Center for Teaching and Learning Blog

Have you been frustrated with how rubrics work in Canvas? Are you interested in trying out some new rubric features? If so, you can enable the first round of enhanced rubric features (phase 1) in your courses this semester. Canvas enhanced rubrics introduces a new, user-friendly interface paired with enhanced functionality to improve your grading workflows. Key updates include:

• Drag-and-Drop Functionality: Allows you to easily reorder ratings or criteria to suit your rubric design.
• Copying and Duplicating Criteria: Save time by duplicating frequently used rubric elements.
• Customizable Ordering: Choose between “low to high” or “high to low” arrangements for rating scales.

These updates should simplify rubric creation but also ensure consistency and fairness in evaluation.

During the first phase of the Canvas Enhanced Rubrics project developers have focused on providing educators with tools for easier rubric organization and more intuitive marking. By streamlining the grading process, these improvements can support equitable evaluation and save valuable time. Future updates will expand these features further, enabling student self-assessment and other enhancements to promote deeper engagement with learning.

If you’d like to try out enhanced rubrics in your Canvas course(s) you can enable the feature in course settings. From the feature options tab click to enable the enhanced rubric option (see screenshot below).

Canvas considers enhanced rubrics a feature preview option, which means it’s under active development and allows early adopters who opt into the feature to provide the Canvas Community user group with valuable feedback to help improve the feature. This Canvas guide provides additional details on managing enhanced rubrics.

Contact the CTL (elearning@mtu.edu, 487-3000) if you have questions or need additional assistance with Canvas enhanced rubrics.

Are you looking for a cleaner and a clutter free Canvas course? Our newest application, available only to instructors, is integrated with Canvas is TidyUP from Cidilabs! TidyUP scans the course looking for content that is no longer relevant, duplicated, or could not be accessible to some students; this content must be in use by being embedded or linked to a page in your Canvas course. A great use for this application is if a course is repeatedly copied from term to term and streamlining the content, files, folders files is needed.

The first step is to get Tidy Up in your Canvas course navigation menu. Choose Settings, Navigation, and scroll down and click the More Options (3 stacked dots) and choose Enable; choose Save when you’re done.

To get started, select TidyUP from your Canvas menu and that brings up the initial splash screen. Scans can be All content or Custom depending on your desired outcome.

Here is an example of an All content scan using my Canvas sandbox:

From these results I would be able to begin working with my Canvas course content!

For more information and training videos, see Cidilab’s TidyUP videos on their support hub!

With the new academic year now underway, we would like to remind instructors of the campus subscription to the Teaching Professor sponsored by the William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning. The Teaching Professor is a highly informative newsletter with a singular purpose: to provide ideas and insight to educators who are passionate about teaching. It’s a source of cutting-edge information and inspiration for more than 10,000 educators at universities and colleges worldwide.

To access the Teaching Professor visit teachingprofessor.com:

• On campus you can obtain full access to all Teaching Professor content (including their extensive archive) if your computer/device is connected to the campus network (except the MichiganTechGuest network). It is not necessary to create an account or log in to access the subscription on-campus.
• Off campus access is also available but does require you to create an account.

Take advantage of this resource and contact the CTL (ctl@mtu.edu) if you have any questions.

CTL Services
Ever wonder how the Center for Teaching and Learning can support your instructional needs? We are here with support for any questions you may have about Canvas, Huskycast, Gradescope, Turnitin, Zoom, or iClicker. Already familiar with these but would like to take a deeper dive into some of these technologies or maybe you have never used these and would like to give them a try in your classroom, we would be happy to provide some one-to-one training! Feel free to drop by during our walk-in hours from 10-noon and 1-4pm Monday through Friday. We can also provide in-person consultations in classrooms for classroom teaching technologies. No time to stop by the CTL? Be sure to check out our online resources that can be found on our site in our Teaching and Learning Knowledge Base, Canvas Instructor Guides, and the Getting Started With Canvas sections. Our CTL Blog is another great place to get information, especially for upcoming events and workshops!

We also have a wide range of devices for short-term instructional loan such as Surface Pros and iPads. If you’re in need of a microphone or portable document camera to hold a phone or iPad for recording, those are available as well!

iNSwan document camera
IPEVO Uplift Multi-Angle Arm for Smartphones
IPEVO VZ-R HDMI/USB Dual Mode Document Camera
IPEVO V4K Ultra High Definition USB Document Camera
Snowball Ice Plug and Play USB Microphone
Swivl Robot camera with tracking

Are you interested in taking a deeper dive into a specific instructional topic? We also have a periodical library available for checkout covering a wide range of topics! Feel free to stop in anytime and review the collection.

Feel free to contact us at 7-3000 or email us at elearning@mtu.edu.