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All courses at my school are pass/fail, and it's an ongoing conversation with admins and faculty re: the opportunities to use various Canvas tools/features for formative assessments and providing students with corrective and explanatory feedback. Rubrics are great for this, but there are a number of aspects that derail adoption and make using these features unnecessarily complex. More specifically... As noted in this idea and the comments, the alphanumeric sorting for ratings that have common point values (whether 0 or another #) essentially forces the use of  point values when creating rubrics (even though they can be removed when adding to an assignment). As a workaround, I generally recommend using lowercase roman numerals (i, ii, iii...) ahead of the ratings titles in order to maintain the proper sequence in the rubric when not using point values.  It's natural for someone to infer a rating or grade scale (even with the lowercase roman numerals), even when one isn't intended. However inadvertently, this also has the potential to undermine efforts aimed at getting students to focus on the progression of their learning (instead of the grade, whether letter, point, or percentage).  When the tool essentially forces an implied or explicit rating or grade scale , i t's extra difficult to encourage the use of the rubrics tool for instructors who want to provide the rubrics to students in the assignment, and also use the rubrics for providing corrective/explanatory feedback, but are adamant about not assigning grades.  The rubrics tool adds great value, but these UI issues consistently create roadblocks to broad adoption and necessitate more direct support from ed techs/ learning designers for the rubric and assignment builds (many instructors get lost in the minutia of the workarounds required to make the tool work for their not-uncommon use case and, to my knowledge, existing support documentation doesn't address these issues).  M aking a no-point rubric a true option by allowing points to be turned off when creating the rubric  and   allowing for the ratings and criteria to be manually sorted seems like a straightforward fix that would be a great step toward accommodating assessments and feedback that don't use grades.   ... View more

A few thoughts after pointing an admin to Analytics Beta for a specific project: The Analytics Beta UI is a fairly good interface. It does not, however, lend itself well to tracking completion rates (of modules or other discrete types of activities, assignments) for large groups of students directly within the UI.  The .csv export provides a more flexible alternative — but it only includes Canvas IDs and University IDs, and not student names, and so must be combined with other data for some data analysis requirements (increasing the potential for error, etc.).  The Analytics Beta UI also requires a certain level of prior knowledge (of the the tool, its integration with CourseWorks, as well as some basics regarding descriptive statistics), which cannot be presumed for the end user.   Some examples:  The counts only include students who have accepted invitations to the course site, but this isn't necessarily known or assumed by the end user.  There is no definition of read receipts, nor any explanation of what is counted as a page view or participation available within the tool.  Tooltips are helpful — for users who know they are there, which assumes a certain level of facility with contemporary digital interfaces that, in my experience, doesn't exist for a large number of end users.  There is no ability to manually refresh the data, nor any indication of when the data will next be updated; though, at this time, the system does note the most recent refresh (i.e., "As of Oct 6, 3:47 PM EDT"). Views are limited to week by week for some UIs in the tool, which may not be applicable to a given use case. ... View more

Thanks erinhallmark‌ Re-posted in Ideas‌: Consistent & clear indication of tool status/visibility ... View more

erinhallmark‌ — Where is the best place to comment further on the upcoming changes to navigation and visibility settings?  ... View more

erinhallmark‌ — Thanks for being responsive to the comments here. Might you be able to share additional info or otherwise connect me to someone who can shed some light on the basis/rationale for these design decisions? While community feedback and UX are indeed important considerations, many in the learning sciences (and other fields!) have been doing some fascinating research that underpins related design principles and other evidence-based constructs. Are the design teams operationalizing evidence-based design principles and research findings from a particular field or guide? operating on heuristics? something else? Any additional information you can provide would be great context, in general, and might also be a meaningful contribution to these discussions — at least insofar as it has the potential to shift the conversation away from preference  as a driver (as expressed here, as well as in A/B user testing) toward evidence-based design and development of learning environments.  More specifically, I've been tuned in to the discussions about the forthcoming changes to the course navigation. fwiw, I'd like to chime in with some words from Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface: "Surprisingly, icons violate the principle of visibility. It is their meanings that are not visible. Use icons only in the few situations where research has shown them to be advantageous" (p. 173-174). (You can view part of the section on Icons in Google Books; alas the pages I'm quoting from aren't available there.) As  @Linkletter ‌ noted in this thread, let's at least be sure that icons are used consistently throughout the LMS (i.e., that it has the same meaning regardless of the tool or page or user or...).  All my best,  Ofelia ... View more

ditto ... View more

Calendar sync would be very very very helpful! ... View more

Maybe an optimal configuration in Canvas would look something like: hierarchical page structures (i.e., parent and child pages) which are visible as a page tree or other kind of site map via the pages tool and are reflected in the course site navigation/ breadcrumbs which can also map to folders in the files tool (optional) ___________ Additional explanation, logic: I used Sakai for years and, imho, the grass really is greener in Canvas in many ways. The page structure and navigation/ breadcrumbs is an exception.   @develand ‌ — Want to clarify between organizing pages in folders (which is what you would do with documents in, say, Google Drive or Dropbox) and site maps (that display different information depending upon the configuration; e.g., index for alphabetical list, site "tree" for hierarchy, etc.).  While I can understand the interest in having folders (i.e., to organize the content of/on the pages in a course site), the pages are indeed web pages and a sitemap would, I think, be 1) more appropriate, and 2) be very useful in the course design process as well.  In Sakai, auto-creation of folders (in the resources tool) happens conditionally (i.e., when you add certain content to an existing page using certain paths). It's similar to files in Canvas, but different. Regardless, there is still a distinction between the sitemap/page tree and the folders in that the sitemap/page tree organizes the pages and the folders organize the content in/on the pages (and not the pages themselves).  I look forward to everyone's thoughts...  ... View more