[Rubrics] Rubric Export

[mfrancis2]

It would be great if canvas would allow a rubric to be exported to a word doc, csv format or pdf so that rubrics can be used in class instruction or provided to students with assignment description and syllabi. Currently, a rubric can be printed but not downloaded so it cannot be shared digitally without recreating the document, which, is a waste of time.

[susanweber]

Yes, please! It would be very helpful to be able to have the rubric as a separate, easy to reference, document/spreadsheet/pdf rather than having to switch back and forth between an assignment and the rubric on the small screen of my laptop.

[CarollMitchell]

Yes, please add this functionality. It would also be great if we could link to rubrics outside of the Assignment they are attached to, so they can be provided to students where, for example, an assignment is locked till a certain date and they need to prepare prior to that date.

[achang3]

For instructors with large rubrics, or lengthy descriptions on their scoring guides, it's not feasable to use any of the workarounds others have suggested. Ie. screenshotting doesn't work because the rubric isn't fully viewable without scrolling, printing to PDF from the browser, etc. After putting in so much effort to input the rubrics for each course and assignment, we need it to be more usable in other modalities like attachments and copies for instructors to mark manually in person (for example, as an in-person performance is being completed by a student).

I agree with all of the comments above. We need this to be a standard feature in Canvas to export a rubric, or at least have browsers recognize the tables in a way that doesn't mash the text together when they are printed to PDF from the assignment page. Here is a screenshot of what it does when printed to PDF in Chrome from the assignment page if the descriptions are more than a couple of sentences (completely unreadable):

Rubric printed to PDF from Chrome with longer descriptions.

[denanewman]

We customized our theme to add a download rubric feature.  It works beautifully by pulling the information from the embedded rubric and creating a pdf.  It actually looks better than the UI because the columns are neatly aligned.

[achang3]

@denanewman Thank you for your comment! That's great to know, it would be amazing if we could also customize our theme that way too. Would you and your school be open to sharing how you did that?

[denanewman]

@achang3 

We developed a Canvas theme modification that allows users to download any rubric that appears in the UI.  In fact, we have a heavily modified theme overall.

How it works in brief:

1. Canvas allows institutions to upload custom JavaScript via the themes area that is run on each page load.
2. Using JavaScript, select all rubrics on the page.
3. For each rubric, add a button at the top right that, when clicked, will run a download function.
4. When the button is clicked, scrape the desired data from the rubric’s HTML, then use jsPDF and jsPDF-AutoTable to create and download a PDF containing a rebuilt representation of the rubric.

Depending on how your custom theme is built, you may prefer to bring in the jsPDF and jsPDF-AutoTable dependencies via npm modules, or you may prefer to use CDNs. Either method will work. If using CDNs, custom JavaScript can be used to add a <script> tag for each CDN to the document head.

Each project can be found on GitHub at:

jsPDF: https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF

jsPDF-AutoTable: https://github.com/simonbengtsson/jsPDF-AutoTable

[CarollMitchell]

Thanks @denanewman much appreciated 🙂 Definitely going to see if my institution can implement this.

[Chris_Hofer]

@denanewman ... this looks interesting.  I work with @achang3, so thank you for the response.  As far as installation is concerned, how is that done?  Do we need to work with folks in our IT department to have some things configured on our own local servers in order for this to work within Canvas?  Or, is it just a matter of adding some JS code to our existing global JS file in Canvas?  I'm not a GitHub guru, so this is a bit foreign to me.  Any other details would be helpful...thanks!

[chasdena88]

@Chris_Hofer and @achang3  Unless you have experience with custom JavaScript, I would suggest you rely on your IT department.  I've shared as much instruction as I could.  Hopefully you have some developers who can help you implement the solution.

[JasonQuick]

I'm currently collaborating with a newly hired instructor, and am in just the second semester at this university myself-- so exporting and quickly repurposing existing rubrics would be an incredible time saver in these crunched weeks of prepping for the start of classes.  Consider this another vote to bump it up on the priority list--thanks!