Student Choice

[tscheip]

There have been a lot of links to students' success and their ability to choose certain assignments or questions that allow them to demonstrate mastery more on their terms.

It would be great if Canvas had features like this where assignments could be linked through a "decision tree" so that students could have options on which they would like to choose. I understand you can lump all the choices into the same assignment, but that doesn't work if you want students to be able to choose between a multiple choice test and an essay test (that goes through TurnItIn.com). Further, it can be very cluttered and difficult for students to navigate if you have 4 or 5 different assignments built inside one Canvas assignment. 

In this same vein, it would be great if the Quizzes feature had settings for student choice, so students could choose which short answer/essay questions they would like to respond to. Again, a sort of decision tree that instructs them to, for instance, "Choose 3 of the 5 short answer questions you believe you can answer best." 

This idea also really helps when you have students "jigsaw" or read different texts from their classmates. This way a Quiz can include questions from multiple areas of content but students choose to answer only the questions that covered their specific content area.

Thanks for your time,

Tom Scheip, Cardinal Mooney High School

🔎 This idea has been archived. While this idea isn't open for comments, it is an important part of Instructure’s idea conversations and development process. Contributions like this are valuable as Instructure prioritizes work on new or existing features.

[KristinL]

Hi @tscheip -

Student choice usually boosts engagement, and I'm excited to collaborate with you!

I think a great place to start is Mastery Paths. While Mastery Paths are generally used post-assessment, they can be used to promote student choice. When I taught, I used Mastery Paths to allow students to learn about project choices and then to choose the direction they wanted. All of the "extra" options never appeared in the Gradebook, which helped everyone stay organized. (I created an assignment group worth 0% of the course grade to encourage students to just pick what they wanted to explore rather than picking the one with the "right" amount of points.)

@kona wrote a blog outlining this application of Mastery Paths. I hope it's helpful!

Hacking Mastery Paths 

With the quiz Idea, it looks like another instructor shared a related Idea in 2021. I think student chooses multiple choice question to answer could be parallel to your idea. 

[KristinL]

Hi @tscheip -

I'm checking on this Idea, and I hope you are doing well! Were you able to explore the blog post and related Idea? I hope they were helpful!

If you are unable to provide an update regarding this idea by March 18, we will need to archive it to help the Community Team focus on current Ideas. If you need more time, that's okay too! Providing an update before that time would be helpful and appreciated.