Modules Support Adding New Quizzes & Release Timing

[SuSorensen]

TL:DR 

New features coming to Beta on February 22nd Production release date March 21st  will enable better workflow for Modules using New Quizzes. 

Problems identified through our discovery conversations with Admins and Educators:

1. Can’t create a New Quiz from Modules - addressed
2. Quizzes co-mingled with Assignments - addressed
3. Navigation in Canvas eco-system causes confusion and needs consistency - partially addressed

Can’t create a New Quiz from Modules/ Quizzes co-mingled with Assignments 

New Quiz can be initiated directly from the Modules page. When you Add Item, all quizzes, both Classic and New Quizzes are now located under the Quiz association. No more hunting for New Quizzes under the Assignments association! Another little bit of clarity we’ve added here in the Modules Add Items is a small tweak of terminology. You’ll notice that the language to add a quiz which doesn’t exist yet has historically been “New Quiz.” This has been updated to reduce confusion. All Add Item association types from the Modules will now display as create instead of new;  ex: “Create Quiz, Create Assignment.” 

If you have previously set the default for either New Quiz or Classic Quiz, the quiz automatically will be created accordingly. If you have not yet chosen a default, a prompt will display and you will indicate the type of quiz you want to be created. That quiz name will then be added to the Modules! 

Navigation in Canvas eco-system causes confusion and needs consistency (partially addressed)

To begin creating content for your quiz, select the quiz name that was just added to the Module. You will be transported to the Assignment Details where it is possible to choose initial Quiz settings. We heard a lot of feedback that you revisit this page when it is time to make the quiz available, but that it is hard for teachers to find it after initial setup. Therefore, we’re changing the workflow process. *Subsequent clicks on a new quiz name will always navigate to the Assignment Details page.* 

During those interviews in December I uncovered something, which will be of no surprise to you, New Quizzes does not have a Previous or Next button to progress the user through the Module. This causes immense pain, particularly for your Quiz takers. We don’t want anyone to think that they are done with a Module when they are not. This particular problem exists for all LTIs working with Canvas and so I will pair with a counterpart in Canvas to begin a discovery around how we can resolve universally. I hear that this is a big concern for you, so I will definitely keep you posted. 

I want to know how this new workflow is, well, working for you! It would be great to hear feedback from you in this thread. However, if you have a couple of minutes (~15) to chat with our team, that would be even better! Just add a note below to let me know your institution and we’ll follow up. 

[chriscas]

Fantastic news, thanks for keeping the community updated, @SuSorensen .  I hope this is just one of many updates that are coming soon for New Quizzes.

-Chris

[hillarykolodner]

Hi @SuSorensen- thank you for this update. To clarify, will the module progression issue also be resolved in this Feb 22nd update? We already built dozens of new quizzes for a course that will be enrolling many users tomorrow and need to decide if we should convert back to classic quizzes or wait it out until the progression issue is resolved. Because there is currently no "next" button, our students are very confused about if they have finished the module and needing to scroll to find their place. Eager to hear when this will be updated and appreciate the improvements! 

[MattHanes]

The Muscogee County School District is always happy to talk to the product managers. Sign me up!

[BethCrook]

This is a great step forward!  Thank you @SuSorensen!!  Now, on the student side, when they submit the Quiz, will they have the Next button to continue to the next item within the Module?  (that's key also 😉)

Now running off to share with some #CanvasFam who are going to be thrilled to hear about this!

[SuSorensen]

@hillarykolodner and @BethCrook The Module Previous/Next progression is unfortunately not designed or developed yet. That is the unresolved piece from part 3 of the pain points. I will be working with another Canvas PM to determine what it will take to make sure the experience is the same with all LTIs and moving between all the types in Modules. Sorry it isn't possible to have completed yet, but I do appreciate the pain and sense of urgency. I'll keep the lines of communication open and post an update when I know more. 

[BethCrook]

@SuSorensen I appreciate the transparency!

[l_lucas]

@SuSorensen  - great to hear this is progressing - and great to hear that 'back' and 'next' buttons are coming for navigation.

This single factor has made new quizzes a non-starter for our organisation from day one. We are a Australian Medical College and have many self directed courses hosted on Canvas - and to have our busy doctors thrown out of the flow of their learning every time they complete a quiz is a non-starter for us.

We already have other LTI's that work in Canvas with 'Back' and 'Next' buttons including Collaborate and H5P (in fact H5P can appear 'inline' with content on a page) and it would be nice if new Quizzes worked the same.

I have posted about this more than once before - and would be happy to talk to Canvas about it in more detail if there was an opportunity.

lex

[mwhite3]

I just wished the RCE of new quizzes was the same as the rest of Canvas. Not being able to see HTML side of a question, lack of 3rd party LTI integration, and even the lack of different font options in New Quizzes just takes the shine away from a nice new product.

[mwhite3]

Oh three other items on my New Quizzes wishlist.

1 - Stimulus along with their associated questions should be able to be placed into an Item back as a single group. It is pointless to have a stimulus added to an item bank and then have to search for individual questions. This also means that you can have a pool of different Stimulus and their associated questions from which you could randomly pull into an exam.

