Rubrics: Carmen’s Most Hidden Secret

One of the issues that comes up in many of my posts is being able to give students effective and specific feedback. When you have 45 or more students, giving every one of them good feedback can be very taxing. Thankfully, Carmen has a way to simplify the process, but it’s not very easy to find the options. Under the Outcomes link on the left of a Carmen course, you can create rubrics to use for each of your assignments.

Rubrics can be attached to every type of assignment Carmen offers (assignments, quizzes, discussions and more). You can use them to create a set of canned comments you can give on graded material. This not only can make feedback less time consuming, but also more effective by giving the students specific and standard issues to improve throughout the course.

Rubrics should focus on the outcomes you want students to get from your course (in History those outcomes are usually things like “students will read primary and secondary sources critically” and “students can present and critique historical arguments”). One way to think about the outcomes you want your students to get from your class is to use Bloom’s Taxonomy which you can read about it in my post on adding variety to your discussions. Bloom’s Taxonomy is designed to connect activities like “understand” or “evaluate” with fields of knowledge like “facts” or “processes” to define outcomes for your students.

Find out more about making and using rubrics in the Canvas Guide.

 

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