Rumi enables the management of AI across writing assignments, providing detailed insights into student progress to enhance learning and preserve academic integrity. Rumi's policy framework allows faculty to customize AI guidelines at the assignment level.
This article covers:
Rumi allows faculty to set AI policies for writing assignments in Canvas. Based on the policy, students can create papers using selected AI (ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini), and faculty can view the students' use of AI as well as track their path. Faculty will be able to see which content was pasted into the Rumi assignment, as well as other insights into the student's writing process, including the percentage of content copied, writing duration, and percentage of words revised.
Students write all content into the Rumi editor in Canvas. Based on the faculty's AI settings, they can request AI assistance with spelling, grammar, clarity, conciseness, sentence structure, or elaboration, or receive feedback on content or writing. Faculty can also allow freeform AI prompts from ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
To preview how Rumi works, view the Rumi Sandbox for quick demos of the faculty and student experience.
Rumi is an external tool integrated with Canvas.
To set up a Rumi assignment:
- Add an Assignment and add a title, instructions and points.
- For Assignment Type, choose (1) External Tool. Search for in the list of tools and select (2) Rumi Assignment LTI in the list of tools. Click (3) Save.
- Check the box to load the tool in a new window.
- Leave the number of attempts at Unlimited to allow Rumi to control the number of submission attempts.
- Save your assignment and then load it to set the Rumi-specific settings.
These settings control what tools students have access to in Rumi. At a minimum, you may want to allow access to spelling and grammar checking through promptsets. If you want the students to also have access to a Generative AI model (ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude) you can enable that in settings also.
- Select the box to Load Assignment in a New Window.
- This places you on the Instructor's Rumi Dashboard. This is where completed student assignments will appear.
- Click Settings in the top menu.
View a video on setting up AI Policy for an assignment. By default all AI options are off.
This is where you can specify what features of AI students can use for the assignment. With these settings, you can allow (or not allow) students to interact with AI models while writing in Rumi, and you can review these interactions while grading. There are multiple levels of AI interaction you can allow. Choose from the following options:
- No AI use - If your policy for an assignment is to prohibit AI, you and the student will still benefit from revision history, similarity reports, and other analytics. To implement a 'No AI' policy in Rumi, leave all the AI policy off. If you leave all of these options off students will not have access to any features except the Rumi editor and will be unable to use Rumi for querying AI.
- Limit AI use - You can choose to allow only specific prompts to be used, such as Fix Grammar or Fix Spelling, or create your custom promptsets. Select Guided AI to allow students to use a selected set of AI Prompts.
- (1) Enable Guided AI by toggling it to on.
- (2) Select from a group of pre-built promptsets.
- (3) Select a promptset to view the prompts it contains
Promptsets are preconfigured sets of AI Prompts. You can also recombine existing promptsets or build your own. For example, maybe you would prefer students not to use all of the AI prompts in an existing promptset. You can duplicate it and remove those prompts you don't want students to use. Alternatively, you may have built your own prompts that you want students to interact with as they work on their assignment. In the latter case you can create a new promptset with just those prompts.
- Enable Guided AI by toggling it to on.
- Select Promptset Builder.
- Choose whether to 1) create your own from your own prompts or 2) duplicate an existing promptset and then edit it.
- To Duplicate an existing set:
- Select an existing promptset from the menu.
- Select Duplicate Set
.
- (1) Enter a new Set Name.
- (2)Add a prompt or Generate one with AI
- (3) Edit or Delete existing prompts
- When you edit an existing prompt, you can change the name of the prompt or edit how the AI can be used. If a prompt is set to "Rewrite text", the AI can replace the text in the student's writing. If that is disabled, the AI can only give feedback to the student.
- Changes to your duplicated promptset are automatically saved.
- To Create a new promptset
- Click on Create New Set.
- (1) Edit the new prompt's name
- (2) Add your own prompt
- (3) Generate a prompt with AI
- If students are allowed to query one of the Generative AI models, enable Conversational AI.
- You can allow students to freely query or add reference material to be used for the AI responses. This can include course texts or specific documents. The context materials can be several thousand words long. You can upload a PDF or enter the text manually. To customize
- Conversational AI Settings: Configure AI behavior and provide context for more personalized AI responses.
- By default, "Block do-my-work & off-task requests" is enabled. This instructs the AI to refuse off-topic questions and requests for the AI to do the student's writing — even with no AI Instructions set. When off, the AI only blocks requests that conflict with your AI Instructions. Unsafe requests are always blocked.
- Set strict rules for how the AI should behave with students. The AI must follow these. For example: "Don't give answers directly" or "Use Socratic method."
- Add Context: Provide reference material or additional context for the AI (e.g., course content, case studies).
- AI Responses: Use headers, tables, and lists to improve readability of AI responses. This is off by default.
If you plan on creating or importing a rubric into the assignment, you can make this rubric available to students within Rumi. Rumi will utilize AI to evaluate the content based on the provided rubric and provide feedback to students.
If you require students to use a specific page formatting style with set margins, fonts, page numbers, etc. you can enabe the new, beta feature that allows students to see margins, pages, etc.
You can also create a template, pre-filled with template content. This must be set before any students have started working on the assignment.
If you want students to submit drafts for feedback and then build on those drafts for a final submission, choose Continuation Assignment. These assignments allow a student's prior submission to be imported into a new assignment without being marked as copied text.
