Rules, procedure, specifications, method, description, directions, or scoring guide; these are just a few synonyms used interchangeably with what we know as the rubric. As an instructor I tell the students if they want to earn an “A” on their assignments they should follow the rubric. In Spring 2014 B.C or Before Canvas, the Nursing Program used scoring guides in a word document format. This could be time consuming if the student failed to attach the scoring guide to their assignment. For many instructors, we may have printed off the assignment with the scoring guide…yikes to those who want to go green! The system at the time was not always user friendly in this ability. In addition, we did not have the proficiency of “speed grader” conjoined with a rubric. Below we have an example of the "word document" scoring guide previously used in our courses.
As A nursing instructor this has been the first full year of utilizing Canvas, and I truly enjoy all it has to offer. I believe that the Nursing Program will continue our Canvas “evolution” as we learn its full capabilities. Some may say that we are an “unique” area in reference to how we use Canvas since our grading criteria may differ. We have never had the opportunity to use “Speed Grader” let alone have a rubric built into the system. The creation of rubrics into Canvas was a challenge at first, since we do not utilize all whole numbers for grading. We wanted our rubrics to align with the Nursing Performance Evaluation tool. Our Nurisng Performance Evaluation tool (as shown below) has ratings from 5-4.75-4.5-4.25-4-3.75-3.5-2-0; which all have a meaning from 5=Exceeds Expectations to a 0= Ineffective. This allows standardnization of grading for nursing instructors, and provided students with an outline for the scoring standards.Unfortunately, the rubric in canvas was not conducive to numbers other than whole numbers, and would foster our creativity on integration of the rubric.
We learned through trial and error that we could not create the rubric from your standard left-to-right as you entered in the numeric values. This modality when entering the ratings criteria would auto input from the highest to the lowest value. The rubric would auto populate the next value as a whole number, and we needed to enter decimal numerical values. When creating the rubric we would enter in the first number which was always a 5 or 10 (highest points earnable), and then go to the far right at the lowest points earnable or “0.” This provided the template to input the rest of our numerical data of decimals point values into the rubric from right-to-left.
As shown above you can add a Criteria, and the criteria’s are quite lengthy. The great component of the rubric is the addition of “view longer description,” which allows us to add in the competencies related to that specific criteria. Through the trial and error process we are now able to create rubrics in all our nursing courses that align with the Nursing Performance Evaluation Tool. The rubrics once created into a “Master” course are readily available for all instructors to utilize and add into their courses. The ability to embed a rubric into a module, and utilize in the speed grader component has improved the efficiency, work-flow, and standardized grading for the nursing program.
