Blackboard rubrics imported into Canvas

[rsasso]

Has anyone been successful in exporting a rubric from Blackboard and importing it into Canvas? If so, would you share your steps/process?

Many thanks,

Rosie

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello  @rsasso ​...

I don't have an answer for you, but I wanted to let you know that I am going to share your question with the Migrations and Integrations group here in the Canvas Community.  I will also tag your question with some keywords.  Both of these things should give your question some additional exposure here in the Community in hopes that someone will be able to respond.  Hope this helps, Rosie!

[rsasso]

Thank you Chris! Much appreciated!

[jago_brown]

Hi Rosie,

This was the result of importing a Bb learn rubric into Canvas just now

However many important details were lost such as criteria rating descriptions & the incremental grades e.g. A+, A-, B+....

I should look more like:

I suppose we need a an LTI like standard for rubric interoperability

Kind regards

Jago

[rsasso]

Thank you Jago! This is very helpful. Can I ask how you ran the export from Bb Learn? I've tried a full export from Packages & Utilities as well as simply exporting an individual Rubric by itself.  In either case, my import failed.

[jago_brown]

Hi Rosie,

I just clicked export:

From:

Blackboard Learn

Site Delivery (9.1.201410.160373)

Community Engagement (9.1.201410.160373)

Content Management (9.1.201410.160373)

Into the cloud version of Canvas that has just been provisioned for us.

Kind regards

Jago

[dhulsey]

A standardized rubric file format would be awesome!

[kenneth_rogers]

Hi there,  @rsasso !

I wanted to follow up on your question and see how things were going. Were you able to come to a solution? Or are you still seeking assistance? Did any of the resources provided to you on this thread help?

Because this question is from over one year ago, I'm going to go ahead and mark it as "Assumed Answered." Don't worry, this won't prevent people from continuing the dialogue in the event the discussion needs to continue

[abigail_smith_2]

Here's how I did it:

1. Export the rubric from Blackboard (we are on v. 9) as a .zip file
2. In Canvas go to Settings. On the right side, click "Import Course Content."
3. Under Content Type, choose Blackboard 6/7/8/9 export .zip file.
4. Click Browse and choose the .zip file.
5. Skip the section about Default Questions. This confused me, but it isn't required to select this menu.
6. Next to Content select "All Content."
7. Then Click "Import."  Wait for it to process.
8. Go to Outcomes > Manage Rubrics. It should be there!

[cmccann1]

Abigail’s method gets the rubric from Bb to Canvas, but the Ratings are not in the correct order, Bb goes from worst-to-best and Canvas goes from best-to-worst (hope that makes sense), and with all the rearrange, copy, pasting that needs to done to fix this -- I might as well just build the Rubric in Canvas from scratch. One useful thing that is working, particularly for text heavy Bb rubrics, is that I can save the wording of the Rating and Criteria fields, and some time I can later copy, paste, etc., the info from a Text Doc (for storage) into Canvas. Our access to Bb is going to disappear soon. In addition, I can't drag and drop Criteria or Rating fields from one place to another —which might be a solution?

[abigail_smith_2]

 @cmccann1 ‌ I discovered a workaround to trick the system!  In Blackboard, edit your rubrics like so:

1. Points-based. Not percentage or ranges.
2. Reverse the order of the point values. So what is supposed to be zero points is set to the highest value, and vice-versa.  The text will not match the point values.

Then export your rubrics and import into Canvas.  The text will be in the correct order in Canvas!  All you have to do is edit the point values back to the correct order, which is much easier than copy-pasting a bunch of text all around.  If you start with the farthest-right side, making it "0," Canvas will snap the rest of your points in that row around to the correct order. Pretty easy!

[Fursty]

It's just plain sad and deplorable that we have to use Blackboard... to make up for the lack of basic features in Canvas. Why Canvas is so popular is beyond me... it is a gigantic step backward and has tripled my work factor due to its lack of basic faculty centric needs i.e.... rubrics, quizzes ( not able to change the total point score -- 2015 and still waiting).  

[willmoin]

Thanks Abigail for the later solution on this, and also Charles for crystalising a problem that we will have here. As an institution moving to Canvas, prior to this using Blackboard, all of our rubric will run as per Blackboard's left-to-right worst-to-best, which is then how we have laid out rubric in all of our handbooks etc. It's going to be a challenge on changing our thinking and communication, but also in technically recreating in Canvas. With one early adopter I was working with his rubric that had 8 ratings against 9 criteria, each of the criteria in Blackboard had different weightings of the overall assignment percentage score (so for example the introduction only had 5% weight even if the student maxed out, whereas the discussion 20%).

Coming over to Canvas via an Export/Import, the rubric is still laid out worst-to-best, meaning that you can't assign the correct point values. I ended up recreating the rubric from scratch (and with copy and paste from descriptions). As Canvas uses only points for rubric, there is no weighting on criteria AFAIK, therefore I had to work out what the weighted percentages equated to in points - I hope I got this right! I then entered these to each cell of the rubric in Canvas. Lots of opportunity for human errors on the calcs and also having to switch between left and right all the time. So that's what I did with a more 'manual' approach.

Following Abigail's steps above I was able to speed things up somewhat by saving having to copy and paste the descriptions. I actually found in her advice I could eliminate one of her steps by editing the rubric in Blackboard, clicking on the 'Levels of Achievement' button, then in the 'Reorder Rubric Levels of Achievement' pop-up window, click on the last button which completely reverses order. I then did not have to switch from percent to points, or edit the percent/points at this stage, instead after export and import into Canvas the ratings had already readjusted themselves correctly to Canvas's Best-to-Worst ordering. So this saved time, however to reapply weighted points I had to do the calcs as above.

Hope this helps, and happy to talk about this and share above files.

Will (University of Liverpool)

[mam_mia16]

how can in import the rubric from BB...under Outcomes it only says .csv or json format only