Greetings MTECH Faculty! We hope your classes are going well. We appreciate all you do to provide your students with quality instruction. As the Office of Teaching and Learning, we are committed to supporting you in your efforts to supply the best possible learning experiences for your students.
We hope that many of you have been able to take advantage of some of our previous webinars and workshops. Brent Gregson has been hard at work researching what topics would be most helpful for our faculty. If you missed any of the recent webinars you can review them here.
March’s How to Deal with Difficult Students Webinar
Coming up on March 30, at 3:30pm, Brent will be conducting a webinar on how to deal with difficult students. You can register to attend here.
April’s Simple Syllabus Workshops
In April, Danny Young will be hosting a workshop on each campus with Brent Gregson to review Simple Syllabus. These workshops are scheduled for the following:
Orem Campus on April 25 @ 3:30pm (Room #103)
Spanish Fork Campus on April 26 @ 10:30am (Room #220)
Lehi Campus on April 27 @ 3:30 (Room #219)
These workshops will be geared towards helping Program Coordinators understand how Simple Syllabus works, how to troubleshoot common issues, and answer any additional questions you may have. We also encourage Faculty to sign up as we will also discuss their role as well as best practices regarding syllabi usage in class. Sign up for the April Simple Syllabus Workshop here.
Canvas Guides: New Quiz vs. Classic Quiz
You have probably noticed that each time you create a quiz on Canvas, you are prompted to decide if you want to use a New Quiz or a Classic Quiz. Currently, both types of quiz can do pretty much the same thing, but there are a few differences. You can check out a feature comparison here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/11nSS2EP0UpSM6dcuEFnoF-hC6lyqWbE9JSHELNmfG2A/edit.
In last months OTL Workshop, Brent Gregson went over a few important key differences:
- New Quizzes may not be fully compatible with Lockdown Browser yet; so if you have tests that use this feature, it is best to keep them as a Classic Quiz.
- New Quizzes have a few new types of questions that are more interactive and provide some interesting options to break up some of the monotony of quiz taking.
- Classic Quizzes use Question Banks in your Canvas course. If you are switching to New Quizzes and still want to use a bank of questions, you’ll need to transition your questions to an Item Bank. These are similar to Question Banks but work a little differently.
New Quizzes information can be found in these Instructure resources:
As always, OTL is available to help you better understand this feature in Canvas and how you might utilize it to improve your courses. Please reach out if you have any questions or would like some help exploring and experimenting with New Quizzes.
Tech Tip: Re-open Closed Tabs on Chrome
For those faculty in Technology and Service programs, you probably remember this tip from Alan during the last faculty meeting. However, I thought it was pretty cool so I wanted to share it with everyone else. If you’ve ever accidentally closed a tab while browsing on the internet you can press Ctrl + Shift + T to reopen the most recently closed tab. I know this happens to me on a regular basis as I consistently have multiple tabs open.
We hope this information is helpful. If you have any questions about our workshops, Canvas, or just want to know more about the Office of Teaching and Learning please don’t hesitate to contact us.
