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In Part 1 we explored best practices, practical tips, and considerations for creating online assessments.  In this Part 2, we’re focusing on the assessment itself and the provisions that can be put in place to ensure that online assessments run smoothly. Consideration 1: Will Canvas be able to handle this? In short - yes!  Canvas can automatically scale to address increased needs imposed by COVID-19 and then again heightened by assessment periods, or indeed by any other situation that might require an increased use of the platform.  From more users, to more assessments, to more simultaneous access, Canvas will scale.  And we have.  In March 2020 alone, millions of users used Canvas around the world, we saw an 85% YOY increase in learners accessing the platform simultaneously, and through it all we maintained 99.9% uptime. For more information, and solid reassurance on how Canvas will scale, take a look at the following blogs that have been written throughout COVID-19. We’re All In This Together – Even If We Have to Be Apart, by Melissa Loble - Chief Customer Experience Officer EdTech Guide: Security, Scalability, and Support, by Hilary Sharton - VP of Strategy Our Commitment To You During Coronavirus, by Melissa Loble - Chief Customer Experience Officer   While Canvas has proved it is up to the task, technology is only as good as its users.  There are important steps we can all take to ensure that students, teachers, and everyone involved in the process are suitably prepared for a successful online assessment context. Proactive Support  Empower everyone involved in assessments by clearly communicating both the expectations and support options available to them.  Students need to know where to find their assessments, how to complete them, and what to do if they need support at any point of the assessment period.  Teachers need to know how to create assessments (if they are required to do so), as well as how they can access support with the transition to and management of online assessments.     Once you have decided on the workflows and resources you would like to provide for students and teachers on how they can gain support, communicate this clearly so that everyone is empowered with access to the correct, relevant information.  This could be achieved with a Global Announcement, differentiated by user so that Teachers and Students see the information that is pertinent to them on their Canvas Dashboard.  Additionally, customise the Help Menu to prioritise relevant assessment support available.       When considering support resources, make the most of existing resources to both provide and communicate these support options.  Use the existing Canvas Guides to provide students and teachers with ‘how-tos’ for completing assessment activities within Canvas.  These guides include screenshots alongside comprehensive, step-by-step instructions and best of all, we keep them up to date so that you can have complete confidence that they will always provide accurate information.     You may also have additional internal support resources such as student experience, learning support, or ICT department telephone or email addresses.  For Teachers who will be creating their own assessments, training provisions need to be considered so that Teachers are able to make informed decisions about how to use the available tools.   Taking proactive support measures empowers students and teachers with the information they need to achieve a successful assessment experience, and can minimise the need for reactive support at the time of assessment itself. Practice Makes Perfect! Provide students with the opportunity for a trial run.  If they will be taking a Quiz, create a practice Quiz and include different Question Types that will be used during the real assessment.  Questions could even be related to the process of how to complete the assessment, reinforcing understanding of the workflow. If students will be submitting an Assignment, create a test Assignment and ask students to practice accessing and submitting the Assignment.   Make these practice assessments available ahead of the real assessment, so that students have plenty of opportunity to ensure they know how to complete their assessment when the time comes. Consideration 2: Providing Time Parameters  All assessments require students to complete a given task within a certain time frame.  There are various ways to replicate this on Canvas depending on the type of time parameter required. Deadline for Submission  If you have a specific date and time that an assessment must be completed by, add this as the Due Date in any Assignment or Quiz.  Canvas will still accept submissions (for Assignments) and allow attempts (for Quizzes) after the due date, though they will be identified as late to both the student and the teacher.  Adding an Until Date can be a helpful way to replicate any existing policies you may have around late submissions (i.e. late submissions will be accepted for up to 1 week after the deadline with a penalty applied during the grading process).  The Until Date prevents Canvas from accepting any submissions or attempts after this date.     Timed Assessment For assessments that have specified start and end times (such as exams), there are two methods for facilitation in Canvas.  For exams using the Quiz tool, a time limit can be applied to each attempt.  