In our unyielding commitment to serving the ever-evolving needs of higher education, we are delighted to introduce a series of recent enhancements to the RCampus platform. These updates reflect our dedication to providing educational institutions with a robust and adaptable toolset designed to foster student success, streamline administrative tasks, and facilitate effective teaching and learning.

The following sections will delve into the notable improvements across various facets of RCampus, highlighting how these enhancements are poised to reshape the landscape of higher education management and enrich the educational experience for all stakeholders. Whether you’re an educator seeking more efficient assessment tools or an administrator in search of comprehensive reporting capabilities, these enhancements are tailored to elevate your RCampus experience.

The ability to import aggregated rubric data from external sources.

The ability to map simple grades with multiple outcomes and competencies, i.e. reverse engineering simple grades.

Higher Focus on Competency-Based Education (CBE) 

RCampus paved the way for outcomes-based assessments during the early days of the movement and before it was a prominent discourse in education and accreditation.  As employers continue to demand more qualified graduates, accrediting bodies respond by requiring stronger evidence of learning outcomes, their measurements and accuracy.  Some are going further by seeking proof that students do possess the competencies required to join the workforce.  

In response to this evolving landscape, RCampus has significantly expanded its Competency-Based Education (CBE) offerings.  This expansion encompasses seamless integration with your Learning Management System (LMS), greater internal support tailored to CBE requirements, increased faculty and student engagement capabilities, and enriched CBE reporting tools.  These advancements collectively empower educational institutions to meet the demands of the modern workforce and ensure student success.

Enhancements in the Competency-Based Education Module:  Our CBE module that can be used stand-alone or as a part of an LMS integration has seed multiple enhancements, the most notable being:

• The ability to import aggregated rubric data from external sources.
• The ability to map simple grades with multiple outcomes and competencies, i.e. reverse engineering simple grades.
• Enhancement to reports and analytics, most importantly, performance analysis by student demographics.

Greater support for external-raters and guest assessments

iRubric “Collaborative Assessments” were introduced at its conception with the aim of accommodating various multi-rater assessment use cases. Over the years, we have diligently pursued this vision and continued our enhancements. Earlier this year, iRubric introduced three new assessment models, iRubric Invite, iRubric Snap, and iRubric Score-n-Send, to further diversify our assessment options while empowering institutions to engage external raters and guest assessments more effectively.

Expanded Integrations with Any Modern LMS

A substantial number of our users have chosen RCampus and iRubric to augment their Learning Management Systems (LMS) for more advanced outcomes-based assessments and Competency-Based Education (CBE) enhancements. In our ongoing efforts to enhance the user experience, we have implemented a more seamless integration across various facets of RCampus. This integration provides users with effortless access to improved assessment tools and greater control over reporting.

Furthermore, our system allows for assignments to be evaluated by multiple independent groups in multi-rater settings, with the flexibility to post any of these evaluations back to the LMS grades module. This feature enhances the versatility of assessment processes, accommodating diverse evaluation needs within educational institutions.

Expanding course-level and other assessments to external raters and guest assessors:  In this multi-prong enhancements, our aim has been to engage external raters such as field supervisors and employers without institutional accounts.

• Allow instructors to invite external raters to single assignment to collect their assessments
• Create multi-rater assessments and invite internal and external raters for named or anonymous assessments of any item or a list of items
• Allow a single assessment to be reviewed and assessed by different groups independently, and let instructors decide which assessments to generate course-level grades

Tailored Integration with Canvas LMS

Beyond our standard LMS integration support, our collaboration with Canvas LMS has evolved, resulting in substantial improvements enriched by the strengths of both platforms. Working closely with our institutional partners, we’ve achieved a seamless and highly customized integration that precisely meets their unique needs. This advancement underscores our dedication to providing a finely-tuned integration experience that adapts seamlessly to the ever-changing demands of educational institutions.

Enhancements to Canvas integration: We have made multiple custom integrations with Canvas specifically.

