Canvas Outcomes and New Quizzes: Part 1

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BenFriedman
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
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Recently, I’ve heard from a few Canvas users that they’d like to learn more about how Outcomes works with New Quizzes. This has gotten extra attention lately with the eventual sunsetting of Classic Quizzes (also see here for our transition toolkit). For this reason, I’d like to spotlight some of the cool capabilities that currently exist while also sharing some work our development team is doing to make Outcomes and New Quizzes even better. To that point, I’m excited to share that we’ve started the work necessary to connect New Quizzes that have Outcome alignments to the Learning Mastery Gradebook and Outcomes Admin level exports like the Outcome Results report. Stay tuned for more information about when this longstanding request will be available. If you are from a K12 school district implementing standards-based grading, also check out information on the Canvas/Mastery Connect integration

For this post, I’d like to highlight the flexibility for aligning Outcomes within New Quizzes. For beginners out there Outcomes are knowledge or skills that students should be able to demonstrate mastery of in a module, course, or program. Determining outcomes (sometimes known as learning objectives, standards, or competencies) that are important for students to master within an education program or course is an important first step in learning design. An “alignment” functions as a tag - connecting the assessment content (in Canvas a quiz or assignment rubric) to the Outcome so that teachers can see which students have reached mastery and which students need additional support. In Classic Quizzes, many outcome alignments are made within Question Banks but this capability does not exist in New Quizzes - instead, there are three alignment types possible. 

First, as in Classic Quizzes, an entire quiz can be aligned through a rubric. This is a good fit for cases where the entire quiz assesses a single or a few outcomes and the teacher or instructor wants the ability to manually provide a mastery level through Speedgrader. This has the added benefit of being reported in the Learning Mastery Gradebook currently (while the other types do not, we’re doing the work to facilitate this as mentioned above). 

The second type of alignment is to individual New Quiz items. This is great when single or multiple questions on a quiz assess the same outcome while others do not. A set of items with Outcome alignments can be pulled from an item bank as needed but this is not required. Outcome results are auto-graded and reported in the New Quiz Outcome Analysis report. 

The third type of alignment is for a quiz overall. This is a great fit for when the whole quiz assesses the same outcome or outcomes (similar to rubrics) but when auto-grading is a better fit. Results for this alignment are reported in the New Quiz Outcome Analysis report

I’ll be back soon with a follow-up blog on how scoring and reporting works for Outcomes and New Quizzes. Hope you are looking forward to it!

 

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The content in this blog is over six months old, and the comments are closed. For the most recent product updates and discussions, you're encouraged to explore newer posts from Instructure's Product Managers.

6 Comments
amyslack
Community Participant

Really excited to see improvements and advancements in this area. I really want to encourage more of my faculty to use outcomes and more of a mastery based approach to teaching and learning. I am hopeful that this will make things easier. The current outcomes reports at the end of a New Quiz is great but I really look forward to it integrating into the Learning Mastery Gradebook. I also really hope this means we will be able to download these results, its often helpful to be provided as a part of reports for accreditation purposes so downloading is essential. Also being able to pull reports at the account level will be fantastic since it will give us the ability to see a whole program! So excited for this! Thank you for all you hard work in this, it is greatly appreciated!

110773282624449
Community Member

Do we have an anticipated date for when this alignment of Outcomes to the Learning Mastery Gradebook will happen?

ritaw
Community Explorer

New Quizzes has the ability to align Institution Outcomes to a single question, but there is no column on the Outcome Results report for this alignment.  We have no idea how our students are doing on these outcomes and a big part of our assessment is missing.  I suggest to have these outcomes appear on that report or have a student by student, and question breakdown in the Outcomes Analysis page in the course.  Or both!

tonyafa
Community Participant

I agree with Rita!  Improvements need to be made so Rubrics and Outcomes work better with New Quizzes.

ShannonBerry
Community Member

I'm so glad that we'll be able to connect learning outcomes from new quizzes to the learning mastery gradebook. I had stopped using Canvas quizzes (new or old) altogether because the learning mastery gradebook is my main gradebook and how I calculate student grades, so I need to be able to intergrate quizzes into it.  I really hope that this integration will be rolled out before the coming academic year (22-23) so that I can return to using new quizzes as I much prefer them and the self-grading feature to paper quizzes. Do we have any idea when we'll see this integration go live?

BenFriedman
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Author

@110773282624449@ShannonBerry - we are currently in development and making progress everyday! I will be sure to add updates in the comments to this blog post and stay tuned to Canvas release notes. 

@tonyafa @ritaw @amyslack We are making updates to the Outcomes Results admin level .csv export report in addition to sending New Quizzes data to the Learning Mastery Gradebook. We're excited about providing better data availability for program assessment and continuous improvement efforts.