Find tools to facilitate general assignments and formative quizzes at UBC. All tools recommended by the LT Hub have receive central technical and pedagogical support.
General Assignments
Tools that facilitate assignments can save you time by reducing your workload for managing, grading, and giving feedback on student submissions.
General Tips
- Communicate clear expectations and instructions for every assignment, especially in a fully online context.
- Include and explain your rubrics for marking assignments, putting these criteria in the tools where possible, to make grading more transparent.
- Break down larger projects or assignments into stages, and provide opportunities for feedback along the way.
Canvas Assignments
Collect individual or group assignments through Canvas.
What are the benefits?
- Students can submit their assignment using text entry, a file upload, a link, or a media recording.
- You can also collect group assignments, if you set up Canvas groups.
- By setting up a rubric in Canvas to grade students’ submitted work, assignment grades will automatically be added to the Canvas gradebook.
Turnitin
Cost:
Free
Bandwidth:
Low demand
Privacy:
Additional steps required. Verified by UBC’s Privacy Impact Assessment process, provided you allow students to use aliases, if they wish.
Turnitin
Check written work for plagiarism, and provide individual feedback for each student on their submission.
What are the benefits?
- You can check students’ written work against Turnitin’s content databases to catch potential plagiarism.
- Submissions in Turnitin can be graded right in the tool (though grades are not synced with Canvas), where you can also provide individualized feedback to each student. Feedback is reusable, meaning you can save and apply the same comment to multiple submissions.
WebworkWebwork
Give assignments and quizzes using numeric problems and equations.
What are the benefits?
- You can set up numeric problems for students to solve that are structured within larger homework sets and/or quizzes.
- Problems can be your own or chosen from a wide vetted library of problems that other instructors have used.
- Webwork can be set up to give immediate automated feedback after students answer each question and allow for multiple attempts.
Formative Quizzes
Tools for quizzes promote learning, whether they are used for grades or for practice only. (For summative assessments like exams, see the supported tools for exams.)
General Tips
- Auto-graded quizzes give students more opportunities to practice, while reducing your marking time.
- When available, including rich automated feedback for formative quizzes and problems can help students learn not just the correct answer but the rationale behind it.
Canvas Quizzes
Distribute quizzes, surveys, and exams for students, all inside your Canvas course.
What are the benefits?
- Canvas quizzes support twelve different question types, including multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, multiple answers, matching, numerical answer, formula, essay, and file uploads.
- You can allow multiple attempts, randomize the question order, and accept late submissions or submissions only during a specific time window.
- Question banks let you collect questions you plan to use repeatedly.
Kaltura
Cost:
Free
Bandwidth:
High demand
Privacy:
Verified by UBC’s Privacy Impact Assessment process.
Kaltura in Canvas
Add quiz questions to videos that can pass outcomes to the Canvas gradebook, meaning students’ answers to your video quizzes can automatically impact their grade.
What are the benefits?
- In-video quizzes with Kaltura engage students as they watch lectures and can let you track student performance.
- You can use a variety of question formats: multiple choice (question with one correct answer), true/false, reflection point (video pause with text), and open question (free text answer).
- Kaltura also provides other options for how students can interact with your questions, such as skipping questions, getting hints, and discovering the correct answers. You can also shuffle the order of answers each time a question is presented.
Cost:
Free
Bandwidth:
Low demand
Privacy:
Additional steps required. Complies with privacy requirements, provided you allow students to use aliases, if they wish.
PeerWise
Have students create the questions and then have them answer, rate, and comment on each other’s questions.
What are the benefits?
- You can encourage studying for upcoming quizzes or exams using these question-and-answer assignments.
- By including peer ratings and comments, you can add a gamification aspect that may help motivate students to develop stronger questions and study more.
Respondus Quiz
Cost:
Free
Bandwidth:
N/A (Respondus Quiz does not run online)
Privacy:
Does not run online, so privacy is not a concern as long as your device is secure.
Respondus Quiz
Build quizzes and exams offline (if you are on a Windows computer).
What are the benefits?
- You can import the assessments into your Canvas courses for online distribution and grading.
- Assessments can also be exported as Word or text files and then printed for in-class use.
Webwork
Give assignments and quizzes using numeric problems and equations.
What are the benefits?
- You can set up numeric problems for students to solve that are structured within larger homework sets and/or quizzes.
- Problems can be your own or chosen from a wide vetted library that other instructors have used.
- Webwork can be set up to give immediate automated feedback after students answer each question and allow for multiple attempts.