Bill Harrison
This is a follow-up post to my General Falcon Online Updates post.
There are changes coming to rubrics in Falcon Online over the 2018 holiday break that will effect how you use rubrics and new best practices for completing rubric assessments. You will see these changes in December 2018 and January 2019. They will make the workflow for assessing rubrics much easier for you as well as for students viewing the feedback. There is a lot in this post, but it is important that you read through the details below.
Displaying Rubric Feedback
Tired of telling learners how to find their rubric feedback? Students will be able to see their graded rubric feedback for discussions and assignments in:
- Gradebook (NEW)
- Discussions (NEW,) and Assignment tool
- User Progress, including Grades tab (NEW)
Figure 1. Student view of completed rubric
The following steps are required for this to work correctly.
- the activity MUST be associated with a grade item
- the rubric MUST be associated with the activity, NOT THE GRADE ITEM
- you MUST assess the rubric in the discussion or assignment activity
So what does this mean for a course where you have associated rubrics to grade items?
- When you copy this course to a new shell, grade items that have rubric and activity associations will be automatically updated so that the rubric is only associated to the activity.
- If a grade item has a rubric association but is not associated with an activity, the rubric will remain with the grade item.
In new course shells:
- You will not be able to associate a rubric to a grade item that is already associated with an activity. The rubric must be associated with the activity.
- Grade Items that have rubrics directly associated with them will no longer be able to be linked to activities. You will need to disassociate the rubric from the grade item and associate it with the relevant activity; then associate the grade item to the activity. In contrast, activities that have associated rubrics can freely be linked to Grade Items.
- You can still associate a rubric with an independent standalone grade item.
Here are a couple of examples:
- Example 1: Discussion "Article Reflection" is linked to Grade "Article Reflection Grade." Both Discussion and Grade have Rubric "Written Communication" attached. After copy, Discussion "Article Reflection" has Rubric "Written Communication," and Grade has no rubric. Completed "Written Communication" rubric can still be viewed in Gradebook with Grade "Article Reflection Grade."
- Example 2: Discussion "Article Reflection" is linked to Grade "Article Reflection Grade." Discussion has Rubric "Written Communication" attached, and Grade has Rubric "Literacy" attached. After copy, Discussion "Article Reflection" has two rubrics: "Written Communication" and "Literacy," and Grade has no rubric. Both rubrics can still be viewed in Gradebook with Grade "Article Reflection Grade."
New Rubric Grading Experience
Auto-Saving and Publishing Workflows
Change: As you assess your rubrics, the assessment and feedback you leave will be automatically saved to draft. There is no need to continuously click on the Save button to ensure all your work is preserved. The publishing options in Discussions assessment now mirror the Assignments, including Publish and Save Draft.
Figure 2: Publish and Save Draft
New best practice: Assess your rubric and leave rubric feedback as usual. Then safely Close the rubric and either Save Draft or Publish for the entire assessment. Save Draft allows you to assess multiple learners before making the assessment results visible (for example, to the entire class). Publish makes the assessment visible immediately upon completion in all tools (User Progress, Assignments/Discussions/Content, Grades) at the same time. Both the Assignments and Discussions workflows also contain bulk publishing for all or selected list of users.
After the rubric assessment has been published, before you can edit the rubric further, you must first "Retract Feedback" because the rubric feedback is being auto-saved on the fly. You can use Update for the Score and Overall Feedback after they have been published without the need to Retract first.
Figure 3: Retract feedback to edit
Overall Feedback
Change: Overall Score will no longer have feedback field as it often gets confused with overall activity feedback.
New best practice: Always leave overall activity feedback in Overall Feedback (previously called “General Feedback” in Discussions and “Feedback” in Assignments). Learners will see the Overall Feedback followed by a link to the completed rubric with detailed criteria feedback.
In Assignments, Discussions, User Progress and Content:
Figure 4: Student view of feedback link in Assignments, Discussions, User Progress and Content
In Grades:
Figure 5: Student view of feedback link in grades
Transfer Rubric Feedback to General Feedback For the Assignment Submission
Change: Since the entire rubric is now available for learners in Grades and all other tools, it is no longer necessary to transfer individual criterion feedback text to the Overall Feedback (previously “General Feedback”). This feature is therefore being removed.
New best practice: The feedback on individual criteria will be available to learners in a completed rubric in Grades without the need to copy the criteria feedback to Overall Feedback. Use Overall Feedback for overall comments on the assessment only.
Figure 6: Transfer rubric feed to general feedback is being removed so will no longer be an option
Leaving Feedback in the Rubric and HTML Rubric Feedback
Change: Previously, due to the inability to display the full rubric in Grades, some instructors used a workaround of adding the level description as default feedback in the rubric and then copy it into Grades within the Overall feedback. We have also seen some use of HTML tables within feedback to further format the level description. This results in a few undesirable consequences. It adds work for the instructional designer or educator creating the rubric and generates noise in student feedback data, which makes it difficult to complete organization-wide feedback analysis.
D2L also observed that HTML content in the rubric feedback field is rare (<4%). Therefore, D2L is removing ability to add new HTML content in the rubric feedback field. If you have previously created HTML feedback, it will continue to display and render as HTML to learners. However, new feedback that you attempt to edit or create within the rubric will be plain text only. You can continue to use HTML feedback in Overall Feedback for both Assignments and Discussions.
Figure 6: Overall feedback for Assignments and Discussions
New best practice: The complete rubric (including rubric levels, descriptions and educator feedback) is now accessible by learners from Grades, User Progress, Content and individual tools (Assignments, Discussions). This means that the feedback field in the rubric can be reserved for educator feedback only. This also eliminates any need for duplicating level descriptions in the ‘Default Feedback’ field.
