Encouraging reading & watching material

In most courses, reading and watching videos are primary methods for students to receive content. You can encourage students to prepare for or follow-up after class by including a short quiz or comprehension check over the materials or lectures. Two easy-to-use tools that integrate with Canvas are Canvas Quizzes and Kaltura Quizzes.

General guidance

• Include at least one short quiz or comprehension check per week.
  • Assign a due date before class to encourage preparation.
  • Assign a due date after class or at the end of the week to check for comprehension or application.
• Focus students' attention to the most important parts of readings and videos (including lecture videos) by asking questions connected to your course- or module-level learning outcomes.
• Keep comprehension quizzes low-stakes:
  • Worth a few points
  • Untimed
  • With multiple attempts so students can practice

Canvas Quizzes

Canvas Quizzes is ideal for low-stakes assessments. (To learn about high-stakes assessment, see Assessing learning). Quizzes includes automatically graded question types (e.g., multiple-choice, true/false, matching, numeric, and fill-in-the-blank) as well as manually graded questions, such as short answer and essay (both of which can be graded in SpeedGrader (Canvas article)).

• Explicitly state that quizzes are "open book" in the Quiz Instructions. This gives students multiple exposures to the material which can aid learning (i.e., if they need to re-read a section of their text multiple times in order to answer a question, they are more likely to retain that information).
• Shuffle answers for automatically graded questions such as multiple choice.
• Provide automatic feedback for correct and incorrect answers where applicable.

Canvas Quizzes resources

• Videos about using Quizzes in Canvas (CTL Article)
• Quiz help for Instructors (Canvas article) (in the Canvas Instructor Guide (Canvas article))

Kaltura quizzes

You can use Kaltura Quizzing to insert questions into your videos or lecture recordings. The questions will help refocus students and reinforce the key points. Kaltura Quizzing can be auto-graded, and if you make it an Assignment the grades will automatically appear in the Canvas Grades.

Here are some general guidelines for how often to integrate questions into a video:

• Short videos (less than seven minutes): add one or more questions in the middle and at the end.
• Longer videos (greater than seven minutes): add one or more questions at least every five minutes.

Kaltura quizzing resources

• Increasing student engagement with recorded lectures using Kaltura quizzes (Centers recorded webinar)