New Quizzes End of Quarter Update
Hello there! I’m Marissa (pronounced like Teresa but with an ‘M’), the newest member of the New Quizzes team. I spent over a decade working in the Higher Ed space for an R1 University with positions in finance, central research administration, departmental research administration, and contracts. Crucial to my development as a leader was understanding individual needs, where there might be gaps in resources, and how we can bridge those gaps using technology. If there wasn’t an immediate solution or an easy solution, I was going to find a way to get the best resources in front of stakeholders. I hope to contribute in that way to get us to our goal of transitioning to New Quizzes over the next couple of years.
I’ve spent my first couple of months on the team getting to know the ins and outs of Canvas, reading through the blog posts and community comments, meeting with customers, and trying to get a handle on the journey that has been New Quizzes. From working so closely with Susan and with the New Quizzes engineers, I am so proud of the work that they dedicate themselves to every day and it’s rewarding to see the outcomes of that hard work. With that, I wanted to give an update on what the first quarter has been like and where we are headed in the next quarter.
Q1 Achievements
For Q1, we projected two items on our roadmap: allow matching questions to include partial credit and support the Rich Content format in Fill-in-the-Blank questions.
Partial Credit for Matching Questions
We released partial credit for matching questions to production environments in the beginning of the quarter. Matching questions include the option to select partial credit, similar to the Multiple Answer questions. Partial credit is the default option for this question type. Newly created matching questions default to the partial credit option. The blog post YESSS Partial Points on Matching Questions! provides additional information.
Rich Content Editor in Fill-in-the-Blank questions
For the Rich Content Format in Fill-in-the-Blank questions work, we will release a feature to Beta environments in April that allows instructors to create fill-in-the-blank questions with rich content such as paragraph formatting, scientific or mathematical formulas, or a table. This feature supports fill-in-the-blank types for fill-in-the-table, multiple drop-down, multiple fill-in-the-blank sentences, and entering equations or formulas. Possible Answer Types include a dropdown, open entry, or word bank. A complete blog post and additional instructions will be provided once the feature is available in Beta environments.
Example of Fill-in-the-blanks question using a table from build screen in New Quizzes::
Example of Fill-in-the-blanks question using a table from a student view:
Item Bank Filter Management
As described in this blog post, we’ve made changes to Item Bank filter names for clarification and to make it easier to find the Item banks you need. We heard from community members that Item Banks can become unmanageable for Admins at large organizations and Admins that have teaching duties. Additionally, we heard that “All banks” as the default is not useful in most situations, so we created a “This Course” filter for item banks used in this course and this filter will be the default selection when navigating to Item Banks from within a course.
The Item Bank Filters are:
- All Banks - Every bank the signed in user has access to. The filter shows all banks the user has created as well as all shared to the user, both directly and through shared via course. *Use this in conjunction with search and sorting options to narrow
- Institution Banks - Banks shared across an account
- Banks Shared to Course - all banks that have been shared to any course. Banks shared to courses are accessible by all teachers in the course.*Use this filter when you have item banks shared to all the teachers in a course and wish to use in another course
- This Course - (“this course” is the course in the navigation breadcrumbs at the top of the page) - any Item Banks used in the course which the logged in user has permission to see (share settings of view or edit).
Q2 Objectives
Our objectives for Q2 are to focus on two big priorities that will further our work so that teachers and admins are able to maintain consistent content across multiple courses. These priorities include finalizing the work on the Bulk Migration Tool and improving the Blueprint Courses experience in New Quizzes, both of which are major endeavors that we have heard have been roadblocks for customers wanting to move to New Quizzes. Additionally, we are beginning efforts to improve the experience around manual grading and notifications.
Bulk Migration Tool
We continued to make progress on the Bulk Migration Tool this quarter. As of 2021-12-22, New Quizzes: Bulk Migration was made available in the Canvas beta environment. In Q1, we received feedback in the community forum and conducted validation interviews with customers who had tested the tool. For more information, a screencast on how the tool works can be found here.
We realize that having the New RCE in NQ will be critical for the teacher's experience of migration to ensure what is migrated will appear as expected. While work on the migration tool is nearing completion, we are waiting for the RCE to be available in New Quizzes before releasing the bulk migration tool. Work on the new RCE feature is under way.
As mentioned in a previous post, please note these current exceptions and statuses:
- New RCE content in CQ will not appear in NQ automatically (work still underway)
- Migrated quizzes move as unpublished (fix underway)
- Images not migrating properly (fix in development)
- Quiz assignment points not moving unless quiz is published (fix underway)
- Surveys will move as CQ, so that they can still be used in the course as originally made until another solution is developed. We are looking at different ways to gather feedback on course/instructors from students.
- Text No Question (such as for subsections) will need to manually be changed to Stimulus, with the next question associated to the Stimulus
Blueprint Course in NQ
In our early discovery interviews on the Blueprint NQ experience, we gathered the following insights:
- Currently, a Blueprint will only sync on the initial association to a course, users need to be able to make updates to a blueprint multiple times and to numerous associated courses/sections of a course. Some use cases include:
- K12 curriculum specialists create content and associated courses for specific grade levels and subjects.
- The main teacher works with a # of other teachers and are sharing the content with the other teachers
- Teaching Assistants are teaching sections with one main instructor managing the content
- Some customers only make major changes between terms while others need to be able to make changes during the term as well.
- Currently, item banks cannot be associated to blueprint courses so they cannot be supplied with the general course framework. Instructors need a way for item banks to be available across associated courses.
What these insights tell us is that we are on the right track with our Blueprint Roadmap which focuses Q2 on supporting additional updates/syncs and supporting item banks within Blueprint courses and associated courses.
Improving Grading Experience
We recognize that there are gaps in the current grading workflow that need to be addressed. Planning is underway to improve indication of when a New Quiz is available for and requires Manual Grading, and to remove early notifications about graded exams to students.
Related Resources:
New Quizzes Feature Comparison
New Quizzes Transition Toolkit
Migrating to New Quizzes capability coming to Beta
