Help your learners track their progress in the course by ensuring their grades are up to date in Canvas.
Canvas has many helpful tools to assist instructors with grading and tracking learning progress. It is important to put all assignments in Canvas, even if they are submitted on paper or presented live. This allows you to provide feedback in a centralized location and incorporate all grades into the same grading schema.
Before the term even begins, the best practice is to give learners an idea of the expected turnaround time for their assignments. Knowing when grades will come back can help to lessen some of the learner’s anxiety. Making that commitment to students early on may also help instructors to keep their grading schedule on track.
Set some assignments early in the term. Rather than waiting for a midterm exam or larger projects, having assignments early allows students to measure their progress and adjust to the course before it is too late to drop or adapt.
For these early assignments to be most effective, offer individualized constructive feedback. Be specific when you offer them suggestions for improvement. This not only helps students to identify areas for growth but also shows them that you are invested in their learning as an individual.
The Canvas SpeedGrader tool and built-in rubrics can help to streamline this process. You can set clear criteria for grading and put feedback comments where they are easily found later. Learn more about these tools in recorded Quick Hits on SpeedGrader and rubrics.
Make sure your settings match up with your grading policy in the syllabus. Consider using weighted groups to give more impact to larger assignments. You can set Canvas to drop the lowest grade (or several) in a group, if that is part of your policy. To learn more about grouping assignments, consider joining the Quick Hit session next week.
In the settings of the grade book itself, you can choose to enable several other settings. First, if you have assignments that you would like to grade in a batch before releasing grades, you can make the grades hidden until you release them. You can choose which assignments to hide or have them all hidden by default.
You can use the late policies to automatically deduct a number of points for assignments submitted after the due date or provide an automatic grade for when they are missing. In the Advanced setting tab, you can enable final grade override, which is one simple option for adding extra credit or making small adjustments at the end of the course. Check out this Quick Hit on the Gradebook to learn more.
Finally, it is important to show your learners how to get the most out of your feedback. They may not know all the things Canvas can do either, so taking the time to show them is worth it.
From their Grades tab, they can enter hypothetical grades for upcoming assignments to calculate what their overall grade may be. Show them how and where to view comments and detailed feedback for each assignment. Anything you post as a comment on an assignment or in a built-in rubric can be seen from the Grades section, but if you annotate a pdf in the SpeedGrader, they will have to open the assignment to see them.
You might also consider setting up practice quizzes or other opportunities for self-assessment so that your learners can check their own understanding. This allows them to become more comfortable with the tools and the kinds of assessments that will be graded later.
Grouping assignments can be a great way to add weight to the grades in your courses and adding accommodations to your tests can make them more versatile. Join Clemson Online for a quick look at these topics. We will explain the purpose of both grouping assignments and online testing accommodation and demonstrate how to use them in your course. All of this is in just a 20-minute Quick Hits session!
Facilitated by Axel Ruiz, Sr. Learning Technology Specialist.
Register for Quick Hits: Grouping Canvas Assignments on June 29th .
Design principles can transform how your Canvas site looks and feels and how it communicates information to your students. Join this presentation to learn what design principles you can apply to enhance the impact of your course content. We have tools and resources for you to start applying what you learn in this session.
Facilitated by Casey Pearce, Digital Learning Designer
Register here for Design Principles for Learning on July 12th .
Review our Summer 2023 Events Calendar to see what Online Instruction Development opportunities await!
We have a robust Summer lineup of topics and live training formats to support your use of Canvas and other e-learning tools. Topics cover demonstrations of using Kaltura, presentations on inclusive practices for online education, and workshops to get your Canvas site ready to teach!
All of our live training is recorded. Registrants will automatically receive a link to that day’s video after it has been processed.
Contact James Butler with any questions regarding these sessions.
Clemson Online – Where Tech and Teaching Meet
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