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Earlier today, Susan Sorensen shared this post about our plans to extend the transition of Classic Quizzes providing users the option to use Classic Quizzes until June 30, 2024 .  I’m grateful for your continued partnership and feedback that you, our users, provide as we navigate the transition from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes. It’s probably important that I emphasize and reaffirm that this extension does not impact our planned delivery of New Quizzes. We are committed to keeping our “foot on the gas” to improve New Quizzes, but we want to ensure you have time and tools to manage the transition from Classic to New Quizzes in ways that better serve your students and instructors.  I also want to share a bit more about the decisions we made in the past in regards to New Quizzes functionality and timelines. One question that we often hear is “Why LTI?”. Our greatest goal in creating a robust assessment tool was to ensure a scalable and reliable experience. We made a decision to optimize for scale and availability first by creating New Quizzes as an independent service, outside of the “monolithic” Canvas code base. Institutions using New Quizzes for very large assessments have attested to its reliability. This said, we also recognize that this approach has created a user experience that needs to be much better. The flow back and forth between New Quizzes and Canvas must be, and will be, better. This is one aspect of keeping the foot on the gas. We know that the road to New Quizzes has been challenging and the circumstances of the last two years have not helped to make things easier. We have tried to do our best balancing many needs as we have assigned folks on Canvas to work on supporting all our customers during a time of rapid change. The feedback you’ve provided, and analysis we’ve done on the history of Classic Quizzes support and New Quizzes development are informing changes that will do two things–(1) fully deliver on promised functionality and (2) provide time and controls for institutions to transition in ways that are more comfortable.  Thank you. Thank you for bringing your expertise, your perspectives and your best selves to this collaboration. We are committed to doing the same. Serving the world’s instructional faculty and world’s students is the great privilege of my career. I am looking forward to amazing things for all of us in 2022 and beyond. Keep Learning ... View more

On this 55th World Teachers Day, I want to say thank you to all the teachers, instructors, faculty, educators who have, and are, making a difference in the world. Last year I spoke at InstructureCon Online about educators who shaped my own life. I will never be able to look back on the years of my formal education without a profound sense of indebtedness to those who helped me become a better citizen of our global community. Here I want to especially thank all of you who are teaching now. Thank you. My own family are the beneficiaries of teachers from elementary school through higher education. My children are challenged and nurtured by amazing teachers in their schools. In challenging times, I know the people I love the most are blessed by caring, expert educators. I am so deeply grateful for the teachers who bless those I love, and to all teachers who are empowering current learners everywhere. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ... View more

A few years ago, a colleague and I were brainstorming how we could help the product we owned be more innovative. At one point, she said that we were going to have to cut the lines to some of the bodankers in the product. The term “bodanker” was not one that I’d heard before. I was confident that it wasn’t a new software engineering term. I knew our product well enough to know that “bodanker” wasn’t a descriptor of anything in the code. I deduced that it must be some sort of colloquialism, and from the context, I interpreted it to mean something that gets in the way of progress. After she finished articulating her line of thinking, I said, “Before we carry on, I want to make sure I understand something particular you talked about. I’ve never heard the term bodanker. What does that mean?” She looked at me, a bit confused and responded that she had no idea what I was talking about. I recounted that she said we were going to have to cut the lines on many of the bodankers, which I interpreted to mean things that were holding us back from innovating. I felt more than a little sheepish when she laughed and laughed, saying, “I said ‘boat anchor’! Y’know, like an anchor...on a boat!” I still think that bodanker is a much more evocative turn of phrase. And it’s funner to say — bodanker. But for the purposes of thinking about creating innovative products, botanical gardens could be a much more instructive analogy than boat anchors. Image credit Shaun Moon Gardens have many of the same characteristics of software products. I want to focus on just two of those here: Gardens typically require gardeners to care for them. Gardens typically have boundaries. Gardeners Botanical gardens need gardeners to take care of them. “Taking care” of a garden can include obvious things, like removing unwanted plants, sowing seeds and setting bulbs, thinning out garden beds when appropriate, pruning trees and shrubs. Taking care may require building of infrastructure—for watering, for retaining soil, for helping people move through the garden. Boundaries Gardeners are constrained by boundaries around a garden. They also constrain themselves through the layout of boundaries within a garden. Because of boundaries, gardeners have to make trade-offs when evaluating how much to change a garden. If a gardener has a goal to help visitors learn about plants native to the area, they might explore the costs required to enlarge the garden's total footprint. They might look to wholly rearrange some parts of the garden by moving garden beds and moving plants from one section to another. Gardeners AND Boundaries When a garden changes, either by expanding the area that is cared for and cultivated, or by rearranging the boundaries of areas and planting beds within the existing garden space, or by changing plants are contained within which areas, gardeners will have to learn new techniques, or hire expertise (temporarily or permanently) in order to make desired changes AND to then care for the “new” garden in new ways. Software Products We are always looking for ways to make the Instructure garden better. However, “better” can’t always be bigger. We cannot always be adding more capability because for every feature, service and component, we need people to ensure its security, scalability and utility. The more features, services and components we have, the more capacity we must give, as a whole, to maintenance--to making sure our garden is well tended. In order to be able to appropriately maintain and innovate, sometimes we have to rearrange the “garden beds” of our products. And sometimes we will make decisions to remove features of the current garden in order to accommodate new elements that can provide more value to more students, more instructors, more leaders. We are committed to making a better garden for the whole Instructure community, which is going to mean that the products in 2023 and 2025 and 2030 are not going to do the same things they do in 2021. In the coming months and years we will be doing a lot of planting and as well as some pruning throughout our products. Canvas in 2023 will not be Canvas from 2021 with more stuff. It will not be “parity plus more stuff”. I recognize that “pruning” will not be welcomed by all. Invariably, Product leaders will make some decisions to remove capabilities and features that some of you use regularly. We will do our best to make things go as smoothly as we can, balancing many considerations. We are invested in the future of teaching and learning and we will always strive to deliver products that support and inform an evolution toward better learning outcomes for all. If you have questions or comments about principles or pragmatic considerations that inform product decisions related to “parity or not parity,” please feel free to engage in the comments section below. I’ll ask that you hold feature-specific questions such as, “Will feature ‘A’ ever be ‘pruned’ from a product?” for discussion in posts related to that particular feature and product. ... View more

We always strive to release defect-free, robust software. I wanted to share some practices and principles that we strive for as we design, develop, and deliver Canvas with an eye on quality.   Following are some of the key aspects of our efforts to release quality software. Manual testing, where people on the product team work through workflows and tasks in a candidate release. There can be different areas of focus for manual testing, such as exploratory/ad hoc testing and accessibility testing. Automated testing approaches and tools: Unit tests (individual blocks/sub-processes of code), Integration tests (holistic testing across code components and infrastructure), User interface tests (verifying that a person’s experience of using the product is as expected). Performance testing around scalability and speed. This is often done through a combination of human-in-the-loop testing approaches and automation. Load testing is a facet of performance testing.   Another practice that helps maintain quality is to release smaller changes. Bigger changes are more likely to create problems for two reasons: (1) they tend to be more complex in and of themselves and (2) they tend to affect or interface with more parts of the system. Both of these factors making testing more and more difficult. Working iteratively and releasing things as we go can significantly reduce the introduction of new issues as well as the effort required to increase confidence in quality.    There is another benefit to frequent, smaller releases, which is that individuals and teams get better at things that they do frequently. With good quality assurance principles, processes and tools, teams that release more often will get better at pre-release testing and will release better quality code.   Even with these frameworks and practices in place, we don’t catch every defect. When that happens, we make very quick decisions about whether to rollback a release or try to quickly address those issues. Making that decision depends most crucially on (1) the level of impact to customers and (2) our projected times for addressing issues. We are committed to improving your experience with Canvas, including the release process. We know that pre-release quality is a huge factor in this experience. We are going to continue to work on ways to make this happen, including refining and maturing current pre-release and post-release practices. ... View more

[UPDATE 2020-09-20] Because of challenges from COVID-19, the timeline presented in this post has been affected. For the most current information, please reference New Quizzes Users Group. For quite some time now, teams at Instructure have been working on a more scalable, robust, accessible quizzing engine for Canvas. Sixteen months from now, in July 2021, New Quizzes is going to be the out-of-the-box tool for Canvas assessments.   Transition Timeline The transition from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes is a big milestone in the evolution of quizzing in Canvas. I’d like to highlight other significant dates that are part of this process.   December 2020: Quizzes Cross-fade This December is an inflection point in the “cross-fade” period where New Quizzes and Classic Quizzes live side by side. December will see two important events: Content migration capabilities will be available for Course Copy and Course Content Import. I’ll share more details about this functionality later in this post. New Quizzes will be enabled for all courses in all Canvas accounts. The cross-fade period will help customers ease into the July 2021 milestone instead of everyone having to “forklift” quizzing activities from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes in one fell swoop.   February 2021: Classic Quizzes Deprecation In February of next year, Classic Quizzes will officially be deprecated. You can learn more about  deprecation in our Upcoming Canvas Changes document.   July 2021: No Student Submissions, etc. July 2021 is the fulcrum on which this whole plan pivots. This milestone of Classic Quizzes Sunset affects creating, attempting, and submitting Classic quizzes. Students will not be able to attempt or submit with Classic Quizzes. Instructors will not be able to create with Classic Quizzes. Classic Quizzes APIs for creating, attempting, and submitting will be disabled at this time. This milestone means that beginning July 2021, New Quizzes will be the only out-of-the-box assessment engine that can collect student submission.   October 2021: No Content Editing In the three months after New Quizzes takes the reins from Classic Quizzes, instructors will be still be able to edit Classic quizzes and question banks. While the same content could be migrated to New Quizzes and then edited, we wanted to provide a window where instructors and staff could make adjustments in Classic Quizzes before migrating the content. Classic Quizzes editing will be disabled October 2021. From October 2021 until the next milestone, Classic Quizzes content and information will be read-only in Canvas.   July 2022: UI End-of-life July 2022 marks the end-of-life for Classic Quizzes user interfaces. At this point, instructors will no longer be able to view quizzes or question banks authored and delivered with Classic Quizzes. Student data will still be presented in the Gradebook.   July 2026: API End-of-life July 2026 is the last milestone in Classic Quizzes Sunset. Five years after New Quizzes becomes the assessment engine for Canvas, Classic Quizzes APIs will be unpublished. Please note that Classic Quizzes Sunset does not change current data storage policies or procedures. End-of-life for the user interfaces and APIs changes modes of access, but they do not change storage and archival. The above timeline is fundamental to our plan for the future of quizzes in Canvas. There are two other cornerstones for our work—content migration tooling and development of critical capability for New Quizzes.   Content Migration Tooling Content migration is crucial for the transition from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes. You must be able to carry your institution’s quizzing content into the future. We are working on a very elegant workflow that seamlessly augments existing activities. When instructors and staff create and prepare courses, they will have an option to import assessment content as New Quizzes. This option will appear in the Course Copy and course Content Import screens. With this option, administrators and teachers don’t have to learn how to use any new tools or screens. They can simply check a box to add quizzes, banks and outcomes to the course as New Quizzes content.    Development of Critical Capabilities We know there are many high-impact improvements that could be made to New Quizzes. We’ve had to be extremely focused when prioritizing work to be completed before July 2021. Plans are, of course, subject to change based on work of other teams and evolving information, but here are some details about what we’re working on in this space. We are in the final stages of work on a partial-scoring option for multiple answer questions. We’re also in the process of validating Respondus Lockdown Browser support and expect that to be available in a few months. As these efforts are nearing completion, we’ve started to ramp up work to improve the liquidity of New Quizzes data. This will include integration with Canvas Data Access and the Learning Mastery Gradebook.   --- There’s a lot going on over the coming months and there will likely be no shortage of questions and feedback. I hope this information can provide some structure for the conversations to come. The New Quizzes User Group will be a great place to keep the conversation going. Please feel free to ask additional questions in the group, and my team and I will be happy to respond.   We’re looking forward to working together for a brighter (more scalable, robust and accessible) future! ... View more