Brent Warner 0:00
This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Five, Episode 19: Canvas New Quizzes.

Tim Van Norman 0:19
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner 0:25
And I’m Brent Warner professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:34
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So counting down are you getting done with your sabbatical? Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of…

Brent Warner 0:43
Yeah. I mean, you know how it goes, right? Like, I’m definitely moving along, and I’m fine. I’m kind of on pace. I’m on “a” pace, and I’ll be done with everything on time. But you know, things just happen. Right? It’s, it’s part of the process where it’s like, okay, hold on a second, this this unexpected part? You know, I mean, I guess you’re supposed to plan for the unexpected. So there we go.

Tim Van Norman 1:05
Yeah, that’s the that’s the best I’ve heard from anybody who’s been doing their sabbatical. So…

Brent Warner 1:12
I’ll take it. Yeah. And then you guys are working on wrapping up the semester. This will have this episode. And one more before we take our summer break. Yeah. Everything going smoothly on campus?

Tim Van Norman 1:25
Well, just about to hit that finals time. So that was starting here. May beginning of May. So yeah, finals are right around the corner.

Brent Warner 1:36
All right. Well, with that in mind, I guess we’ll we’ll take a look. Now, I’m not going to suggest that we use today’s conversation for finals.

Tim Van Norman 1:44
No. Please no. (laughter)

Brent Warner 1:47
But kind of understanding a little bit about what’s what changes are happening. We’re talking about Canvas, new quizzes. So we’ve talked about it several years ago, but now we’re gonna come back to it. So, Tim, let’s jump over.

Tim Van Norman 2:06
So I was looking and the last time we covered it was season one, episode eight. So it’s yeah, it’s been a while. But new quizzes. Really the tool from Canvas isn’t ready for primetime. I’m gonna say maybe, maybe not. I know noncommittal. But guess why that’s, that’s kind of the way it is on this. Canvas keeps talking about forcing us to go with it. Year and a half ago, they said, they were not going they said they were going to and then they shut that down really quick. So the latest I’ve heard as of about a month ago, was, were really not planning on it for another two years, forcing everybody to it. But they’re not doing any development in the in classic quizzes at all. So if something doesn’t work the way you want it to, you’re out of luck. They’re putting everything they can and they’ve really started ramping up the production work on new quizzes. So something to look at.

Brent Warner 3:08
Let’s take a pause here, because I think there’s so many people that have been like, Oh, I was told not to use this or I didn’t, I haven’t touched it for years, or it’s kind of this weird thing on the side. So can we kind of clarify what is what is new quizzes? What is classic compared to what is classes quizzes, let’s just get a little sense of it here.

Tim Van Norman 3:28
So classic quizzes is quizzes, surveys, polls, that type of thing that’s in Canvas right now. It’s available to you. And it’s it’s a what you think of when you say quizzes, new quizzes, is an enhancement that Canvas has written to, to do additional things in Canvas. So it’s got and we’ll talk about this in a little bit. It’s got additional question types that just don’t exist in a classic quiz. And it’s got a number of different tools, they’re really trying to put a lot into it. They’ve designed it to work now on a cell phone. So a student literally can take a quiz on a cell phone, and it’s designed to be they’re not like classic quizzes, which kind of shoves into fit. And so it’s things like that, that are are in place, they’ve we’re gonna hit a number of features as to why I think it’s worth looking at. Notice I haven’t said why I think it’s worth switching to. I know some people who have switched to it, and many of them seem to be really happy with it. But there’s just a couple of things that I still hesitate on, but I think it’s worth looking at because there’s some really key features that you might want. And so it’s just like everything else pick the tool that’s going to work right for you and not the tool that some techie says This is the right tool. What’s right for you as the teacher, and knowing what this is, I think is is going to be beneficial.