For all Assignments, we can add an Available from date, which when used in combination with a due or until date creates a start and end time parameter around the assessment.  Keep in mind that setting an ‘Available From’ date will prevent students from accessing any information added to the RCE or settings applied to the Assignment.     There may be information about the assessment that you would like students to have access to ahead of the Availability Dates, such as what resources they might require or how long they will have to complete the assessment.  A great way to do this is using an Announcement.  Not only will this be easily accessible to students from within the Course, but it will also trigger a notification via their chosen notification preferences.  The release of the Announcement can also be coupled with a delayed posting, effectively providing a timed release of this assessment information.   Scheduled Release of Assessment(s) and/or Resources Where there are multiple pieces of assessment content that you would like to be released at a specific time, use the Lock Until feature within Modules to schedule the release.  This will allow students to see only the title for each piece of content before this time, providing them with the reassurance that they know where to find their assessment content as well as the exact time they will be made available to them.     This feature is useful particularly when there are multiple assessment points opening at the same time.  Do keep in mind that if you have added any Files within the Module or RCE that these could still be accessible from the Files tab if this is available to students within the Course.  Make sure to add availability dates to the files that match your assessment if this is the case. Consideration 3: Exam Integrity  As with all assessments, we want each student to make an authentic submission.  Canvas has partnerships with a variety of tools that can provide plagiarism checks and proctoring solutions.  Explore how many of our partners are here to support you through these extraordinary times, or talk to your Customer Success Manager for more information on appropriate solutions.  Meanwhile if you are delivering your assessment with a Quiz, take a look at this detailed resource exploring the variety of inbuilt settings available to maximise security.   As with in-person exams, occasionally situations may arise during the assessment where responsive action is required.  The Moderate the Quiz panel allows us to monitor student progress during the quiz, as well as give extra time or attempts to individual students should this be required in response to any given situation (perhaps the student had a connectivity issue for example).  We can even manually submit any outstanding attempts should students forget to do this, allowing the grading process to continue without delay.  Though if a time limit has been applied, Canvas will do this automatically once the set time has passed. Keep In Mind “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”   As educators, we are all too aware that even the most well planned in-person assessment can be impacted by unforeseen circumstances.  Adverse weather can lead to rescheduling, an on campus event can lead to a distracted cohort, or a forgotten resource can impact a students’ ability to access material.  Technology will never entirely remove the risk of unforeseen circumstances, but we can certainly make ourselves aware of the potential risk factors and mitigate them as best we can.   Will students have a device and sufficient internet access to enable them to access the assessment? Providing trial runs and practice assessments can help to spot these potential issues. What if something happens to a students’ device or internet connection during an assessment? In an in-person environment, a student would raise their hand to inform an invigilator - provide students with a suitable alternative workflow when they are working in a remote setting (refer to the Proactive Support section for ideas on how to communicate this with students) How will IT staff be able to support multiple teachers and assessments remotely if incidents occur? Consider staggering start times and deadlines to allow internal support to be available and responsive at these key crunch times if required. Just as you might have policies in place for how to respond to unforeseen circumstances in an in-person context, have policies ready for how you will respond with unforeseen circumstances in an online context.  Share these clearly with students, and as always apply them with parity as best as possible. Summary One of the best ways we can respond to change is to embrace it.  The current context is forcing us to adapt in many different ways, from how we shop for groceries to how we effectively provide opportunities for assessment.  Understanding the tools available to us can enable us to make informed decisions about how to best facilitate assessment within the new context that we find ourselves.  The method we use may have to change, but hopefully these blogs have given you ideas for how you can continue to achieve the intended end goal.   Contingency Planning Read More Contingency Planning Blogs ... View more

