3 more features of Canvas to optimize your online courses
If you haven’t read the previous blog, I suggest you take a look to get familiar with some of the basic features of Canvas. In this post, I want to share some additional features that I think makes Canvas the best LMS out there for evaluating and giving feedback to students.
Remember that the essential uses of an LMS are to distribute course information, assign and collect student work, and provide feedback to students. There are plenty of LMSs which do the first two just fine. I’ve worked extensively with Google Classroom and Apple’s iTunes U. Both are simple for both teachers and students to figure out. The lack of advanced features make them both approachable, and most people are already familiar with Google and Apple interfaces.
Google, in particular, is great for distributing and collecting assignments because it facilitates collaboration and peer feedback well. You can add rubrics to assignments in Google Classroom, and there is a course grade book. However, it only allows you to give a holistic grade at the end of each course.
However, if you really want to get fancy and start providing in depth feedback on learning outcomes, you need to check out Canvas. Here are the features of Canvas that will significantly improve your feedback game.
#1 setting up learning outcomes
This is probably the first thing I do when preparing any course. You and the students need to decide what they are going to get out of the course. You could have one main aim, but if you drill down you can come up with some focused, achievable, and demonstrable outcomes. You might actually end up with several groups of them to address all the systems and skills.
Canvas allows you to create folders of groups of outcomes. You can create a folder for each skill for example. Inside the folders, you can begin adding outcomes and giving a description. For example, an outcome might be to be able to use transition words and signposting when giving a presentation.
Once you have worded the outcome in the way you like and will make sense to a student, you can then define how you are going to evaluate students using that outcome. This is a scale from 1 to whatever you like (1-5, 1-10, etc). Somewhere on that scale, you will also indicate what score is needed to meet the outcome, e.g. 3 out of 5. You can also indicate what score a student can earn to exceed expectations (5 out of 5 by default). This will be important later when we create our rubrics. The default settings are fine, but you can get really advanced and complex here.
For now, I’ll just advise you to set up folder groups of outcomes and make sure you have worded them clearly. These will be something that you and the students can refer to throughout the course to keep you focused.
#2 create and assign rubrics
Once you have all your outcomes in place, you can begin to create rubrics with them. In Canvas, a rubric is a collection of the outcomes you set up. You can create one rubric with all your outcomes, or you can create multiple rubrics and mix and match the outcomes on each. You can have any number of outcomes on a rubric that you like.
In the previous blog post, I told you about assignments. You can assign the rubrics you build to the assignments you create. You will then use those rubrics to evaluate your students’ performance on those assignments. When marking assignments, you will see the list of outcomes that you added to the rubric, along with the scales you defined when setting them up. Decide how well each outcome was met by choosing a value from the scale. Remember that one of the values on the scale will let the student know if the outcome was met, e.g. 3 out of 5.
When the student reviews the assignment, they will see your written or recorded feedback, they will see the overall grade if one was given, and they will also see the list of outcomes that were included in the rubric along with how well they performed on each.
#3 assign outcomes to question banks
In the previous post I talked about quizzes and how you can create question banks that you connect to multiple quizzes. The course outcomes can also be attached to question banks. You can attach as many outcomes as you want to a bank. Then, when students answer questions from the bank, their performance on those questions will affect whether or not those learning outcomes are met at the end of the course.
Let’s say you have two question banks. One is a bank of vocabulary items, and the other is full of grammar questions. Let’s also say that you have an outcome for use of vocabulary and another outcome for the use of grammar. You can attach those outcomes to the corresponding question bank.
Now let’s say that you want to set up a quiz with both vocabulary and grammar questions from those two banks. You will link those banks to the quiz and determine how many questions from each bank you want to appear. You take 10 questions from each, and now you have a 20 question quiz. You give the quiz to a student, who answers all the vocabulary questions correctly and none of the grammar questions.
When the student then reviews the learning outcomes at the end of the course, they will see that the rating for the vocabulary outcome will be brought up by the quiz and the outcome for grammar will be brought down.