Assignments - Why use Canvas assignments?
Assignments in Canvas are one of the many ways you can assess if your students have met the learning outcomes of your course. Being clear with your expectations and providing time and space for your students to demonstrate what they have learned are several components of effective teaching.
When to use assignments
Use assignments when you want students to directly submit something to you: text, media recordings, a link, or a file. You assess assignments in Speedgrader, just like discussions or quizzes. Here are some examples of what students could submit in an assignment:
- An essay
- A link to a Google doc
- A recording of a speech, presentation, or performance
- A recording of a student doing an art project
- A photo or image file of student work
- A photo or scan of a student's handwritten work
Grading
You can attach a rubric and/or use comments Links to an external site.to give your students immediate feedback. Rubrics can automatically sum up the students points, percentages, a letter grade, a GPA and will ultimately populate them in your Gradebook. See Rubrics Module in the Advanced Orientation for more.
Weighting assignments
You can set up Gradebook to calculate the final grade with different weights to your assignments groups? (For example: Assignments = 20%, Quizzes = 20%, Mid-term = 30% or Final = 30%) You can do this by creating assignment groups. First create assignment groups. Links to an external site. Then assign weights to that group. Links to an external site. See Gradebook module in the Advanced Orientation for more.
As you can see, assignments provide lots of flexibility to design and capture your students' learning. For each major assignment, add rubrics to articulate how well your students are performing with each criteria.
In your syllabus, make sure you have a clear structure of your course grading. This includes clear expectations with due dates, a late work policy, a value of each assignment and test assessments, and grading scale.