Using Rubrics in SpeedGrader

Rubrics make grading assignments a lot faster and can help provide more detailed feedback to help students improve. If a rubric is added to Canvas for the assignment, you should be able to access it by clicking the “View Rubric” button in the right panel.

This should open up the rubric. You may need to adjust the width of the panel by dragging the central divider for it to be fully visible. Using the rubric, you can click on the table cells for each criterion to give the assignment a grade, and then finish by clicking the “Save” button.

NOTE: if the assignment doesn’t have a Canvas rubric yet, you will need to create one. See the Canvas documentation for how to do that here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-add-a-rubric-in-a-course/ta-p/842

Is the score not being saved?

If you graded using the rubric and pressed save, and the score is blank or shows a 0, it may be because the rubric is misconfigured. An example of this is below.

If this happens, you need to go back to the assignment. At the bottom of the assignment’s description should be the rubric. Click the pencil icon in the top right of the rubric to edit the rubric. Canvas may warn you if the rubric is being used in multiple assignments. If you receive the warning, click “OK” to continue. You will need to make this change to each assignment where the rubric is being used.

The view should change to allow you to edit the rubric. Scroll to the bottom and make sure “Use this rubric for assignment grading” is checked. Make sure to click “Update Rubric” to save your changes.

After you make this change, you need to go back into SpeedGrader and redo the grading using the rubric. You should then be able to grade the assignments and the correct grade should appear after pressing “Save”.

Grade Policies

Prior to doing grading, the teaching team may want to schedule a meeting to ensure the grade policies are setup in Canvas. To change the grading policies, go to the “Grades” section of Canvas and click the gear icon in the top right corner.

In the window that opens, you can setup things like the course’s late submission policies, and how grades are posted by default.

One thing that you, the LA, and your faculty member may want to do is ensure that the default grade posting policy is set to “Manually Post Grades”. This makes it so that grades and feedback are only visible to students when you release the grades. If “Automatically Post Grades” is set, then grades will become immediately visible upon being entered. Automatic grade posting can cause issues when you are working on grades that may change – students would see their grades change each time you make a change.

If you want to setup automatic grade posting for specific assignments (e.g. quizzes) so students can immediately see their grade, you can make this change for a specific assignment by clicking the three dots to the right of the assignment’s name in the Grade tab and selecting the “Grade Posting Policy” option. This allows you to override the posting policy for just the assignments you wish.

Setup Office Hours as Canvas Events

Setting up office hours on the Canvas Events Calendar is beneficial for both you, the LA, and the students. It’s a great opportunity to engage with students, as they have a direct reminder on their calendars and to-do lists on Canvas. To get started, locate your class page and click “View Calendar” on the right-hand side of the home page.

Once you are on the calendar landing page, click on the “+” button on the top right corner.

Once the event adder pops up, you can input your information if you want to create only one event. This is a great option if you have reoccurring office hours, but you had to reschedule one week because of an absence. But to schedule reoccurring office hours, proceed to click “More Options”.

Once the full page loads, you can add all the information such as a Zoom Link or location within each designated box. To make it a reoccurring event, click on the “Duplicate” button.

From here you are able to choose if you want your event to be every week. You can also change the settings so the event will be every 2 weeks, etc. You can also choose how many weeks you want to have the reoccurring event. Since there are 15 weeks in a semester, a good starting option would be 14 (total minus finals week).

Now that your events are all created, you can go back into the calendar to see your new events!

Handling Course Communication w/ Canvas Email

We strongly recommend using Canvas for all course communication rather than having students directly email the instructional team. Using Canvas for email provides some great benefits: it is easier to stay organized, it makes it easier to notice student communication, and it can be easier to search for emails. By using Canvas for all communication, it makes it a lot harder to accidentally lose access to important emails.

One large benefit is that using Canvas, you can quickly filter to only show Canvas messages for a specific course. You can filter by course using the dropdown menu in the top left.

This makes it easy to stay organized. In addition, you can search by people using the search box in the top right which makes it super easy to find specific emails. For example, if a student comes to you and wants to talk about an email they sent earlier, it is very easy to bring that email up by searching for the person’s name.