Step 1: Assignment Setup

You can create assignments on the Assignments page. In Course Navigation, click the Assignments link.
Open Assignments
Click the Add Assignment button.

Assignment details include fields for the assignment type, name, description, points, assignment group (if desired), grade display, and submission type, and due dates. You can also specify if the assignment is a group assignment in the assignment details (Links to an external site.) lesson.

Submission types where instructor can:


Make comments in SpeedGrader	View and make comments in SpeedGrader	View, annotate and make comments in SpeedGrader
Website URL	Text entry Video (common formats) Audio (common formats)	Uploads Word documents PDFs PowerPoints Excel Images Student annotations

When you add details to an assignment, you can also assign the assignment to all students, course sections (Links to an external site.), course groups (Links to an external site.), or individual students (Links to an external site.) as part of the Canvas differentiated assignments feature.

Step 2: Rubrics

You can access and manage Rubrics from the course navigation.

Once you create a rubric, the rubric is saved in your course for future use. You can add the rubric to an assignment (Links to an external site.) and use the rubric for grading and adding comments. You can manage created rubrics in the Manage Rubrics page (Links to an external site.).

You can create a rubric in the Manage Rubrics page. You can also create a rubric directly when adding a rubric to an assignment, and the process is the same.

Rubric criteria can include a point range or an individual point value.

Open Rubrics

Rubrics can be used in the following ways:

To assign a score, i.e. quantitative feedback.
To assign a rating, i.e. qualitative feedback.
Both quantitative and qualitative feedback.
For freeform comments.

Part 5 of this series covers grading with Rubrics.

Step 3: Select a Grade Posting Policy in the gradebook

Grades assigned to students in the SpeedGrader immediately appear in the gradebook. The default Grade Posting Policy for all graded course items is Automatic, which means that students can see the grade as soon as they are entered.

You can keep students from seeing their grades until the instructor is ready to release them. The posting policy can be changed to Manual at the course level (applies to all graded activities) or at the assignment level (applies to a single activity).

Part 7 of this series covers SpeedGrader and the Gradebook in more detail.

Step 4: Access SpeedGrader to grade, assign scores and provide feedback.

The SpeedGrader can be accessed from the Assignments tool, Gradebook, or the To-Do list (on the Home page).

Parts 3, 4, 6 and 8 of this series cover accessing the SpeedGrader, grading submissions, the types of submissions, and providing feedback in more detail.