I attended a webinar from our Educational Technology group last week. The topic was “Getting Students to Read Your Syllabus.” One recommendation was to create an online quiz, where the questions are all easily answered by reading the syllabus. For me, this means questions like “When are assignments due?” Answer: Sunday at 10 PM
So I spent some time today creating an online quiz in Canvas. I’m up to 16 questions, might make it all the way to 20 by the time the course begins. I’ll be interested to see student feedback on this quiz.
I also updated the Syllabus to match the quiz questions. I’m very happy that I made the investment of time over the summer to write my Syllabus in Markdown. My master document is in BBEdit. I use Marked 2 to get HTML from the Markdown version, and then it’s totally simple to paste the HTML into Canvas. Canvas is a nightmare as an editing platform so it’s best to do all the edits elsewhere.
Tools in use today were Canvas Quizzes, iThoughts, BBEdit and Marked 2.