Hello! In this video, I’m going to show you how to add assignments and set up the gradebook for your Canvas course. Before we get into a course, I want to take a moment to explain the relationship between assignments and the gradebook. While assignments in Canvas can collect student file submissions online, they can also act as placeholders for in-person or ungraded assignments. These placeholders allow you to enter grades in the gradebook without collecting student submissions through Canvas. In essence, creating an assignment is how you add columns to the gradebook, whether or not you’re collecting submissions online.

Creating Assignments

Let’s take a look at how to create assignments in Canvas and the options that are available. To begin, I’ll log in to Canvas at canvas.case.edu, then enter into my course. From the course menu, I’m going to click on Assignments. This takes us to the Assignments page, where we can easily see all of the assignments in the course. To add a new assignment, let’s click on the +Assignment button. The first thing to do is enter a name for the assignment. You can then enter any instructions or materials for the assignment in the big text box below. Once you’ve set up the basics, it’s time to look at the assignment settings.

The first thing we need to enter is a point value for the assignment. Everything in the gradebook is based off of points, even if you grade with percentages or letter grades. You can enter any number for this value, even 0. Next is the option to set an Assignment Group. We’ll talk about those in a minute. For now, select how you want the grade to display and whether this assignment should be included in the final grade for students.

Up next is the most important feature of assignments—the submission type options. This is how you tell Canvas and your students what to expect from this assignment. The first option here is No Submission, which means that students aren’t submitting anything for this assignment. This is a great option for attendance grades, extra credit, or other items where you’re not collecting anything from students. This option doesn’t allow students to upload anything to Canvas but does create a corresponding column in the gradebook.

The second option is an Online submission. This gives your students a place to attach something and submit it through Canvas. You can use the checkboxes to select what items you’ll allow students to submit. Text Entry will give students a text box into which they can type their submission. Website URL gives students a place where they can paste and submit a link to a website. Media Recording will give students access to Canvas’s media recorder, where they can either record an audio or video submission or upload an existing media file. The last option is File Upload, which lets students attach a file from their computer to upload as their submission. If you select the File Upload option, you can also restrict the types of files that students upload.

The third assignment type is an On Paper submission. This should be used when you’re collecting items from students outside of Canvas, such as an on-paper test or handwritten notes. This option doesn’t allow students to upload anything to Canvas but does create a corresponding column in the gradebook. Finally, there’s the External Tool assignment type. These are assignments that connect with an external tool, such as publisher websites.

Once you select the submission type for the assignment, you have the option to make this a group assignment or to require peer review. If you have a large class or several graders, you may also find it helpful to turn on the moderated grading tool. The last setting is to select who is assigned this assignment. Canvas lets you select individuals, groups, or sections that an item can be assigned to, all with different availability and due dates. For example, let’s say I have a student who needs an extension. I can assign this to everyone for a due date, but I can also assign just the one student a different due date.

Now that I’m done, I’m going to click Save and Publish, which will save the assignment and make it available to students.

Grading Assignments

Now that the assignment has been created, let’s take a look at how it appears in the Gradebook. Click on Grades from the course menu to enter into the gradebook. Here we can see that each student gets a row, while each assignment gets its own column. You can rearrange these columns by dragging and dropping them or by sorting based on due date. You can enter grades by clicking on a cell and entering in the grade. Press Enter to save the grade. To view submissions to online assignments, you can click on the SpeedGrader option from the column’s menu.

The gradebook calculates subtotals based on assignment groups and a total grade based on the assignments you add to your course. By default, this total column will calculate the grade by adding up all of the points earned by a student for their graded assignments and dividing it by the total points possible for those assignments. So, if your course uses this type of grading scheme, you won’t have to set up anything special other than creating assignments for all of your graded items.

If your course uses a weighted grading scheme, that’s where Assignment Groups come into play. Assignment Groups are used to organize assignments and assign weights as part of the final grade. If we go back to the Assignments page, you’ll notice that we can create new Assignment Groups by clicking on the +Group button at the top of the page. Doing this will create a new assignment group, into which we can place our graded items. To add an assignment to an assignment group, you can either drag and drop an existing assignment into the group, click the plus button next to an assignment group to create a new assignment, or edit an existing assignment and select the appropriate group in the assignment settings. While assignment groups can contain multiple items, they can also contain just one item, depending on your course’s grading scheme.

Adding Weights

Once I’ve created all of the groups that compile my final grade, I can add weights to them. To do this, click on the gear at the top of the Assignments page and select Assignment Group Weights. Select the checkbox, then input the percentages for each group. When everything looks good, click Save. You can now see the percentages for each group at the top of the group. It’s important to note that items within assignment groups are not weighted equally or as an average; they are weighted proportionally according to their point values.

Assignment Weights

For example, if I have four items in a group that counts as 40% of the final grade, and each is worth 100 points, they will each count equally as 25% of that overall 40%. If, instead, one of the assignments is worth 50 points while the others are worth 100 points, they won’t count equally toward the overall 40%. Each assignment worth 100 points would contribute around 28% to the overall 40%, while the 50-point assignment would contribute around 14% to the overall 40%.

If we head back into the gradebook, you can now see that each assignment group has created a subtotal. We can see the weights for each group listed at the top of its subtotal column. The Total column will now reflect the final grade using the weight percentages that we just set up.

Conclusion

Whatever grading method your course uses, we recommend setting up all assignments at the beginning of the semester and establishing your grading structure before class begins. That way, you can simply enter grades and not worry about managing the gradebook’s organization as the semester begins. And that’s it! We’ve taken a look at the basics of creating assignments and setting up the Gradebook in Canvas. For any questions or concerns, please contact edtechliaisons@knoxschools.org.