• Course level as well as assignment level integration
• Using iRubric as a secondary scoring tool in addition to the internal Canvas facilities.
• Scoring student submissions directly in iRubric with and without student visibility and with and without visibility to students (anonymous)
• Secondary and independent evaluation of student submissions

Beyond Demographics: Expanding Insights to Students

While tracking student demographics is undeniably valuable for understanding how external factors influence student learning and achievement, it’s essential to recognize that various programs may require additional characteristics beyond the traditional demographic categories provided by institutions. These additional “Student Properties” encompass a wide range of factors, such as extracurricular activities, internships and fieldwork, student’s unique access to resources, personalized academic and career paths, and more. These facets are often underrepresented in generic institutional data that some programs may need.

To address this gap, RCampus empowers programs to extend student properties for their specific needs, providing a broader and more nuanced perspective on student backgrounds and experiences. This comprehensive approach enables the inclusion of diverse student attributes and activities, which can then be effectively reported and utilized across various areas within the system.

Enhanced Program-Level and Institutional Outcomes

There have been significant enhancements to our outcomes and competencies features in RCampus, underscoring their pivotal role within our platform.  We have broadened the scope of outcomes and competencies management, extending access to faculty and staff while introducing approval workflows in specific areas. 

Furthermore, our support for tracking of individual student outcomes has expanded within modules such as iRubric Rapid, now incorporating mapping to individual students, their assignments and demographics. Curriculum maps have become more accessible to end-users, facilitating easier viewing and modifications. Additionally, RCampus and iRubric’s robust reporting capabilities have been enriched with enhanced visualizations and data functionalities for outcomes and competencies. To enhance management and reporting, we’re also extending our repository for more granular categorization and target/goal setting, providing greater insight and control.  Expect even more substantial improvements in the upcoming academic year.

More meaningful data

At RCampus, we understand that meaningful data is at the heart of informed decision-making in education. For that reason, we’ve developed an intuitive reporting system that requires minimal training, ensuring that all stakeholders can easily access the insights in real-time.

Our reporting system is designed with the diverse needs of educators, programs, and institutions in mind. It provides data reports and visualizations that offer a clear and concise view of student performance in alignment with standards, outcomes and competencies critical information. Whether an educator is tracking student progress, an administrator assessing program outcomes, or an institutional researcher evaluating institutional performance, our reporting system delivers the needed data in a meaningful format that can be presented in various internal and accreditation reports.

Recent enhancements have further amplified the power of RCampus reports and analytics. We’ve added numerous functionalities and data elements to provide even deeper insights into educational processes and outcomes. 

Enhancements in reports and analytics:

• Report generation is even faster than before
• Enhanced support for Student demographics and properties
• Combine external and internal data
• More data segmentation by type of assessment

Enhanced Matrix Experience

In the past year, we’ve made multiple changes to the matrix UI and the user experience. One of the changes that released earlier this year was a different view of evaluatees progress with the ability to work on individual cells directly from the progress bar. With the most recent release in October, facilitators can add evaluators to individual cells. This added permission control will allow programs and institutions to utilize evaluators for only their areas of experties, and to add even more privacy to other parts of the matrix.

Highlights of Matrix Added Evaluators feature:  In addition to the whole matrix evaluators, facilitators can now add adhoc evaluators to individual columns or cells of a matrix.  

• • Added evaluators have limited access and only to part of the matrix 
  • Use this feature to add evaluators based on their expertise and access levels
  • Added evaluators will not see the rest of the matrix

Advancements in Accreditation Management

RCampus Matrix has undergone substantial enhancements to bolster its capabilities for accreditation management, collection of evidence from programs and faculty, a robust review workflow, and enhanced reporting. Following are notable features among the key improvements:

1. Enhanced Questionnaires: We’ve revamped our questionnaires in recognition of their pivotal role in data collection and narrative gathering from programs. The user interface is now more intuitive and opens automatically, and collaborative capabilities have been improved to allow multiple users to respond to a single questionnaire.  Additionally, questionnaires have been expanded with more question types and can collect supporting documents. 
2. New “Contributor” Feature: A new “contributor” role has been introduced that allows programs to invite other users to specific parts of a matrix as contributors. These contributors can only access the assigned areas to upload documents, participate in questionnaires, engage in the progress workflow and more.
3. Enhanced Exporting and Reporting: Our download and export functionality has been enhanced to generate folders based on your view of the matrix structure, merge certain elements conveniently into a single PDF, and manage downloads for future observations. This streamlines the reporting process, making it more efficient and accessible for accreditation purposes.