We love the Canvas blueprint courses that allow us to work in teacher teams to provide a guaranteed and viable curriculum for all of our students. Our HUGE problem is that when we do so, the outcomes placed in the blueprint class that populate in the associated classes duplicate whenever we create something new in the blueprint class and move it to the associated class. The result is a very confusing Learning Mastery Gradebook for both teachers and students. When students go to the Learning Mastery Gradebook, they find several sets of outcomes with duplicate rubrics in each. They have no idea how the information reflects the progression of their learning.
The duplicated outcomes seem to share the same outcome ID, but because the assignment with rubric is created in the blueprint class and then moved to the associated course, the outcome travels in as a duplicate both in the Outcomes folder and in the Learning Mastery Gradebook. There seems to be no workflow for teacher teams who work together (best practice) to avoid having duplicate outcomes. We have worked with Canvas support/engineers, who suggested our best option was to submit our problem here with the hope that a fix could be put on the Canvas roadmap. Our other option is to notice the duplicate outcome, detach it from an assignment before we grade it, reattach it using the original outcome, and go from there. That's not a sustainable workflow.
We have been hoping that an outcomes dashboard would be provided that would provide a cleaner interface for students and teachers to see outcomes data and use it to drive learning, but we've been told that this outcomes dashboard is no longer being considered for development.
We are trying very hard to personalize learning by focusing on the learning and not grades and points. Canvas was supposed to be the tool that opened that door for us. Now it's become the impediment. This change would go a long way to helping all educators and their students focus on learning. Ultimately, we want to take advantage of the Learning Mastery Gradebook so that both students and teachers can look at the evidence of learning there and easily understand which outcomes need to be addressed so that we can plan next steps in learning. Thank you!
Lisa Wathen-Canvas Instructor and Admin