The end of the school year is in sight, we can almost see it, just beyond that final assessment period!  Amidst the current context of COVID-19, where we are utilising online tools to enable teaching and learning more than ever,  we may need to take a different route to get there to the one we had planned. The purpose of this blog is to support you with running online assessments in Canvas. In this Part 1 we’ll look at Creating the Assessment, and in the following Part 2 we’ll look at Facilitating the Assessment.   Wherever your starting point, from making a few adjustments to previous assessment periods, through to upscaling your entire assessment process to online for the first time, we hope this blog will provide you with helpful best practices, practical tips, and considerations to ensure your assessments run smoothly in Canvas.  Consideration 1: Ease of Access The workflow for students to access their assessments should be clear and easy.  We want students to be focusing on the assessment itself, and a logical navigation, simple presentation, and well chosen functionality is going to support this.  Navigation  Where will you place the assessments? One option could be to add them to a new Module, placing the assessments in the same Course as the teaching and learning occurred.  This could be further signposted by moving the Module to the top of the Module list, or even linked to within an Announcement (particularly useful when combined with the setting that shows recent Announcements in the Course Home Page).     Alternatively, you could create a new Course purely for assessments.  This could include only the assessments for a particular course, or if students are taking multiple Courses across the institution (for example as part of a larger programme of study), they could be coordinated into a singular assessment Course.  This could provide a secure assessment space for access to and storage of assessment artefacts (should that be required as per any existing policies).  Students would then navigate to the assessment Course from their Dashboard, and a Global Announcement could be used to signpost this workflow to all Students.   There are other important considerations beyond a streamlined workflow that should be taken into account when deciding on where to place your assessments: Consistency - if Students and Teachers are participating in multiple Courses, navigation to assessments should be consistent across these.   Communication - decide how will you let your Students (and Teachers / Graders) know where to find their assessments. Grading - ensuring those involved are able to access the assessments and complete their workflows. Existing Integrations - if you have any automations for creating assessments, enrolling users, or data extraction, these will of course need to be considered. Presentation As with all assessments, there will be information that you need to share with your students to ensure they are able to complete the assessment effectively.  If your students are going to need access to a resource during an assessment (for example a case study, an article, or a video demonstration), consider embedding this directly into the Rich Content Editor.  This allows the students to access all assessment content in one page, minimising navigation and allowing them to spend more of their time on the assessment itself over navigating between different items.     Rubrics provide an effective way to present your expectations for the assessment to students.  As well as supporting the grading process, Rubrics are visible to students as part of the Assignment or Quiz information both before and during the assessment.  This allows Rubrics to be used as an opportunity to present your expectations, guiding your students to meet the assessment criteria as best as they can before they submit the assessment.   Functionality Assignments and Quizzes are two tools with functionality that support assessments.  Choosing the appropriate tool and enabling the required functionality that best meets your needs is a key component of successful assessment preparation.  Canvas has the functionality, your responsibility as a teacher or decision maker is to choose the right tool and settings that provide the required opportunity, along with as clear and simple workflow for students as possible. This leads us on to Consideration 2... Consideration 2: Which Assessment Tool to Use? The primary assessment tools in Canvas are Assignments and Quizzes.  Assignments allow students to submit artefacts that teachers can then grade and give feedback on.  Quizzes allow students to answer questions, with the additional functionality of being able to automate the grading and feedback workflow.  With this baseline functionality, there are many ways that each tool can be utilised to provide agency for a variety of assessment formats. Assessments with specific File Types to Submit  Perhaps you want your students to submit a particular file type - a PDF, a Word document (doc, docx), or an Excel spreadsheet (xls, xlxs) for example. If so, have Canvas carry through this requirement for you.  By restricting the file upload type, students will only be able to upload the file types that you allow. Reinforcing your expectations while preventing your students from making accidental uploads of incorrect file types. Assessments with Multiple Artefacts to Submit  We may need to ask students to provide multiple artefacts as part of the same assessment.  For example, a Music student may need to submit an audio file along with a pdf of the score, a Business student may need to submit a portfolio of case studies, or an Apprentice may need to provide a combination of video and written evidence from a work placement.  