NextGen Question Types

[amyslack]

I want to ask that the New Quizzes group explore some of the NextGen Question types that are coming down the pipeline for Nursing Programs. While I completely understand that the New Quizzes team is super busy - and I am seeing a lot of great work and improvements with New Quizzes I do think that New Quizzes really needs to stay ahead of the curve and to do that we need to see New Quizzes offer the most cutting edge question types that really push our assessments to really dig deeper into student learning. While I currently work at an institution that is Healthcare focused and these question types are specific to Nursing I do think these question types can benefit all levels of teaching (k-12 and higher ed, I formerly teach high school chemistry and have plenty of teacher friends at all levels of education and I can see these question types being used to better assess student learning at all levels). 

Question Types I am proposing: 

• Multiselect Gridded Response - creating a table with rows and columns where within each cell there is the option for either radio buttons or checkboxes for a student to check off items 
• Drag and Drop to an image for labelling (being able to drag and drop more than one item ideally) 
• Being about to have students interact with text in a stimulus - like click to highlight the main idea - allow the reading to be tokenized so that if a student clicks anywhere within a sentence it would select that whole sentence or tokenized phrase. 

For reference I am attaching the two pdfs about the Nursing NCLEX that is being updated soon that talks about some of these NextGen question types. And again while I completely understand Canvas as a very large userbase - I do think these are question types that would benefit more than just the Nursing programs since they questions types would allow for more robust assessments that could potentially test higher order critical thinking skills for students at all levels.  

[cvalle]

I am a math teacher and would definitely use the first two options listed. I would also request that for the gridded response that one of the options be “numeric” so a student can complete a numeric table.

[amyslack]

I agree! That would be a great idea for the gridded response, as a former Chemistry teacher, I could see how a gridded table where a student could input numeric answers would be amazing! 

[lettgo583]

Hi Amy, That is a great suggestion! We're having to look outside of Canvas for our exam needs, in order to prepare students sufficiently. By the way, is your university using Outcomes for implementing the AACN Essentials? We're getting started on that here ...   -- Linda Haynes 

[amyslack]

Thanks @lettgo583 ! We have started working on using Outcomes and trying to find ways to use New Quizzes to meet what we can but yes I am afraid we will have to look outside of Canvas but I am still really hoping New Quizzes will create new question types that will meet our needs!! I truly can see the value in these question types extending to all educators to help our students be assessed at higher levels so we can actually assess deeper learning. I think 

[lettgo583]

Hi Amy, I was wondering ... How far have you gotten on using Outcomes in Canvas? We're in the eval process and looking for examples that can help us decide how to proceed before diving in! 🙂  Any thoughts or words of wisdom you can share? -- Linda 

[amyslack]

Well... we are still in progress. 

With New Quizzes and outcomes being quite strange - like they don't populate in the learning mastery gradebook. We are having to align outcomes to each assessment manually the first time and then can only see an outcomes report for each assessment - not overall course or even account level which is what we really need. I also still need to test it but I think if you have added questions to item banks them those outcomes won't show in the report either - I am hoping I am wrong about this since some of my instructors built everything into Item Banks but I think I read this somewhere and if true is very frustrating!

We have created our outcomes at the root account level though so importing those into courses is easy. I built those institution wide using the example CSV that is provided - it took a few times practicing in our test instance in order to figure out how to nest folders into folders but I was able to get all of our program outcomes created within a day or two so that was a big win. Just hoping New Quizzes will work with the Learning Mastery Gradebook ASAP and also hoping eventually that aligned outcomes will have account level reporting eventually. 

For my instructors still on Classic quizzes many of them are not willing to reorganize all their question banks to align to outcomes so many of those courses are doing tracking manually 😞 They have most of their question banks set as Test 1, Test 2, Test 3, etc. Not question bank for each outcome soo they are not willing to deal with reorganizing all of those and I get it - that interface is not the most user friendly plus they want to be able to align question by question and they want to align multiple outcomes to each question (Blooms, Program Outcome, College Outcome, and Course level outcome) so the classic quiz way of doing it does not really meet their needs but many of them are worried about moving to New Quizzes since there seem to be quite a few concerning quirks still (like now being able to download the data as as csv in New Quizzes, this is a huge limitation). 

So my answer is.... its complicated and a work in progress as we wait on the New Quiz team to get farther in outcomes working better with New Quizzes. Wish I had better answers for you! If you have any specific questions/concerns, I am happy to do my best to answer them 🙂 

[lettgo583]

Hi Amy,

Did you create Canvas outcomes for the ACCN New Essentials? We're trying to determine the fewest, yet most useful, levels to set. 

[amyslack]

We have not created those yet, we are still exploring the best way to create some of these question types. We had to migrate our older exams from Examsoft into Canvas - its a very manual process. Now that we are finishing that project us I expect my nursing faculty to begin thinking about this next step for sure! I am kind of holding out for a bit hoping to see New Quizzes integrate with the Learning Mastery Gradebook and allow reports to be downloadable as a CSV first though so I am not super rushing them yet, more focusing on letting them get comfortable with New Quizzes first. 🙂

[talway]

Hello,

I realize that some time has past since your initial post.  However, I was wondering if you could share what programs/applications you are looking at outside of Canvas for your NCLEX exams.  We have evaluated ExamSoft.  I am looking for others to evaluate. 

Thank you.