If you teach multiple sections of the same class and are concerned with the possiblity of students from classes that meet early in the day sharing quiz questions and/or answers with their friends who come to your class later in the day, these features are for you! These features are also really helpful if you use Mastery Paths, or have other situation in which students do not all take quizzes simultaneously. 

   When you create a quiz, instead of just typing in your questions, choose "New Question Group" and either name a new question group, or open an existing group of questions. Decide how many questions will be selected from the question group, and the point value of each question. To have a lower chance of students having the same questions on their quizzes, have a small number (compared to the total number in the group) assigned for each student. If I have 100 questions in the question group, and I only assign 5 to each student's quiz, the liklihood of students having the same questions on their quiz is really low. Personally, I'm not quite that concerned that I'm willing to create 95 additional quiz questions. I tend to put no more than double the total amount that will be assigned to each student into that question bank.

   As an added layer of security, the details section allows some helpful options. I like to shuffle answers, which changes the order of the answer choices for each student. The choices themselves do not change, but the order in which they appear shuffles each time the quiz is loaded. I also like to allow students to see their answers, but not until after everyone has taken the quiz. I use the "Show correct answers at" function and select a date at least one day after the quiz closes for student submissions. Students (and their parents) can still see where they went wrong on their quizzes, but not until after all students have taken the quiz

   If you allow students multiple attempts on a quiz, they are not guaranteed to have the same questions on the subsequent attempts than they did on their first time taking the quiz. My only caution is to make sure that all questions in a question group are a similar difficulty level. If you have some really easy questions and other really hard questions in the same group, student's scores might not vary based on their understanding as much as based on the difficulty of the questions.

In 2016 we ran a series of after school training sessions to show parents how to use Canvas. A comment that came up time and again was how can a parent easily switch the view from one child to the next in the website. This is not a new request and has come up in https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/2512-parental-observation-in-canvas-complicated-with-three-chi... and  Parents Access to Canvas. The parent app has its flaws and until the greatest ones are ironed out, we won't be recommending its use.

To help parents, teaching assistants, learning support assistants and others may be observing more than one student at a time, here's a little bit of javascript you can add to your theme to make it easier to switch between students.  If there are multiple observees, a drop down should appear to choose between students.  This is what it looks like when completed.

To do this, the code picks up the observees of the current users and then a list of courses for these users.  As Canvas calendars only deal with 10 courses by default, we wanted to limit the courses picked up.  We did this by filtering for courses by certain terms that include the current year.  Everyone should check lines 23-25:

if ( course.term &&
 course.term.name.includes( (new Date()).getFullYear() ) 
 ) 

Hope this helps

K-12 Users Group​ Thank you to all of you that attended the K-12 User Group Meeting this month.  Attached is the recording.  Please let me know what questions you may have.  I will send an email to everyone with a link to the notes and the chat log. See you all at our next meeting at InstructureCon 2016!

The start of a blog and discussion about how to use CSS styles to develop your courses. The link below is a video to whet your appetite. It is part of a course we deliver for staff training.

WARNING: I am not a coder or designer. I have managed to develop what you see through a mixture of luck, hard work and having some very clever friends. Happy to share all.

Please leave a message and get in touch... more to come soon.

A webinar touching on best practices for administrators and instructors at the close of the school year. Learn about Terms, course conclude dates and managing student access after the term end date. Teachers will learn how to pack away their course and either save to Commons, or create a Canvas course export file. Instructors will learn some tips on maintaining a summer sandbox during break and how to leverage that space for content creation and curation.

Recording of K-12 User Group Meeting #1 held 3/31/16 @ 9am MDT

What's Wrong with the Built-in Google Doc Submissions?

If you've been using Canvas for a while you probably know that students can connect their Google Drive to it. This allows them to turn in or submit files directly from their Google Drive without ever leaving Canvas. Sounds good right? The concept is great and it is pretty easy. All the student has to do is select the file in their Google Drive and then click on the "Submit Assignment" Button. When they do, they get the following notification:

What appears to be happening behind the scenes here is that Canvas sends an API command to Google that tells it to convert the doc, slides or sheet to a (.docx .pptx or .xlsx) file. Sometimes it takes Google too long to do this and the Canvas/Google connection is timed-out which stops this process. When this happens students don't know if their work was submitted successfully or not. In the words of one high schooler "Nothing happened. It just wouldn't work." This seems to occur most frequently when students are submitting Google Slide Presentations, but even plain old docs and sheets can be plagued by this problem. To make matters worse, most of the time the assignment is due late at night and students get really stressed out when they have stayed up late working hard to get everything done only to be foiled by a faulty Google Drive submission.

I've also noticed that the formatting and pagination is sometimes degregated during this process, especially if you have tables in your Google Doc. Google Spreadsheets that are submitted this way usually have this issue as well. They also take a long time to load in SpeedGrader, the cell height & widths get truncated and pagination is applied which breaks tables across several different screens and makes it really hard to work with.

One last reason why using the built in Google Docs submission tab is not desirable. When a teacher views the work that students have submitted using this in SpeedGrader they can use Crocodoc tools to comment on it and give feedback but wouldn't it be nice to use the native communication and commenting tools built right into the Google Docs to do this? That way students can see the corrections and make their edits in one place!

To date, we've had 76 documented help cases due to this problem, and I've even officially made a help case on all the help cases to report this problem to Instructure. From what I've been told, there is no short term fix for this issue on the horizon, so it's time to consider a workaround and a better way for students and teachers to leverage the power of both Canvas and Google Docs.

