Canvas - Assessment Setup

Owned by Matthew Harrington
Nov 30, 2023
3 min read

Canvas has an interesting model for graded content, in that all graded content is the same type of content - an assignment.

What determines the sort of activity for the assignment is simply what pieces the learners use to submit the assignment. This can be anything from a series of quiz questions, to a file upload, or an LTI tool.

Assignments themselves have a range of generic options that apply to all assignments, regardless of their content. These are:

  • Points - The weight of the assignment

  • Assignment group - As mentioned in section 1, the group by which multiple assignments are grouped together to be weighted or dropped from, similar to Open edX assignment types (except optional).

  • Display grade as - Which grading scheme to display the learner’s final grade as (so for example displaying a score of 80% as an ‘A’)

  • Submission type - What form of learner inputs will exist within the assignment, the 5 types of assignment being:

    • Assignments

      • A generic assignment type for text entry, file uploads, media recordings, external tools, URLs, peer assessment - anything graded. This type of assignment doesn’t even need to be present on the platform, and can form a shell for grading other activities that take place outside of the LMS, such as participation in live in-person events.

    • Discussions

      • Graded discussions where learners can participate in discussions and then have their contributions graded against a rubric by staff. The contributions of individual learners to discussions are displayed for easy browsing in SpeedGrader.

    • Quizzes

      • Automatically- or manually-graded quiz questions with a variety of input types

    • External Tool

      • An external activity returned via LTI tool and/or grading API from a third-party tool

    • Not Graded

      • This is a little weird, but it appears this is simply used as a way to assign mandatory work to learners that isn’t graded, such as completing a mandatory reading by a certain date. It’s given to learners as an assignment, but no grade is actually ever returned to the LMS.

Each of these graded assignment types can be assigned a Rubric which determines how an assignment is graded, which causes the assignment to appear in Canvas’ SpeedGrader tool (which will be discussed down in the Grading section). Rubrics can be defined at the account or sub-account level, as well as at the course level.

There is currently no way to assign a rubric at the question level within a quiz or similarly mixed assignment, something that the community has asked for repeatedly, to the point where this product idea discussion in their community reached over 100 votes, was discussed for their product roadmap, scheduled, but then was unceremoniously archived with no further explanation given. Rubrics always exist at the assignment level, making them inflexible.

Most assignments and quizzes share the same basic settings as listed above, whether quiz or assignment, leading me to believe there’s actually very little difference between them; quizzes and discussions are simply categorised differently in the user interface from other assignment types like submissions.