To set up a multipart assignment
- Create the Part 1 Assignment using the Canvas integration with Rumi.
- Then create the Part 2 Assignment using the Canvas integration with Rumi.
- In the Part 2 Assignment's Rumi settings, enable Continuation Assignment.
- Select the Prior Assignment or Part 1 assignment.
This is a Beta feature that should be used cautiously. While group assignments are supported in Rumi, these involve extra grading steps for faculty. You can import Canvas Groups into a Rumi assignment and students can work together on the assignment in one Rumi session. Students can see each other's work, but they cannot see each other's AI prompt usage. Only one student can submit an assignment and in the Gradebook, faculty can only grade and provide feedback on that one student's submission. For the second student faculty need to copy comments and feedback from the first student's submission.
Create a Group Assignment
- Create a Group in Canvas
- Go to the assignment Settings in Rumi (Note: you can't create a Group assignment in Canvas. It has to be set up in Rumi.)
- Select Group Collaboration (Note: You must set this up before there are any submissions.)
- Import a Group from Canvas by clicking on the Import from Canvas button.
- You will need to authorize Rumi to access your Canvas groups.
- Select the desired group
Students will automatically be assigned the correct group partner. Each student can work on the assignment separately or together. Only one student can submit. The student who submits will be the student whose submission appears in the gradebook. The instructor will need to keep track of group members to assign a grade to the second student as no submission will appear in the gradebook.
Instructor Review Type should be set to After Submission Review if you review papers after submitting them. The Live Review While Writing option allows you to see papers as students work on them.
Peer Review allows students to review each other's papers. Students give feedback on classmates' submitted essays by commenting, annotating, or assessing with the rubric.
- Select Class-wide Peer Review or Selective Peer Review
- Note that document comments are visible to all peers.
This section allows you to control how students access your comments in Rumi.
- Enabling Manual Release prevents students from seeing your comments until you have finished reviewing the document. (Recommended)
- Notify via email would send an email to students for every new comment.
You can also set feedback release policy for rubrics and peer reviews.
Create a rubric by selecting the Rubric option in the Rumi menu. You can ask AI to generate a rubric, but you can also import an existing rubric from Canvas or a spreadsheet. If enabled for students, they can ask the AI Assistant to evaluate their work based on the rubric. All rubrics in Rumi are fully editable after creation.
- Generate with AI: The system uses the assignment description as a foundation and allows instructors to specify details such as the number of rubric levels and additional considerations (e.g., focus on structure, creativity, or critical thinking). Verify that any rubric created with the AI Assistant matches your expectations for the submissions.
- Build Manually: Use the rubric builder to create a rubric directly in Rumi
- Import a rubric: Import from a spreadsheet
- Canvas Sync: Import an existing rubric from Canvas or save the rubric built in Rumi back to Canvas
- You may need to authorize Rumi to connect with the Canvas rubric application.
- You will see a list of rubrics in your current class. Locate the desired rubric and click 'Import This Rubric'.
- You can edit the rubric in Rumi to add or adjust criteria and ratings.
- Click Save Rubric to save your changes.
- If you'd like the rubric to also appear as part of the Canvas Assignment page, select Export to Canvas. This will also add the revised rubric to the course Rubrics and make it available for other assignments. The rubric is unique to each assignment and cannot be copied between assignments, but you can export your rubric to Canvas and then import it into another Rumi assignment.
Giving Students Access to the Rubric
In AI Settings, enable AI Rubric Feedback.
Select AI Rubric Settings and disable AI-Generated Leveling. The AI-generated leveling recommendations may be inconsistent, and the model may produce hallucinated or inaccurate outputs. Use this feature with caution.
Using the Rubric
Grading with the Rubric
When you are ready to grade a submission, you can use the rubric as a guide or ask Rumi AI to provide feedback based on the rubric.
- Open the submission in Canvas Speedgrader.
- To view the AI feedback, click on the Rubric button in the menu.
- Select AI.
An AI generated feedback screen will show the original rubric's criteria, strengths of the submission and areas for improvement. Note: This is the same feedback students will see if they use the AI Assistant to evaluate their submission. This should be used with caution as the content is AI generated.
Student Use of the Rubric
Students can query the Rubric up to 3 times while writing their submission. The AI will evaluate their work based on the rubric. To use, tudents should click on the View Rubric button in the main Rumi menu.
After setting up an assignment in Rumi, you can use Student View to verify which options are available to students. In student view, you can enter content, test AI features, and view pasted content as a student would. Testing as a student will also give you insight into the student experience.
Some things to note about the student experience:
- Spell checking only flags misspelled words but doesn't offer the correct alternative unless the instructor enables Spell Checking in a Promptset. Even with a promptset for spelling and grammer checking, the experience is different from what students are used to in Grammarly or Google Docs. Students must select the text first and then check it using a promptset. The AI will return the rewritten content and list individual spelling errors in a table. It's still up to the student to accept the changes as a whole or go back through the document and individually address the errors.
- There are no page numbers in Rumi, so students must rely on word count to judge the length of a submission.
- Rumi saves automatically so students can leave the assignment or Canvas and come back later to work on it. Students shouldn't hit the Submit button until they are ready to submit the assignment.
- Students can see assignment instructions in the left column of Rumi, so load any important instructions at the top of the Canvas assignment instructions. Some students experienced difficulties switching browser tabs to get back to the instructions so having more instructions present in Rumi may help.