Brent Warner 5:08
Okay, so I’m gonna put out just a loose advice to say, look at this over the summer jump in, try to play with some of these tools, see if they kind of fit into your, your teaching strategies and the activities that you’re going to be doing. I always hesitate a little, I just always kind of dislike the term quizzes itself, because it’s not just quizzes like, they should call it something like Canvas interactives, or I don’t know, something like that, right? Where it’s a little bit more of like, hey, there’s other, you know, it’s not just a quiz. And it’s not in that feels like it’s high stakes for some reason. But regardless, take a look at it, after we’ve talked about it, you can kind of get a sense of what some things might be over the summer, take a look, see if it works. And then maybe if if it does work, consider applying it into your fall semester classes. But, Tim, we’re going to, you’re going to jump in and tell us all the things that are coming up here or that are, you know, the features that we might want to look at, that might be valuable for people. Absolutely.

Tim Van Norman 6:06
So I mentioned that it’s designed to work on mobile devices, as well as on laptops and tablets and stuff like that. So that is actually one of the really nice features is it’s designed for touch. So what do I mean by that? A touch could be like a mouse, but also some of the question types like categorization, you literally can touch the screen and drag and drop, which is much more natural on a portable device, or even a Windows laptop, or Chromebook if it’s got it. But that doesn’t work on a desktop, you don’t think about that on a desktop and classic quizzes was designed for more of that desktop type of field. So this is one of those reasons why I think it’s worth investigating, seeing if this is going to work for you. So number of question types, you’ve got categorization. So that means you take and you break things down into categories. And then you have different options for things that fit under that category. So nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and you have these words, and the student just places them where they belong. Those types of things, it’s really easy to do, and it’s designed that way. So that’s a really cool question type that just doesn’t really exist. In Classic. You’ve got of course, the File Upload formula. But multiple choice, true and false fill in the blank essay, all of those are just standard, the same, both quizzes,

Brent Warner 7:37
Formula, sorry, formula is for math, I’m assuming?

Tim Van Norman 7:40
Formula is for math. I find that a lot of people really don’t like it. I like the concept, but I find it’s difficult to, you really have to play with it in both versions. So the formula is where you could say x plus y equals Z, and you give a range for x and a range for y and it calculates the range for z. And every student gets a different set of values. Okay. Okay. So it uses a formula to, to figure that out. So each student gets a different question, even though they’re all laid out the same way.

Brent Warner 8:16
Oh, that’s good. Okay, that does make sense, although, but I do know that traditionally, formulas in the computers have always been a pain for everybody, because it’s like, writing it by hand is really easy. writing it on the computer is always kind of a nightmare. And so hopefully, then there’s some improvements I made with a touchscreen, it could it could be, you know, I’m not sure if it would recognize writing or not, but that would be a way to maybe deal with it.

Tim Van Norman 8:43
And that’s, that’s where they’re trying to get some of that stuff in place. But some of the really cool things, especially with touchscreen are hotspot. So hotspot is you got a picture of something and you touch the touch of the nose, touch the ear, touch the eye, whatever that is. So it, it does it with an image and that really is it’s a good way to make sure that your students do understand. It’s not just EY E, you know, you get it.

Brent Warner 9:14
So there’s like, cuz you could have a diagram, you could have, for example, like you could have a, a engineering map of like how a centrifugal pump works, right? And then it’s like, click this part, like, show me that you understand what each of the parts are. Right? And so, yeah, okay, so, so there are that, you know, it’s funny, because that’s not new technology for all, you know, I mean, there’s like, a lot of like hotspots have been around for a long time. So it’s kind of it’s almost frustrating in a certain way to say, okay, like, now it’s cool that it’s coming here and like this is a brag but it’s like but hotspots have been on available on the internet for 20 years. You know, like it’s It’s not a it’s not a new thing. But I would be happy to have it here, I guess.

Tim Van Norman 10:03
Absolutely. So one of my favorites, though, is what’s called the stimulus. So the stimulus is where you have a stimulus at one side. So it can be a letter, it could be a picture, it can be whatever, by letter, I mean, like a document or something on one side of the screen. And on the other side of the screen, you ask questions about that document, or that image or something like that. And so it allows you to, one of the things that we did in classic quizzes is we would put a picture up, and then under it, we would ask questions about that picture, right? All right, this puts a picture on the side. And you can have lots of questions. And it literally will scroll through all of those questions, 10 questions, and it just depending on how big the screen is, it’ll just scroll through those questions until they get to the bottom of them and move on. So they always have that on the screen, they don’t have to scroll back and forth to try to get it. That’s great. I think that is one of the amazing.

Brent Warner 11:06
So if you go back to just thinking about like paper and pencil, right, it’s like you can have your document, you can have your document open that you’re reading or whatever your paper and then you can have your blue book and your your writing in your blue book wherever you need to. And then you’re flipping. So you’re kind of have two sides of it. Right? Yeah. Okay, great. So, definitely useful and, and a lot less taxing to like, mentally skip back and forth, right, all that. All that code switching that you do every time you’re trying to switch between different stimuli. Right. Exactly,

Tim Van Norman 11:40
exactly. So that that’s one of my favorite ones. ordering some ordering allows you to put things in in order 1234, you know, what order did these happen in type of thing? Or what steps should you go through or something like that? Those are types of things. So there’s just again, think about if you could click, like you do on your phone, click and drag, and it would work really well. You can do it with a mouse, but it’s really easy to do on your screen. So it’s where that mobile comes in. So they’ve really put a lot of effort into getting these additional types in. And I really liked that. So some other features that they’ve got getting away from the question types, is you can shuffle shuffle questions without a question bank. So right now in classic quizzes, the only way to have a random set of questions or random order for your questions, is to use a question bank. Okay, because it pulls in X number of questions in a random order. You can within multiple choice questions, you can have a random order for the answers, but it will always pull in from the question bank, right? in a random way, this one allows you to do that directly in the quiz, which makes a lot more sense. Why shouldn’t you be able to do that?

Brent Warner 12:59
So you’re saying I could add questions 1234 that were all or sorry, questions ABC and D that are all going to be possible choices for question two, right? I don’t have to go create a question bank separately. And then and then link them in. I can just kind of do it all at once if I wanted to.

Tim Van Norman 13:19
Yeah. Okay. And they can show up. And if you’ve got four questions, it could be questions will show up in ABCD. And the next person will be B, C, A D, you know, just different orders that will come in both. So it’s really nice to have that capability.

Brent Warner 13:35
So you can you can build your options as you’re making the quiz, not kind of preparing the whole thing separately ahead of time and then importing it into the one question or whatever it is. Okay.

Tim Van Norman 13:47
Exactly. Exactly. And by the way, you can do the other two,

Brent Warner 13:51
I would hope. Yeah.

Tim Van Norman 13:54
Exactly. Exactly. So moderate. So let’s say you’ve got a student who automatically gets 50% more time on all tests. You go in and you moderate one, and it does it for all of them. Oh, that’s great. So that that right there is a huge plus, I love the fact that that’s available. It’s one of the first things I saw it. I’m like, man, we want to go with this. And then we had other issues. They’ve got a lot of reporting that they’ve done. They’re really trying to get into how successful is each question and really give you those analytics if you want them. You don’t have to do it. But you could go in and you can download quiz answers by for each question and really see how students were doing. And so you can see if all of your students are missing this one component or and stuff like that, rather than you have to physically go through and look at everybody’s quiz and guess it’ll do it in a spreadsheet.

Brent Warner 14:52
That’s nice. So you can you can analyze the quality of your activity or what how well your students are understanding the concepts or, you know, and make decisions between whether that’s kind of on you or on them too. Right. So good. Right?

Tim Van Norman 15:06
Well, and and maybe you want to change your quiz for the next time. Yeah. So it gets you that capability. So that’s pretty nice. Cool, cool. So those are some of the features that that are, to me worth looking into. Whether you make the decision to go with it or not, I’m not going to be offended if you don’t, in fact, I’ll probably be happy. But you should know about it. And you should start playing with it and just seeing at what point is it really worth getting into?

Brent Warner 15:35
Oh, question here, Tim. Because I know this isn’t been an issue for other people is like, they’re like, hey, if I move over, do I have to move – Do I have to move all? Like, do I have to be exclusively new quizzes? Or can I kind of go back and forth? And if I do, is there a way for me to import my old quizzes into this? Or do I have to start all over?

Tim Van Norman 15:53
Excellent question. So first of all, you can pick and choose individual quizzes to be new quizzes versus classic quizzes. Okay, good. So take care of that first one. So you can try it for one quiz and go, Oh, this is my syllabus quiz. I’m gonna try it, and then never do it again. That’s perfectly fine. And that, to me, that’s a great use for it, try it once, back off. The other is you can go from classic quizzes to new quizzes, but you cannot go from new quizzes back to classic. Okay. I believe that’s mostly because they’ve got some question types that aren’t in there. And so there’s not a good way of pulling it back. You can, there is a copy and paste type of way of doing it. So there’s ways of making it work. It’s just a lot of work to do that. Now, a lot of manual labor. Okay.

Brent Warner 16:45
But there is a convert option, which is good

Tim Van Norman 16:47
To convert from classic to new is an easy couple of buttons. And you’re done. So it’s really good. So that said, that leads us into what are some of the known issues. So one is pulling it back from a new quiz to a classic quiz doesn’t work. Another one is there’s only one proctoring software solution that claims to work. That’s Respondus LockDown Browser. But none of the other ones do work. And it even though it will say in it, hey, click on Proctorio Do you can use Proctorio for instance. It doesn’t work. So I had somebody literally last week have exactly that problem. But I had says I can I’m sorry. And and that seems to be something Canvas turned that on a couple of years ago, and it just has not functioned. So don’t know what’s going on with that.

Brent Warner 17:46
So lockdown browser, or sorry, responsive browser does only one that claims to work claim store. Okay, but that that one’s basically the one where it’s like you just can’t jump to other tabs or jump to other browsers when you’re in the middle of it. Right?

Tim Van Norman 18:00
So it actually you have to install a separate browser. That’s right, that will only work in that quiz. And then when you’re done, it gives you another browser, you know, so. So it’s it’s pretty restrictive, which is good or bad. But just understand if you need it, you need to be aware of what’s going on there. The other main thing that I find, and there’s a bunch of different ones, but big ones, it’s not got a survey option. What I mean by that is there’s no way of giving your students five questions and they get five points if they answer the question at all. Right. Okay. That’s it in classic quizzes, they’ve got it in new quizzes. They don’t. They’ve said that they’re not going to build it. But why wouldn’t we keep asking? It’s, it’s like, yeah, exactly. It’s kind of a no brainer. This would, to me, this would be like one of the easy ones. And so I’m hoping that they’re gonna look at it, they’re gonna go, oh, wait, wait, wait. We can do that. But they don’t have that capability yet. So hopefully, by the time you know, somebody’s watching this in a couple of months, Canva will announce Oh, Tim’s wrong. Yeah, I will be happy to be wrong.

Brent Warner 19:20
That’s a wild like, can you Okay, all right. So sometimes sometimes these corporate decisions, you’re like, why on earth would you not do something that benefits everybody? Right. And they’re, and like, to me, the one thing that I’m I am still not seeing Canvas do is really movie. I mean, it doesn’t seem like it’s fully interactive. And the way this like you still have to pull in all of these LTI is to make things work. And it’s like some of these things are things that just should be built into Canvas. Right. I know they don’t want to get into that game. But like, some are fairly obvious in a survey that is like, hey, just do this one quick thing. Let’s get a sense. Let’s do an exit ticket. Let’s say you know what? Roll. So is some of these things should be in there. But okay, so hopefully, hopefully that’ll change. But right now, no survey, okay?

Tim Van Norman 20:09
So, understand that to create a new quiz, we wanted to talk about that just a little bit, because some people don’t realize what it is, it’s pretty simple. But if you don’t know it, it can be a little bit daunting, and especially when you go back into edit it. So in quizzes on the left in Canvas, you click on, add a quiz plus quiz, and it will give you a menu option of classic or new quizzes. If it doesn’t give you the option. You there’s three dots to the right of the plus quiz, you can click on that and you can select what you want to do. And that but that sets it to be defaulted. Okay?

Brent Warner 20:51
If it doesn’t give you the option, are you defaulting to classic quizzes? Or?

Tim Van Norman 20:57
Good question, very, very good question. Because in the question of it says, new quizzes, classic quizzes, and then there’s a button at the bottom that says, use the selection for for this course. If you check that box, whatever you’ve selected above, will automatically be available to you immediately when you hit plus quiz. Okay. Okay, so you typically set it now, there are some new instances of canvas that are coming in, and they’re only getting new quizzes, they’re not getting classic at all.

Brent Warner 21:29
So, so if searches IVC chat, hey, well,

Tim Van Norman 21:33
if you’re, if you’re on a brand new campus is just getting canvas, check. Encourage your your IT people or whoever to make sure that classic is available to you.

Brent Warner 21:45
Well I’d also say like, even if you’re on it, even if you’re on your campus that you know, sometimes the IT teams make these shifts, and they say, “Hey, we’re on we’re on the new instance,” and kind of make the assumption that it doesn’t matter or that like, hey, it’s kind of still all the same. So you should probably know for yourself regardless.

Tim Van Norman 22:02
Exactly, exactly. So when you do plus quiz, it comes up with the first page just like classic quizzes, they look very similar. But at the bottom, there’s a little blue build button. So that build then loads something that looks very different. And that gets you into the settings and everything else for the for the new quiz. That said, when you go back to edit the quiz later, so you’ve got to return at the top and then you go back into you’re going to edit it. It’s again at the bottom there. And it’s a build button. So it looks very different. That part, I’ve I’ve had people who, well, I’m editing my quiz, but I can’t see my questions. Scroll to the bottom little blue button, I believe it’s blue for everybody. Click on build. And that then comes up. And so that is a classic indicator that it is a new quiz.

Brent Warner 23:01
Maybe we don’t call it a “classic” indicator (laughter)

Tim Van Norman 23:02
That is “THE” indicator.

Brent Warner 23:04
The indicator (laughter)

Tim Van Norman 23:05
The indicator, Yes. So just be aware of that. And I say I I want to bring that up simply because I’ve had people not realize that that’s what was going on.

Brent Warner 23:17
No sound cool. Yep. All right. Anything else here? Yeah.

Tim Van Norman 23:21
So basically, they one of the big concerns that I have had all along, and they just resolved this, I think a month or two ago was you had no way of exporting a quiz, a new quiz to another instance of Canvas. So if you were teaching at IVC, and at Saddleback, you could not take that quiz with you. Right, right. Now you can good good, grand new. And that’s this is part of why I’m saying I think it’s worth a try. Before they had this, I didn’t think it was worth a try. Yeah, I couldn’t

Brent Warner 23:57
believe that. Because it’s like so many teachers are, you know, freeware flying and doing this and that. And it’s like, I built all this stuff. And now I just have to start all over again. Are you serious? Right?

Tim Van Norman 24:07
Absolutely. So, so my suggestion, give it a try. Maybe do one quiz. Try it out this summer. Just try it as in you play with it and see what it looks like and stuff like that. And then I would love to know your comments. You know, we’ve got show notes and we’ve got feedback area, please let us know what you think. I’d love to do an episode of, of listener comments regarding new quizzes. Yeah, I think that would be very instructive.

Brent Warner 24:38
Yeah, for sure. Actually, actually, people’s comments on any aspect of Canvas in particular, like, Hey, these are things you know, like little individual hacks and things. That’d be a lot of fun. So cool. All right. So there we have it. Some some things to consider, especially as we’re stepping into summer break around new quizzes.

Tim Van Norman 25:02
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we took a look at Canvas new quizzes. For more information about this show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you’ll find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner 25:15
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows. There’s a link over there where you can give us your topic ideas

Tim Van Norman 25:25
For everyone at IVC that’s listening, if you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by the IVC Training Center in a 322 or contact me Tim VanNorman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner 25:42
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 25:47
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner 25:49
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody