edit.

In my history classes I use discussions to give students practice comparing the interpretations in our text and course videos. The prompt details differ for each discussion (the list of chapters and videos is unique to each), but the rubric criteria are the same:

• Response to prompt: Does the response to the prompt have two paragraphs as described?
• Evidence: Does each paragraph include evidence?
• Peer feedback: Does the reply to a classmate provide specific feedback, ask a probing question, or describe something learned?

It took me a few semesters before I worked this out, as I originally wanted the criteria to be connected to the discussion prompt. That warning about not being able to edit the rubric scared me too, and in some classes I ended up with rubric titles like "Rubric/Checklist for Video vs. Text (1)" and "Rubric/Checklist for Video vs. Text (2)."

[Denham]

Hi Gregory,

In the specific courses where I was looking into this they do currently use the same rubric across all the discussions, I was considering the maintenance consideration for future offerings of the course,  especially if a new instructor takes over the course and isn't aware of these little gotchas. I wish they could fix the error message to be accurate (eg if it relates to when you edit the TEXT not the settings, then the error should be tied to the edit button on the fields rather then to the attachment which includes the settings)

[Denham]

Not sure who clicked 'accepted as a solution' but whilst I see what Gregory is saying, but honestly is this really the best practice option? It really doesn't solve the problem at all, namely:

1 ) if you are reusing the rubric inaccurate error messages are presented to teaching staff if they attempt to set the settings (this resulted in at least 1 academic not setting the setting to use the rubric for marking on subsequent tasks

2) if you DO need to make an update, instead of having an option for the update to apply to all uses of the rubric it literally prevents you from updating from the Rubric area instead you have to unlink the rubric before updating then relink (terrible waste of time and a process that teaching staff aren't going to remember for the occasions when they need to do it)


literally storing duplications of the same rubric which each need to be updated, meaning you may miss updating one and present the wrong rubric to students (but also the time it takes to update every single one). is a terrible design, especially considering how unintuitive it is to duplicate a rubric (especially considering the far simpler process for other items in Canvas) 

Guess I'll need to submit this as a suggestion to fix or something