Using Program Assessment Outcomes in a Sub Account without courses

[BarbSchultz]

Hello, 

I have a question related to building and using program level outcomes for an interdisciplinary program that uses courses found in other sub accounts. I am able to build the outcomes in the program sub account, but I don't have any way for the instructors to add the Outcomes to their course rubrics because the course are attached to another sub account. 

How have others worked with an interdisciplinary program to build and use Outcomes/Rubrics for assessment? 

Thank you,

Barb Schultz

[JennyDruckrey · Accepted solution]

Hi Barb,

I'm not sure if you've come up with a solution or not, since I see this was posted last month.  Our institution is just starting the pilot phase of outcomes, using them to assess at the course, program, and institutional level.  We've debated the best place (level) to place the outcomes but are currently importing all outcomes (regardless of whether they are course-level or program-level) at the root account of our Canvas instance.  This will allow us to pull one account report to compare outcomes across courses and programs.  The downside of this is organizing everything to be easy to find (we're using catalog numbers and folders by subaccount for now), and the worry about how much data the outcomes report can hold.  Ideally in time we'll start to analyze everything through Canvas Data, but we're waiting for our IT department to have time to dedicate to that project.  I was happy that we choose the root account level because we are now facing a re-organization of our subaccounts.  If we had the outcomes imported on the subaccount level, we'd have a bit of a puzzle trying to reorganize those into our new structure.

I'd love to her how your institution (or anyone else) is analyzing the outcome data.  

[paul_fynn]

Hi @BarbSchultz, @JennyDruckrey  has identified the core solution, and challenges, in my view, 

You might find it useful to check this 

https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.outcomes_csv.html  

From memory our experience suggested that Outcome Codes needed to be no more than 8 characters to avoid messing up appearance. There's also the question of whether you can restrict specific outcomes to specific study levels or specific courses. As jenny alludes, you also need to consider what happens if you decide to change the outcomes later, or have a new version.

My experience with a pilot use of outcomes suggested that it was simpler to build a  set of master rubrics at root level, from which outcomes could be deleted and grading criteria added, than to expect colleagues to search for and add Outcomes manually.  Overall I'd like to see an improved Outcome interface ...

[BarbSchultz]

Thanks, Paul. 

Barb