There are different options to consider here to facilitate an assessment with multiple submissions required: An Assignment with an Online Submission via File Upload will allow Students to submit multiple files to a single Assignment.  This works well when video is not required as part of the submission.   When a variety of ‘Submission Types’ is required, the preferred workflow may be to Duplicate the Assignment.  Enabling the relevant Submission Type in each Assignment and using a clear naming convention will support your students to understand what is required for each Assignment.  This option may be preferred for assessments that require video as part of their submission, as the video can be embedded and therefore previewed in the SpeedGrader for ease of grading workflows. It can also allow for a different Rubric and/or grading schemes per submission, should that be of use in the grading process. Quizzes also can also be used to allow for submission of multiple artefacts.  Using a combination of Essay and File Upload question types, a question can be added for each artefact required.  This can provide a clear framework for students, and Quiz functionality such as adding a time limit to the attempt may be beneficial.  However, do consider the implication on the grading process, as the SpeedGrader has less functionality when Files are uploaded via a quiz. Assessments usually taken on Paper or presented to a Panel There are, and always will be, aspects of assessment that do not easily translate to an online format.  In Mathematics, the ‘workings out’ are often more important than the final answer itself.  For language, we need to assess the spoken as well as the written technique.  Or in Performing Arts, demonstrating a specific skill visually is often required.  For these cases, remember that Canvas can just as easily accept media submissions.  Using the ‘Text Entry’ submission method,  photographs, voice recordings, and videos can easily be submitted from the browser on a laptop or even the app on a mobile phone.   For assessments usually taken as a formal exam, there are many settings within Quizzes that can be used to manage the student experience.  In particular, you may wish to consider adding a time limit, multiple attempts, showing one question at a time, locking after answering, and when the students will be able to see the correct answers.     Consideration 3: Accommodations for Students  When conducting assessments there is often a need to differentiate the experience to make sure that all students have fair access.  For all assessments we can use the Assign To box to assign students with different availability dates, due dates, or different assignments entirely.  In Quizzes, we can also give additional time or attempts to individual students.  These accommodations should be set up before the assessments are accessible to students, to ensure that students are aware of the correct parameters pertaining to their own assessment experience. Practice Makes Perfect! One of my favourite tools in Canvas is the Student View as it allows us to view and experience our course as our students do.  In the case of assessments, this means that we can check the workflow for our students is logical, functional, and matches the intentions we had when we created the assessment.  Use the student view to test run your assessment, and remember there’s always the option to trial this in the test environment first if you’d prefer to keep content unpublished at this point.   These are just a few considerations and suggestions for Creating Assessments in Canvas.  Stay tuned for Part 2,  where we’ll take a look at Facilitating the Assessment.     For now, we’d love to hear from you - what are your thoughts about these suggestions? What are your tips for managing assessments in Canvas? ... View more

With the education landscape rapidly changing, many of us are exploring ways to enable online teaching and learning opportunities to an increasing cohort of students.  This blog will explore best practices to consider when teaching large Courses within Canvas. Sections  Sections are a great way to subdivide students within a Course.  Using sections can enable easier facilitation of teaching, communication, and grading processes, as well as the opportunity to provide differentiated content and due dates for students.  Assignments, Quizzes and Graded Discussions When creating Assignments, Quizzes or Graded Discussions, they can be assigned to a specific section so that only students in that section will be able to access the activity.  This can be a great way to provide differentiated learning activities should you choose to create sections based on student ability.  It is also possible to set an activity for the entire Course, but with different availability and due dates for different sections - a great solution when sections are created for students who usually have class at different times.  Keep in mind that students will only see the dates that you have set for them, so they will not know that other students in the course may have different due dates. How do I assign an assignment to a course section?  How do I assign a quiz to a course section?  How do I assign a graded discussion to a course section? Announcements  Announcements are a simple way to provide targeted communication to specific sections, meaning students will only receive the information that is relevant to them. Using the ‘Post to’ box, Announcements can be sent to individual or multiple sections.  