Commons Favorites & Why We Got Rid of Ratings

[cwruck]

We’ve had a few questions about the removal of the rating system in Commons, and we wanted to provide you all with some insight into our thought process.

1. The rating system didn’t see wide adoption. Only 6.8% of resources in Commons had a star rating. Of those resources with a rating, 88% of them received 5 stars. We weren’t the only ones who noticed that the ratings weren't being used in a way that truly provided value. Here is an actual review of a resource in Commons:

   (rating: 5) "I'm going to give a five star rating to anything I find that is offtopic because nobody else is going to use the rating system in commons and that lets me game the system to ruin everything."

2. Rating content in Commons is a lot of work and quite outside a normal workflow for most educators. It seems, for the most part, folks weren’t taking the time to import content into Canvas, evaluate its quality, and then return to Commons to rate the quality of the content. And this behavior is pretty understandable! That’s a lot of steps to take as a busy educator, when there is not direct benefit to your own process.
3. We wanted a shorter route to surface valuable Commons content for you in Canvas. Commons contains some awesome resources to include in your Canvas course. Currently, that process requires that you launch Commons, locate the content, and then send the content to the Canvas course you were building.

So if ratings aren’t proving to be super useful for identifying valuable content, we asked ourselves: What could we do to help identify valuable content in Commons without requiring our users to do extra work? Taking that problem a step further… how can we help identify that valuable content and surface it in Canvas?

From Canvas, very soon you will see an option to pull up your list of Commons Favorites and directly import content that you’ve identified as valuable. First, we’ll give you that option in the Rich Content Editor (RCE). From the RCE, you’ll be able to choose any video, audio, images, or files that are in your list of Commons favorites and directly import them. Next, we’ll give you the option to add content from your list of Commons favorites on the Index and Modules pages. We’ll also be adding feedback about how often things are favorited and imported to each resource. “Most Favorited” and “Most Downloaded/Imported” will be added to the “Most Relevant” sort options in search results.

Because adding resources to your Commons favorites will allow you to keep track of your favorite Commons content and makes it easier to import content into your Canvas course easily and efficiently, we expect favoriting to see greater adoption than the rating system did. We also feel that number of downloads/imports and favoriting numbers provide a better indication of effective content than a subjective and poorly adopted rating system did.