New Quizzes End of Quarter Update - Q2 2022

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Instructure

New Quizzes End of Quarter Update - Q2

As we approach the anniversary of the Classic Quiz Sunset Timeline post with the extension to June 30, 2024, we can reflect on a year of increased focus on New Quizzes to help us reach the milestones to move us forward.  We’ve added more resources to the effort by increasing engineering and product staff dedicated to the work. We continue to meet with customers who help us shape features with their testing and feedback.  The hard work, collaboration, and leadership show that Instructure is committed to getting us to the finish line and is willing to provide the necessary support to ensure we are successful.

New Quizzes Resources

Find all updates and the most current roadmap on the New Quizzes Hub.

Before we go into the latest New Quizzes achievements and plans for the following quarter, I wanted to make sure that everyone is able to follow along with our current priorities, what we’re looking to accomplish in the near term, and the important resources available as customers and users transition to New Quizzes.  

Roadmap for prioritized features

By now you might be familiar with the roadmap that appears on the Transparency into Quizzes Planning blog post where you can see, in real-time, what the Product team is currently working on and what they plan to do next with New Quizzes. The items on this list represent features that have been prioritized according to the current timeline towards the sunset date in 2024. 

New Quizzes Feature Comparison

The New Quizzes Feature Comparison document shows the current functionality available in New Quizzes as compared to the functionality in Classic Quizzes. We are proud to report that we have released nearly 75% of the items listed in this document. There is only one function that we have noted will not copy exactly in New Quizzes and that’s creating a survey, which we plan to use current/planned functionality to meet those needs. There may be items on the Feature Comparison document that don’t appear on the roadmap but that we intend to address once the big priorities are accomplished.   

Feature Flag blog post

We have recently updated the Feature Flag blog post with more information and release update information. As more of these self-enablement tools are available, we will update with more information. As a reminder, these features are account-level feature options and cannot be managed in sub-accounts. 

Quizzes Transition Hub

The Quizzes Transition Hub is where customers can find updates regarding the Classic-to-New Quizzes migration project and engage in discussions on forums around new features. All blog posts related to New Quizzes can be found at this hub, directly here. All forum discussions can also be found at the hub, directly here, and divided up by feature or topic.

Engineering Resources

Canvas is focusing our resources towards this important work to get us to each milestone and towards our end goals.  In Q2, we moved three seasoned Canvas engineers to our main Quizzes team and it has helped us tremendously in being able to work towards the completion of big ticket items as well as meet the monthly needs of maintenance and support tickets.  As well, we have a team working on New Quizzes integrations and specifically focused on the RCE integration work. 

Each of these resources exhibit the prioritization and hard work of many people who are centered on delivering the most important items over the next two years to ensure that we can support our customers' transition to New Quizzes.

Q2 Achievements

For Q2, we projected four items: 

  • Complete Bulk Migration Tool Improvements
    • Rich Content Editor (RCE) Integration work
  • Blueprint Course Sync
  • Blueprint Item Bank
  • Improved Grading Experience

RCE Integration

Our intention with the RCE Integration work is to have full Canvas RCE in New Quizzes. For an update from the team dedicated to the RCE, please see this blog post which describes their journey so far and how the work is broken up so that we can deliver the most important features that are needed for the Bulk Migration Tool to reach the needed functionality.

Migration Tool UX improvements

In the past two quarters, the Bulk Migration Tool has been in beta and we appreciate the many customers who have tested and provided feedback on the tool. While we are still awaiting the RCE integration into New Quizzes before releasing the tool into production environments, we have been addressing issues that have come back from testers and feedback in the community on the functionality of the migration tool.

Here is a list of the related fixes or features that we have completed in the past two quarters since the bulk migration tool was released in beta environments:

  • Migrated quizzes move as unpublished (fixed)
    • Migrated quizzes will keep the state of the original quiz. If it was unpublished, it will copy as unpublished and vice versa.
  • Quiz assignment points not moving unless quiz is published (fixed)
  • Migrated question groups share with the new course (completed)
    • Course Instructors have default access to the item banks shared in the Course after migration
  • Multiple dropdowns with blank answers break when migrated to NQ (fixed)
  • Migrated question banks used by a course should be Course Shared Item Banks (completed)
  • Imported Quizzes.Next assignments are always in an unpublished state (fixed)
  • NQ stuck in copy mode if importing a course export file from a course that was previously reset (fixed)
  • CQ questions containing math formulas in LaTEx will automatically migrate to NQ as formulas which can still be edited (completed)
  • ‘Import assessment as new quiz’ isn’t importing point value on assignment (fixed)
  • Rich Fill in the Blank - The Rich FITB question type helps to support seamless transition of data from Classic to New Quizzes by providing the text formatting and tooling options of the RCE in FITB question stems. (completed)

Improved Grading Experience

As described in this post, New Quizzes that require manual grading now appear in an instructor’s To Do List. In the gradebook, instead of a partial grade, a New Quizzes icon will be displayed that shows the quiz is pending completion of grading.