Combining this with the ‘Delay posting’ option and links to relevant Course content can be another way to streamline admin time, with the added benefit of supporting students to engage with course content. How do I add an announcement in a course? How do I delay posting an announcement until a specific date in a course? How do I insert links to course content? Gradebook and Speedgrader  Using sections as a filter in the Gradebook can allow teachers to more easily monitor student engagement and progress within an individual section. Filtering by Section within the Speedgrader can be another way to streamline the grading process by completing grading one section at a time.  If you have multiple graders within a Course, consider creating Sections based on grader allocation again for ease of filtering. How do I filter columns and rows in the Gradebook? How do I sort the student list [by section] in SpeedGrader? How do I enable SpeedGrader to launch filtered by student group? Creating Sections It is possible for teachers to create sections and enroll students to those sections within Courses.  However for large Courses, using a SIS import for section creation and enrollment is a far more time efficient workflow.  Reach out to your institutions Canvas Admin to action this, and the below guides provide further detail on how to create sections via either of these methods: How do I add a section to a course as an instructor? How do I edit sections for an enrollment in a course? How do I import SIS data to a Canvas account? How do I format CSV text files for uploading SIS data into a Canvas account?   A few additional considerations for sections: Students can see the name of their section - keep this in mind when choosing a naming convention There is the option to limit users to only interact with other users in the same section - this can be helpful for restricting student interaction, and for assigning markers to sections Sections can be given start and end dates that override Course dates - very useful if using sections to allow for different cohorts to start the Course at different times Groups Groups provide collaboration opportunities for students to work together.  In large Courses, Groups can provide students with a smaller circle of peers to interact with, which may be more engaging and manageable than interaction across the entire cohort. Group Area  Groups are given sub areas within the Course, where students have space to independently interact with each other.  In Groups, students can facilitate their own Discussions, create content with Pages and Collaborations, share resources with Files, communicate with Announcements, submit Group Assignments, and even host online meetings with Conferences.  Groups can therefore be an efficient way to allow for peer-to-peer interaction, as well as student-led learning, even within large Courses. Group Discussions Another way to facilitate interaction is to use the Group Discussion tool. With just one additional click, teachers can create identical Discussion topics for each group of students.  When students reply to the Discussion, they do so within their Group environment, allowing simultaneous Discussions on the same topic to be held across all Groups. Creating Groups There are many options for creating Groups depending on your teaching preference - allowing students to create their own groups, to self sign-up, asking Canvas to automatically create Groups, or manually assigning Groups as the teacher.  Full guides on these different options can be found in the links below, however there are a two key things to consider with this process: For students to be able to sign up to or create their own Groups, they need to be able to access the People tab in the navigation menu of your Course.  If you would like to allow self sign up, make sure the People tab is visible - it can be adjusted in the Navigation menu of the Course Settings. Placing students into a Group adds a tab to the Global Navigation Menu, allowing them to navigate Groups without needing to be in the Course first.  Using a naming convention that identifies the Group as belonging to a specific Course will make it a lot easier (and more likely!) for your students to navigate in to.   How do I create Group Discussions? Guides on how to create Groups for teachers Guides on how to use Groups as students Large Courses Considerations Canvas courses are optimised for 3,000 - 5,000 enrollments, and will remain performant with these numbers.  As will all online tools, there are implications to be aware of when dealing with larger volumes, particularly with regards to load times and navigation.  It is important to be aware of this, and really consider whether reaching the upper limits of student numbers is necessary in your context, or if other solutions could be found.  Areas in particular to be aware of include: Gradebook - using Sections, Modules, or Groups as filters will help   Discussions - navigation can become suboptimal when thousands of topics are in use, though the search and sort options can be of assistance here Analytics - large student numbers will extend load times, but only up to a minute so hang in there! These are just a few suggestions of best practices for facilitating manageable teaching and engaging learning opportunities within large Courses. We’d love to hear from you - what are your thoughts about these ideas? What are your tips for managing large Courses? ... View more