Improve Rubric Efficiency for Graders

[dadmiraal]

I'm an engineering instructor.

My rubrics tend to have a lot of elements to make them quicker to use.  For example, if the student has to complete 30 tasks to produce a quality report, each of those tasks has a rubric line and is worth a small number of points.  That makes it easier to convey to the student what they did wrong/right with just a click of the mouse and without having to write a lot on the report itself.  Likewise, each question on one of my fifteen problem exams may have a rubric line.  Some questions may have multiple rubric lines if they have multiple parts.  The issue here is that it is usually more effective to grade all students one or two rubric lines at a time than to do the entire rubric for each student one student at a time. However, in speedgrader, using the rubrics in this manner is cumbersome for large rubrics.  Here is why:

1.  Canvas rubric lines take up a lot of space (unnecessarily) and cannot be easily zoomed in or out.  The width of rubric tables can also be excessive for standard monitors.  Making it easier to change font size or eliminate white space in the rubrics would allow more lines to be shown at once without having to hit the scroll bar to find other rubric lines.  It would be nice to have more flexibility in how rubrics are displayed in speedgrader.

2.  Every time we want to change a rubric we have to hit "view rubric" before changing it.  Then we have to scroll down to the rubric line that we want to change.  Then we have to scroll to the bottom to hit save before going to the next student.  It would be much more efficient if: (a) the rubric was automatically shown in speedgrader without having to hit "view rubric" every time we switch students, (b) changes to the rubric were automatically updated without having to hit save before going to the next student, and (c) position in the rubric did not change when going from student to student. 

Here are some other possible easy improvements:

If automatically saving rubric changes is not possible, a save button that appears on the screen no matter what position you are in in the rubric would eliminate the need to scroll to the bottom every time before going to the next student.

An option that would allow you to show or hide specific lines of a rubric at any given time so that you could address specific lines student by student and easily see the currently relevant lines without having to scroll would be very helpful.

Anything that allows the grader to use the rubrics with fewer mouse clicks has the potential to vastly improve efficiency for large class sizes.

[Stef_retired]

@dadmiraal Thanks for sharing this comprehensive feedback about rubrics and how they display to the instructor/grader in Speedgrader. However, the prompt contains a number of separate ideas (change font size and remove white space, display rubric automatically in Speedgrader, save changes automatically without clicking Update, maintain position in rubric between students, Save button in fixed location, show/hide lines in rubric or collapse parts of rubric), each of which would need to be discussed and prioritized for implementation separately. Please read through How do I create a new idea conversation in the Canvas Community? for guidance on writing singularly-focused idea prompts. We've archived this one as a member would not be able to accurately apply a rating that would express support for just one or two of the ideas contained here.

Thanks again!