December 2023 Update

Authentic Discussion and Journal prompts

To counterbalance AI plagiarism, instructors can now generate discussion and journal prompts that encourage students to:

• engage in higher-order thinking.
• apply their knowledge.
• justify or challenge their beliefs and ideas.
• and emulate real-world situations.

An instructor can:

• enter a discussion or journal description.
• select a desired cognitive process based on Bloom’s Taxonomy.
• set the complexity.
• and generate a discussion or journal title.

The instructor can review the generated prompts and select one to add to the discussion or journal. After adding the prompt, the instructor can edit or further refine the prompt as appropriate.

Rubric criteria and levels of performance restrictions removed.

In the past, rubrics were limited to 15 criteria and 15 performance levels. These restrictions have been removed.

Group assessment due date exceptions.

Instructors can now set different due dates for each group working on a group assessment and assign a unique due date to each group using the exceptions workflow. This can be done on the group assessment submissions page.

Goal alignment to questions in banks

Instructors can now align goals to questions within a question bank, ensuring that assessment items measure the desired learning outcomes. This helps to ensure the accuracy and effectiveness of evaluation and feedback practices.

Prevent students from earning full credit when selecting all answers choices on a multi-select question with partial credit.  

Multi-select questions require students to select multiple correct answers from a list to encourage critical thinking. Some instructors may award partial credit to students on these types of questions. When an instructor designs a multi-select question and allows partial and negative credit, the negative credit auto-distributes across wrong answer choices. An instructor can remove or edit the negative credit if desired. 

Sorting controls in Students and Questions tab  

Instructors can now apply various sorting options in flexible grading including: 

• Submission date (oldest – newest) of latest attempt 
• Submission date (newest – oldest) of latest attempt 
• Last Name (A – Z) 
• Last Name (Z – A) 
• First Name (A – Z) 
• First Name (Z-A) 
• Student ID (ascending) 
• Student ID (descending) 

The grading interface stores the most recently used sorting option. If an instructor stops grading an assessment and resumes grading later, the last sorting option is applied. 

Also, if sorting the submissions by last name or grading status, the chosen sorting option carries over into the grading interface. 

Grid view sorting controls  

The sorting options to all remaining columns have been extended in the gradebook grid view: 

• SCORM 
• Journal 
• Group Assessment 
• Group Discussion 
• LTI 
• Calculations 
• Attendance 
• Discussion 

Instructors can sort records in ascending or descending order and remove any applied sorting. A purple highlight in the column header indicates sorting is applied. 

Automatic zero gradebook improvement  

Instructors can configure their gradebooks to assign automatic zeros to past due work. Automatic zeroes are no longer applied to past due items for withdrawn students as this caused problems for course data and did not show a fair representation.