Formative Assessments in Canvas

[dejonghed07]

Students benefit from formative assessments that allow them to check their understanding of terms/concepts throughout a course. According to instructors at our community college, regular formative assessments are especially helpful in identifying student strengths and weaknesses as they begin learning new terms and concepts in introductory courses.

Below are some ideas that we find work well as formative assessments in Canvas. What are some other ideas we should add to this list?

Self-Check Formative Assessments 

Canvas Quizzes -

• A practice quiz can help students check their understanding of the course concepts.
• Instructors may place video or images into the quiz question field's Rich Content Editor and provide response choices to allow students to quickly check their understanding. Once an institution enables Quizzes.Next, instructors will also be able to add hot spot questions, organizing, categorizing and and other interactive instant feedback.
• Videos may be edited to segment into each quiz question field instead of displaying the video all at once. Our institution subscribes to Films on Demand that allows instructors to segment videos.

Questions Embedded Throughout Videos -

• The free service Edpuzzle allows instructors to place questions throughout YouTube, TED, Khan Academy and other popular video channels.
• Paid services such as Techsmith Relay and Camtasia will allow instructors to place questions throughout their own videos and connect them to the Canvas grade book through the Techsmith Relay LTI.

Flashcards/Games/Interactive Content - 

Teachers or students can register for free accounts and create/share their flash cards and games from:

• Quizlet (embeds in Canvas and a  Quizlet LTI is available)
• H5P (embeds in Canvas page)
• Quizziz (use as an external link)

Journaling & Creating Multimedia as Formative Assessment

Ongoing Journals (of descriptions or real life application of terms and concepts) -

Journals are possible in Canvas by assigning:

• Collaborations to individual students or
• Discussions to individual students.

Student-created video/audio or images (for descriptions or real life application of terms and concepts) -

• Flipgrid integrates with the Canvas grade book and works well for student reflections.
• Adobe Spark allows students to create a short video, image or web page without downloading/installing software. They are able to edit/add to it as they learn.
• Record or upload video or audio or mobile video, audio or image uploaded to Canvas Discussions.
• PowerPoint saved as video and uploaded to Canvas Discussions.