How Students Can Submit Native Google Docs

Since all Google Docs are really webpages and they all have a unique URL that can be shared, I recommend enabling only "Website URL" assignment submission type.

Doing this turns off the built in Google Docs Tab in the Canvas assignment submission window so students can only submit a URL.  This allows you to view the actual Google Doc/Sheet/Presentation/Drawing in SpeedGrader and use the native Google commenting tools to provide feedback and comments. And of course you can use all the Canvas tools (except for Crocodoc annotations) like media comments, rubrics and text comments. BOOM!

Student Submission Instructions

The first time I have students do this, I walk them through it. After that they are usually pros at it. I made a slide guide to share with the Canvas Community and you all are welcome to put a link to it in your assignment instructions.

See: How to Submit Your Google Drive Files in Canvas (for students)​

Today, I'm co-leading a short presentation on Canvas updates at my institution. During that presentation, I will highlight some Canvas Settings (that may not be 100% intuitive to faculty members). Based part of the discussion from Saving a partial test​, I thought I'd share some of these [Hidden] Canvas Settings so other K-12'ers could benefit.

Assignment Options in Canvas

• Display Grade As… has several options. After entering the amount of points a student can earn, be aware of the options for gradebook display.
  • Percentage
  • Complete/Incomplete
  • Points (default)
    • The default is what Canvas programmed. Click View Grading Schemes to see other options.
    • If your institution has their own grading schemes, you need to select the appropriate grading scheme from the list. Just like with rubrics, this needs to be done with each assignment.
  • Letter Grade
  • GPA
    • As an institution for grades 9-12, we've found this confuses our students. We do not recommend our teachers to use this options. Your institution may have their own preferences.
  • Not Graded
• Available From/Until is a great tool for teachers. It does have some limitations at this point.
  • Teachers can publish a page, assignment or quiz and set the Available From date. Until this time, students will not be able to access any information on that item. The Available Until date will relock the assignment.
  • Once the Available Until date has passed, students can access the item’s information and feedback from the browser version of Canvas only. If students access locked/closed items from the iOS app, they will only see a padlock. (Note: Canvas is working on this functionality in Mobile. See the discussion in What is the difference between assignment due dates and availability dates?​)

Notes in Gradebook

• In Gradebook settings, teachers can Show Notes Column. This will create an entire column for a teacher to use for private memos about students right next to their name/user information and grades.
• One idea would be to place their graduation year in the column. Another would be to write short-hand codes for important information like “A” for accommodation plan or learning plans (not the plan itself!), etc. to jolt your memory in an inconspicuous manner.

TurnItIn

• In Course Settings (directly under the file storage box), there is a place for TurnItIn Comments. Whatever you type in the box will appear with each assignment for which a teacher activates TurnItIn submissions. Of course this box will not appear if TurnItIn is not activated for your institution/course. I like this feature because you can kindly remind students that their submissions will be scanned through TurnItIn, but Canvas helps you by "canning" a message to add to those assignments.
  
• When creating an assignment, and you select Enable TurnItIn Submissions, you have many options. Teachers can also select when students see the originality report: immediately, after grading, after the due date, or never. While there are pro's and con's to both, hopefully teachers can find that one of those fits well with their classroom.

Discussion Options

• These settings are not in the same location as the discussions themselves. There are some important settings linked to the main course’s settings.
• From your course’s home page, click Course Settings. Then More Options at the end of the page.
  • Let students attach files to discussions
  • Let students create discussion topics
  • Let students edit or delete their own discussion posts

Saving a Quiz Mid Test

• Canvas quizzes automatically save when a student completes a question. There is not a formal “save button.” As long as there is not a time restriction on the quiz, students are able to complete the quiz at a later time.
• Sometimes it is important for a faculty member to administer/monitor the quiz. To restrict a student from continuing a quiz on their own, it is possible to update the password for a quiz even if there are active attempts.

If anybody has other settings that they highlight with their staff, feel free to reply to this post!

I love the start of a new term. It allows for a fresh start and for new ideas to be brought forward. As I have reflected over our process for this post, I really love the way we assist our faculty with getting ready as it seems to be very personal and allows for a lot of collaboration. Here are some of the ways we like to P.A.R.T.Y. as we begin a new term.

1. Personal contact - We start personally contacting each Course Manager either by email, phone or stopping by their office to reach out and ask if the is anything we can do to assist them in getting their course ready for the start of the term.
2. Attention to details - In those meetings we emphasis the need for tight consistency of directions, terminology, and structure of the learning materials. This means that all of the dates are accurate, links are not broken and that there is a unified look and feel to all pages.
3. Readily available - While we are not a 24/7 help desk, we work hard to be available when needed to answer questions during business hours, with a willingness to eagerly assist when asked. We also have a knack for showing up at the office door just as a faculty member is getting ready to call/email us. Which happens because we go…
4. Trouble hunting - We go looking for trouble. A couple of times a day members of our office will “make rounds” to each faculty office to see if they need any help or to check-in on any issues we have been working through with them. This is where we most often get accused of have telepathic super powers. We just know when and where to find trouble.
5. Yelling allowed - We tell our faculty to not hesitate in contacting us. Actually we tell them if it takes them longer than 5 minutes, they need to call us, email us or hunt us down.

So the next time you are getting ready for a new term, make it a PARTY and keep being awesome!

Matthew Jennings, M.Ed.

Instructor and Instructional Design Specialist, Sr.

uab.edu/nursing

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