Working With Overall Score (Level Achieved)
Change: The existing interaction between Overall Score and individual rubric criteria often results in rubrics that are difficult to interpret. Instead of treating Overall Score level as a minimum point threshold, it was previously treated as the override of the rubric Total. This has been a big point of confusion for both educators and their learners as they are trying to understand the results of an assessment. Specifically, in the example below, a learner may receive 8 points overall, but looking at the details of their rubric assessment see that they have accumulated 15 points (5 per each criterion).
The new changes clearly separate the rubric Total (the numeric value from criteria) which results in the Score in the Grades from the Level Achieved.
Figure 7: Current rubric scoring can cause confusion
New best practice:
Level Achieved is auto-suggested by using the minimum points from the Total. The level can be overridden by the educator, but that does not have an impact on the rubric Total. Level Achieved is communicated to the learner as a level only (without point information). Total can still be overridden manually by the educator.
Please note that in the future instructors will have an option to decide if they want to use Level Achieved in a rubric or not. This option will come with the new rubrics creation experience.
Figure 8: New rubric score is less confusing
Grading Activities From Grades
Change: Previously, the Assessment column containing a rubric only displayed in Grades if the Grade Item had a directly associated rubric. Since we have added the ability to associate a rubric with the activity, instead of seeing two columns – one for Submission and one for Assessment – instructors will only see the Assessment column, which allows them to launch the assessment workflow for that activity.
Before: When a rubric was attached to an assignment or discussion directly, it was not possible to grade it from Grades, and the Assessment column would not be displayed.
Figure 9: Assessment column for grade item with rubric directly associated (top) and grade item without directly associated rubric (bottom) without assessment column
New best practice: Submission and Assessment columns are merged into a single Assessment column, which allows you to see the submission and assess it at the same time. Grading can be done from individual tools (Assignments, Discussions) or through Grades depending on your workflow preference.
After:
Figure 10: Rubric is attached to an assignment
Figure 11: Rubric is attached to a discussion
Figure 12: Rubric is attached directly to a grade item
Working With Multiple Rubrics
Change: Previously, it was not clear which rubric was considered Scoring when multiple rubrics were attached, and the Scoring Rubric in Discussions did not always automatically contribute to the total Score. Additionally, in Assignments, the rubrics were listed as separate links, but each link would open the same dialog with all rubrics for assessment. The same rubric dialog required the instructor to pick the Scoring Rubric even in cases where only one rubric was attached to an assignment. With these changes, the Scoring Rubric is always indicated and always contributes to the total activity Score.
New best practice: Always see which rubric is currently considered the Scoring Rubric that automatically contributes to the Score (for Assignments and Discussions). Choose whether you want to Assess All Rubrics or assess only an individual rubric. You can still pick the scoring rubric from a drop-down (which only appears when multiple rubrics are attached) in the Assignments tool.
Note that we are not introducing picking a Scoring Rubric to Discussions at this point: Scoring Rubric is the first rubric in the list that is added to a discussion topic. However, the indicator of which rubric is the Scoring Rubric will consistently display among Assignments and Discussions.
Figure 13: Assessing multiple rubrics
Figure 14: Scoring rubric indicator
Summary
In summary, here are the key new best practices to keep in mind:
- Since rubric work is auto-saved, there is no need to continuously Save the rubric. Instead, use the Publish and Save Draft options to make feedback visible immediately or later.
- Leave overall activity feedback in Overall Feedback for the activity and not in the rubric. It will display to the learner in a nice, consistent block followed by a completed rubric with detailed criteria feedback.
- Reserve the use of rubric criteria feedback for assessor additional comments (in plain text). Criteria feedback will not be copied to Overall Feedback for the activity.
- Be assured that your students will see your rubric and overall activity feedback in a consistent presentation across User Progress, Content, Assignments, Discussions and Grades
- Treat rubric Total as the numeric score that is transferred and communicated in Grades. Use Level Achieved as additional information of overall achievement. Note that it will be possible to exclude the Level Achieved section in the future.
- Be assured that the Scoring Rubric automatically contributes to the activity Score.
- In the case of multiple rubrics, choose whether you want to assess an individual rubric or all rubrics in the same dialog in Assignments
- Choose the rubric visibility setting to control whether the rubric is intended for communication of feedback to the learner or for other assessment purposes.
Updates Coming 25 Jan 2019
To improve on the new rubric creation experience, rubric creation will be changed to a single-page workflow. Clicking New in the Rubrics tool immediately brings the user to the rubric authoring page. As well, the two previous Rubric Tool options Properties and Levels and Criteria are now condensed into a single Edit option.
Video Overview
As always I encourage you to subscribe to this blog so that you can comment and ask questions. When you subscribe you will also receive email notifications of future posts. You can also contact us in the FIC at fic@daytonastate.edu or 386.506.3485 for assistance. Or visit us between 8AM - 5PM M - F.
Bill Harrison
Senior Instructional Designer/Instructional Technologist
william.harrison@daytonastate.edu | 386.506.4306
SP19 Course shells are available 21 Nov. 2018.
icon for a Bonus item states, “Bonus items are not included in the maximum points for a category or final grade. They are added on top of the calculated grade. Bonus items cannot make users’ grades exceed the maximum points specified unless the ‘Can Exceed’ choice is selected.” Every sentence is essential in the Help statement because D2L identifies the differences between a category, final grade calculation, and the need for ‘Can Exceed'. In Example #1, I did not set ‘Can Exceed’ for Extra Credit #1 because it is not part of a category. Therefore, Extra Credit #1 is part of the Final Calculated Grade. 
