What to Think About Before You Design Your Course in Canvas
You will want to avoid making adjustments to your grading while you’re facilitating because it will make for a better experience for your students and provide you with a manageable workload. To ensure a streamlined grading experience in an online setting, consider the following questions prior to creating any assignments, discussions, or quizzes in Canvas:
- How do you usually approach grades?
- Are all assignments of equal weight or do you have different components or sets of assignments worth different percentages?
Grading is one of the few ways you can engage with and communicate essential feedback to your students.
Canvas offers more than one way of reviewing student work and giving feedback. You can assign scores, leave written, video, or audio comments, annotate on submissions, develop and use rubrics via the SpeedGrader, the Gradebook, or your graded “assignments.”
As you design your assignments, grading system, rubrics, and facilitation plan, consider the following questions:
- What kind of feedback will help your students to learn and be more successful in your course?
- Will student participation in discussions be something that you give individualized feedback to or will there just be an overall participation grade in the course?
- How much time will you need to provide students with meaningful feedback that they can apply to the next assignment before it is due?
- What criteria and performance levels does your rubric need to support your assignment or discussion objectives? Do you have to create a new rubric or do you have an existing one?
For more information about setting up your grading system and providing feedback, please refer to the following articles: