175 Quizzing in Canvas – 04.26.2019

In the April 26, 2019 Active Teaching Lab, 21 participants discussed recent and upcoming changes in Canvas Quizzes, what options are available, and how to move beyond the basics to make quizzes do more.

Takeaways

• Quizzing is in a state of flux at UW-Madison. The Canvas Quiz tool is not going away anytime soon, but Quizzes.Next is an additional tool in development to offer options that Canvas Quizzes doesn’t. Additionally, Atomic Assessments is coming out of the Canvas migration project to meet the functional gaps that neither Canvas Quizzes nor Quizzes.Next are expected to meet. 
• The tentative timeline for  campus integration of and documentation on comparative features between Canvas Quizzes and Atomic Assessments is spring 2020. 
• The same course will be able to host quizzes from Atomic Assessments and Quizzes.Next, but you won’t be able to meld the functionalities within the same quiz.
• One of the biggest weaknesses of Canvas is that Quizzing is not very robust (hence the quest for more tools). Atomic Assessments will be part of the left-side navigation in Canvas and allow the ability to do math, spoken responses, matching, and drag ‘n’ drop questions in quizzes. For ideas on how to move beyond multiple choice quizzing, see Dan Pell’s Beyond the MCQ presentation.
• Currently, Canvas Anonymous Surveys can be non-anonymized by changing the settings to revert back to non-anonymous after responses are received . Vote here to help push changes forward to fully anonymize! Until changes are made, a workaround to complete an anonymous survey without checking individual contributions is to award one point to every class member but only if the whole class (or XY% of the class) completes the survey.

For more information on Canvas Quizzing updates, visit the session’s activity sheet.

Video

The Active Teaching Lab is a Faculty Engagement program with sessions held on Thursdays from 1:00-2:00pm and Fridays from 8:30-9:45am in the Middleton Building (1305 Linden Dr.), room 120. Check out upcoming Labs or read the recaps from past Labs. We build interdisciplinary conversations that are more emergent than a presenter and more dynamic than a panel — a conversation with colleagues sharing challenges, solutions, and experiments on topics selected by a variety of stakeholders.

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