Purpose and Benefits of Canvas Outcomes at UIW
Warning! Canvas Outcomes used for program-level tracking must be built by a Canvas administrator. Contact the UIW Instructional Technology team for initial set up. This collaboration enables ability to run a consolidated results report for all courses within the program by term. Outcomes built at the course level by an instructor are not included on this results report.
Canvas Outcomes is a competency-based education solution used to align learning standards with course assessments. Outcomes allows instructors to rate student performance beyond assigning traditional points, percentages, and letter grades. Once Outcomes are implemented in Canvas, instructors add them to rubrics for Assignments, Graded Discussions, and Classic Quizzes as well as directly with New Quizzes.
This guide explains the benefits of using Outcomes, implementation considerations, and connects you with detailed guides to get started.
Benefits of Using Outcomes
- Ability to rate and track student performance on a proficiency scale with a variety of calculation methods.
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Empowers faculty to make informed adjustments to teaching methods, review sessions, tutoring opportunities, content selection, and lesson plans.
- Gives student visibility of learning standard alignment in each course and faculty the tools to communicate outcome performance on student assessments.
- Supports the choice to implement outcomes at the course level or program level.
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Simultaneous use of course-level and program-level outcomes is also supported.
- Program-level use provides administration with term data across every course in one spreadsheet.
- Provides each instructor with a course report within their gradebook.
- Creates assessment artifact data that can contribute to accreditation documentation.
Outcomes Implementation
Implementation is a two-step process requiring program decisions to design your outcomes before instructors set up each of their courses.
Design in Step 1: During the decision-making portion of the project, an outcomes designer guides you in preparing standards to track, establishes naming conventions, creates folders for each program within your school's Canvas subaccount, and customizes your school's rating scale.
Implement in Step 2: In the course setup portion of the project, each instructor connects outcomes to their courses and sets up their assessments. This setup, combined with students completing work and instructors grading, creates assessment data. However, where outcomes are created impacts reporting:
- Course-level outcomes only create an individual course report.
- Account-level outcomes create an individual course report and a comprehensive program report.
Outcomes Resources
Canvas Outcomes is a robust feature requiring careful planning to ensure assessment integrity. We encourage faculty and administrators to carefully review each of our guides: