Hello,
New Quizzes is now available at our university for us to explore, and I have been playing around with it. I love many of the new features, but one thing concerns me. Perhaps I am just overthinking this, but I wanted to ask to make sure I am not missing something.
I have gotten into the habit, when setting up online exams in Canvas, of presenting one question at a time to my students. I do other things as well, like limit the time they have to take exams, pull random questions for each student from question banks, and randomize the order of answer options, but I have felt that showing one question at a time--while allowing students to go back to previous questions if they want to--will make it harder for students to be dishonest. In "classic quizzes," I know that while taking a quiz, students could see a list of all question numbers on the right side of the screen, thus allowing for them to easily jump to different questions or return to questions simply by clicking on the question number.
I set up a practice exam using "new quizzes" and then tried to take the exam as a test student. I set things up to show one question at a time, and to randomize both the order of questions and the answer options. I don't see anything, from the student view, like we see in "classic quizzes," where students see a list of questions and can quickly jump back to a previous question if they want to, in addition to seeing which questions have been answered and which have not. Am I missing something or not looking in the right place, or is that just not how "new quizzes" works? I instead see one question at a time, along with "previous" and "next" buttons so I can scroll back and forth. When I attempted to take my quiz as a student and went to submit, I got a message saying I had not answered Question 3. It was great that I received an alert to this, but my quiz had 20 questions, and it seemed to me like the only way I could get back to Question 3 was to hit the "previous" button many times and scroll back through many other questions. Once I got back to the right place and answered Question 3, I couldn't easily submit the quiz right there, but I had to click on the "next" button several times until I got back to the end of the quiz, and it was only there where I could officially submit.
I worry this having to scroll back and forth without easily being able to jump to a specific question could be frustrating from the student vantage point. Perhaps there is something I can do or change in the settings so as to not make it so clunky in order to go back to certain questions? If there is such a setting, it's not jumping out to me.
Do you think I am worrying for nothing? If there hasn't been much push-back from students about this that you have heard of, it could be that I am overthinking all of this. Further, maybe the fact that I can now randomize the ordering of questions will make the showing of one question at a time not so important. However, I'm not quite convinced yet that randomizing the ordering is the best way to go. I tend to set up my exams to begin with some easier questions and then move on to more challenging ones, and I worry that randomizing the ordering could make things unfair in that maybe it would lead to a more challenging, anxiety-provoking testing experience for some compared to others.
I hope this all makes sense. Thank you in advance for any advice/support/clarification you can provide.
Michelle
