December 9, 2024
Big Improvements to New Quizzes
Several useful features have recently been rolled out for Canvas New Quizzes:
- Custom Results Feedback: Now, instructors can add a customized message that will appear on the quiz End screen along with the student's results. One way to use this would be to explain to students what they should do next. Up until now, students have often had a hard time navigating back out of quiz once they had finished. To enable, toggle on "Show Custom Feedback with Results" in the Settings Tab (in "Build" mode).
- Manage Students Results View: reveal the correct answers to a quiz only after a certain date/time, and then hide them again at another date time! This will allow you to make sure all your students have had a chance to take the quiz before the correct answers are revealed. You can also still choose to NEVER reveal the correct answers.
- Add Time to Existing Quiz Sessions: You already know you can provide individual students with additional time for quizzes in advance, or provide them with additional attempts. Now, an instructor can add additional time to an in-progress quiz attempt. Useful for accommodations, or unforeseen circumstances like fire drills!
More Information:
Add Formatting, Hyperlinks, etc, to Speedgrader Comments!
The rich content editor (RCE) is now available when leaving comments on student submissions in Speedgrader! That means you can add comments with formatting (bold, underline, etc), bullet points, and even hyperlinks. We recommend linking to helpful resources within the course itself, or to outside links like the Whittemore Library LibGuides!
Please note that as of November, students viewing these comments on the Canvas Mobile App will not see the formatting displayed correctly: they will see only plain text. So if some element of the formatting is essential, we recommend that you include a comment that the student should view your feedback on a computer. Development is underway to expand this functionality to the mobile apps.
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Changes to Term Date Settings
Further adjustments have been made to the term date settings in Canvas, following uoon the change that was implemented in Winter 2024. Now, teachers will continue to have full edit access to courses until a few days after the deadlines for submitting Incomplete work, as stipulated in the Incomplete Grade Policy, instead of full calendar year. This adjustment should provide instructors with enough time to assign and grade work for students who received an Incomplete grade, but also allow the course to naturally roll off the Dashboard within a reasonable amount of time. All other elements of the plan announced in Winter 2024 remain unchanged.
For most instructors, there will still be periods of overlap in which courses from multiple semesters appear on their dashboards. However, Canvas users have the ability to specify which courses they would like on their dashboard. There are several methods to customize the appearance of the dashboard as described in Clean up your Canvas Dashboard.
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What's New in Canvas? is a semesterly article that highlights the latest features and enhancements in our Canvas learning management system, along with cool, existing features that can enhance your teaching experience. Brought to you by the Education Technology Office (ETO).