Preview Improvements for Viewing and Creating Outcome Alignments in Canvas

This blog from the Instructure Product Team is no longer considered current. While the resource still provides value to the product development timeline, it is available only as a historical reference.

BenFriedman
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
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In Canvas, outcomes represent the knowledge and skills we want students to master within a course context. The system takes time to set up but is incredibly valuable because it allows educators to use data to identify how students are making progress towards mastery of those outcomes and identify specific areas they can support students. When aggregated across courses, data from Canvas can also be used to track the success of groups of students, assess programs, facilitate continuous improvement initiatives, and provide data to accrediting organizations. 

Out of the features that make all of that possible, “alignments” are absolutely central. That’s because they connect or tag outcomes (or by other names standards, competencies, learning objectives and more) to different types of content or artifacts in Canvas. So far, that has been assessment artifacts like assignments (through an outcomes aligned rubric) and quizzes. Very soon, we are also looking to add the capability to align to instructional artifacts like pages - stay tuned to future blogs for more information about that.

Previously it has been difficult to efficiently view alignments across any outcomes that exist within a course. For that reason, we are planning to add a dedicated space within the new Improved Outcomes Management experience to solve this problem (see the image below for a preview)! Here, each outcome will be listed with all aligned artifacts shown directly below it by expanding the space. We will show the number of alignments and what module they are in all in an accessible and responsive user experience with cool capabilities like search. There will also be an option to filter the list by outcomes that do not contain alignments to identify where additions may need to be included. 

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Stay tuned for an update in the Canvas Release Notes for when you can try out this “Outcome Alignment Summary” over the next few months. We look forward to continuing to enhance the user experience for outcomes. Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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This blog from the Instructure Product Team is no longer considered current. While the resource still provides value to the product development timeline, it is available only as a historical reference.

4 Comments
amyslack
Community Participant

This is super exciting to see! I think it is so great that y'all are working towards providing supports to better promote mastery based teaching and learning! This is wonderful to see and I look forward to its release!

ProfMartin
Community Explorer

FINALLY!

I am glad that you are going to bring back this functionality to the "improved" Outcomes. When the change happened, I went to Outcomes and was shocked that the ability to see aligned items was gone with the new improvements!

I was sad too that the only way to actually see the aligned items was to ask the Canvas Admin to toggle off (disable) the new improvements! Not efficient or intuitive at all!

Outcomes at our college are tied to the SLO reporting data we have to submit at the end of each semester so we relied heavily on the ability to align assignments and other artifacts and view said aligned items. When this function was removed with the new update, we were scrambling to find out why. Now we know and eagerly await the return of this function. 

Thanks!

cbward
Community Member

This looks very exciting! We will be following this update closely. This is going to make such a big impact on the ability to manage this data effectively!

michelle_coots
Community Participant

This is nice, but not the functionality I am hoping for. Teachers need to be able to see the alignments at the student level along with the scores for each aligned item that is factoring into their outcome score.  While this can be seen using the student learning mastery view, not all teachers want to enable that AND teachers shouldn't have to click that far away from the instructor's Learning Mastery Gradebook to be able to see alignment data from one student to another.