Clarifying Archived Rubric Workflows
By Mike Moore & Megan Shuker
Managers, Product Management
Updated September 2022
One of the things users often love about Brightspace is its configurability. The downside to this configurability is that sometimes, settings can be confusing. For “archived rubrics,” this appears to be the case. This article is intended to provide clarity on the expected behaviour of rubrics that have been archived.
The "archive rubric" capability in the Brightspace Rubrics tool is intended to allow users to update rubric versions while keeping the existing evaluation records available for the instructors’ and the learners’ reference. The act of changing the status of a rubric to Archived will not affect the alignment of the rubric to any assessment activities or impact any previous evaluations completed using the rubric. In the Rubrics tool, the on-screen help regarding rubric status states that when a rubric is changed to Archived status, the following should be expected. Archived rubrics:
- will not appear in search results
- are not available for new associations. Existing associations with archived rubrics remain functional.
As a clarification of the second bullet point, “existing associations with archived rubrics remain functional” means that archived rubrics remain associated with activities that are previously created and but cannot be updated. Learners can still see evaluations on archived rubrics and their scores in activity summary, user progress, and grades tool given the rubric is made visible to learners.
Additionally, in the November 2022 release (20.22.11), editing assessed rubrics will be released in general availability. This feature will allow needed text corrections to previously assessed rubrics which will help eliminate some of the need for new rubric versions and archiving of previous versions.
For course designers, creating new assessment activities with an attached rubric, archived rubrics will not display in the list, and cannot be selected. Only Published rubrics will be displayed while attaching a rubric to a new activity. Archived rubrics are not available to attach to new activities. If a rubric is changed to archived status after it has been aligned to an assessment activity, that rubric will still be aligned to the activity and displayed in the activity create and edit screen with an "Archived" tag to indicate its status.
If an activity has a rubric aligned with completed evaluations and then the rubric is changed to an archived status, that rubric remains attached to the assessment activity and fully visible for the instructor, with an indicator that it has been archived.
Figure: The Evaluation & Feedback accordion showing attached rubrics.
For instructors, when evaluating an assessment activity where an archived rubric is attached, an "Archived" rubric tag will be displayed in the rubric tile to identify clearly which rubric(s) is(are) active status and which is(are) archived status. Rubric alignments to assessment activities are not affected by changing the status of the rubric to archived.
Figure: Archived rubric tag in Evaluation & Feedback accordion.
For learners, any completed & published evaluation is displayed and available wherever rubric evaluations and feedback are available. No indication of the rubric status is indicated to the learner. Previous evaluations are not affected by changing the status of the rubric to archived.
Figure: An example rubric with assignment feedback.
The appearance of the archived rubrics tag is largely governed by the Manage Rubrics permission being enabled at the course offering level for the user role. Generally, learner roles do not need and would not typically have the Manage Rubrics permission enabled as a Best Practice.
Figure: The Edit Permissions page highlighting the Manage Rubrics permission for instructors.
These workflow updates and the appearance of the "Archived" tag was released in June (20.22.06). Please refer to the 90 Day Release Notes for more information.