2 - There is currently no way to export New Quizzes as QTI files, which makes it very difficult to create Word doc versions of the quiz for accommodations issues. Currently, we use Respondus to pull in a Classic Quiz QTI file and then have it make a Word doc version of the quiz complete with answer key. This is not possible with New Quizzes. 

3 - While I'm talking/writing about item banks - there should be an easier way to multiple select questions and assign then to items banks, current system one question at a time is just too burdensome to do with large exams.

Ok - I think that's all I wanted to get off my chest this morning - thanks for the space.😊

[petern]

This is excellent news

If you click on the quiz from assignments, quizzes or modules you go directly into the LTI where you can edit the quiz questions and basic settings but couldn't do things like change the due date of the quiz. The only way to change a due date for a quiz was to find the quiz in assignments, click the small dropdown menu and click edit. This change is hugely appreciated.  Thanks for taking the time to do this.

I agree with @l_lucas regarding H5P.  Their inline questions are fantastic and feel like a natural part of the content on a page.  Which leads me to an artificial barrier with the new quizzes.   The interface looks like you're leaving Canvas.  It would be improved in the left course menu and top course breadcrumb was still present

Lastly, and sorry for the moan, but it would be nice to have an improvement to the matching question type.  I don't believe it acts intuitively. It currently presents a drop-down list of answers for each item. Most instructors would expect each item on the left to match once (and maybe some distractors).  This question type could be improved by having a click and drag interface where the answers are picked from a pool of options.  This would be similar to the word bank feature that is implemented in the fill-in-the-blank question type.

[SuSorensen]

Thank you all for the feedback!

@l_lucas , I really appreciate the specific example of LTI use with Previous/ Next. 

Integrating the new RCE will come this year. Planned Priorities and Roadmap 2021.

[Steven_S]

Fixing the starting page to point to the due date page will be a huge improvement!  I am happy to hear that the students will be getting their previous and next buttons back, eventually.  I understand that is an issue for all LTIs that will take some time, but maybe in the meantime new quizzes could add a "return to your course" button that returns students to the modules page, if not the very next activity on the modules page.  Maybe an option next to where students are prompted to check their scores, and also prominently displayed on the score page?

Also, on the subject of displaying student scores, it would be especially helpful to find a way to obscure scores that require manual grading.  For example essay questions, and true fill-in-the-blank that are autograded as wrong answers (not the drop downs or word banks but the questions where students need to type a response).  Those are questions faculty need to check manually, and so the student's scores may not be correct. Seeing those incorrect scores alarms students, unnecessarily. 

In a related topic, a remaining navigation issue for faculty is identifying when a new manually graded submission has been received.  The canvas gradebook and speegrader both have mechanisms for labeling what "needs grading," but new quizzes only transmits scores calculated with zeros for the manually graded questions.  If instead, new quizzes could transmit the symbol canvas recognizes as code for "needs grading," the gradebook (and probably to-do list) should do the rest.  Displaying the "needs grading" indicator to students instead of a premature (and artificially low) score on the student results page would work well too, and so one solution could possibly solve both problems. 

[l_lucas]

Thanks for the acknowledgement @SuSorensen 

Our learners are mostly time poor self directed learners - who want to logically work their way through a learning experience. Getting thrown back to the assignment page - or the module page - is poor usability for the learner - and therefore makes new quizzes a non-starter for our context.

There are some attractive quiz options in the new quiz engine that would be attractive to us - but until the navigation can be fixed (or at least made as good as other LTI's) - then it is a complete non-starter for us.

[tross]

I agree with those that say Build will be a confusing term and Edit makes more sense.   I also agree that Save should always work the same and not have different actions because it is a quiz.

Finally, we would told that mid-release deploys were for items that did not impact users.  This is a big impact to users in a very busy time at least for US schools.   This has been such a stressful year for teachers and adding anything that is more stress right before finals is a bad idea.  We honestly would prefer it not change until June but definitely don't just drop it in when we don't know it is coming.

[BethCrook]

My faculty and I have been stumped for days trying to figure out how to edit questions in New Quizzes! Time wasted. How were we supposed to know to click Save to get to the questions?  Sorry, if I'm coming across as frustrated right now, but well...

[SuSorensen]

@BethCrook I absolutely get the frustration! Timing Feedback Needed NQ Instructor Workflow Changes forAction discusses how this pain point came to be and our desire to fix ASAP. 

I know that generally we don't want changes in the middle of exam periods. However, because of what you said above, an intervention now is actually more of a bug fix. I'm able to track user progression in a disambiguated way, and see only about 20% of users making it through the funnel to editing quiz questions. Because of this, we will push the fix to production with the next deploy canvas deploy in April .

[SuSorensen]

Hello all,

Happy Summer!

A quick update here; the workflow problems caused by the lack of Previous/Next buttons will be addressed in the July Release. Students working from within a module will be taken to the activity preceding or after a New Quiz. 

 Canvas Release Notes (2021-07-17)