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When students complete a quiz that requires manual grading, they will not receive notification of a graded exam until grading has been completed. Partial grades will not show up in their gradebook, to avoid the early notification or visibility of incomplete grades.  New Quizzes will not appear in the student’s recent feedback list until after the teacher completes the manual grading.  

As soon as a teacher clicks to “Updates Scores” in Speedgrader, then Canvas will see the quiz as completely graded and remove it from the teacher’s To do list and will be displayed in the student’s recent feedback.

This Course Filter

Along with the other Item Bank Management Clarification work completed in Q1 to clarify and improve how to search for item banks, we added a filter called This Course.  The purpose of this filter is to display any Item Banks used in the course which the logged in user has permission to see (share settings of view or edit). After release, we found an issue with the filter on courses with large numbers of assignments so we had to pull it back to add operational improvements to support very large courses.  The current quizzes infrastructure and performance improvement work will address this issue and improve the overall experience.

Rich Content Editor in Fill-in-the-Blank questions

Following the addition of the Rich Content Editor in Fill-in-the-Blank questions in Q1, we received feedback from users who needed to use specific types of characters either for different languages or for scientific questions, so we improved on the work by allowing for any character within the backticks which include any special character (parentheses, math operators, etc.) and accents.

A screencast on Rich Content Editor in Fill-in-the-Blank questions can be found here.

Issues from related Release Q&A that have been completed:

  • Duplicate FITB questions cause possible answer field to lose association to question
  • Cannot edit FITB questions with several blanks when migrated from Classic Quiz
  • Regrading FITB questions in New Quizzes does not allow modifications to answer settings

Item Bank Icon Update

Based on feedback from our community, we have changed the icon for item banks and resources within Canvas LMS and Mastery Connect from a piggy bank to a file folder. We have recently received feedback from our users from various cultural groups that the pig has negative connotations, and we want all learners to feel comfortable using Instructure products. As a global company, we want to recognize the nuanced cultural differences and avoid using imagery that is offensive. We are committed to diversity, inclusion, and belonging and to serving all members of the Instructure family.

Link to Press release

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Q3 Objectives

Our objectives for Q3 are to focus chiefly on the RCE Integration work and the other two big priorities of Blueprint courses along with continuing our Infrastructure and Performance Improvements in order to ensure a more stable environment as more users transition to New Quizzes. 

An update from our team working on New Quizzes Integrations can be found here, where they provide information on Rich Content Editor, API, and Item Analysis.

RCE Integration

  • Please see this blog post from Tamas Balogh on the RCE integration work.
  • The RCE integration work is broken up in four phases:
    • Phase 1: Core functionalities like editing, A11y checker, upload/record media, math editor, HTML editor
    • Phase 2: Remaining features of RCE: insert user/course images, media, links, documents etc. 
    • Phase 3: 3rd party app integration
    • Phase 4: Migrate content from the current RCE to new location

Blueprint Course in NQ

Our Blueprint priorities in Q3 include completing the Blueprint Courses improvements so that courses can sync after the initial sync and item bank changes related to the course will also sync, then moving on to begin the work allowing locking on Blueprint courses in New Quizzes.

Infrastructure and Performance Improvements

We are making several upgrades to our core infrastructure to provide continued service and performance improvements.

FITB in Word Banks with multiple answers

This work improves the experience for FITB questions with multiple blanks since previously each blank was treated as having its own isolated set of choices rather than a true word bank with a common pool of answers.  On completion, the question type will support a common word bank where the answers disappear as they are used or they may be used in more than one blank.

New Quizzes Outcomes in Learning Mastery Gradebook

Our Outcomes team is working on making results for New Quizzes with item and quiz level outcome alignments available in the Learning Mastery Gradebook and in admin-level outcomes .csv report exports that provide data on student mastery over all aligned assessments. Previously these results were only available for individual quizzes in the Outcomes Analysis report.