-: Going to use maybe in quizzes and tests,
you don't have to use pools.
You can just build a number of tests
and have them as you wish.
But if you have sometimes people from textbooks
have banks of questions that can put them in pools.
And the other reason why you might want to use pools
is if you're giving a test that has
where you have the desire to let students take the test
but each have a slightly different version of it.
So for instance say,
I have a series of 10 questions
about a certain chapter in the textbook
and I want students to get three of those questions
but they can randomize within that block of 10 questions.
So, you know,
Patrick might get
question you know A, B and C,
whereas someone else Jane might get
question C, H and
you know, what I mean,
I should have used numbers, but anyway,
I'm going past 10, yikes.
My point is that
within a block of questions on a topic,
you can decide everybody will get a slightly different
and it is randomized.
So some of them could accidentally get the same.
Some could just get completely different ones
or get some the same.
It's Blackboard will just distribute it automatically
when students start the test
and you use a pool and a question set for that.
So you can say, I want to pull into my test
these 10 questions from a pool
and I want students to get
three on this chapter
and then you're gonna do the same thing
with the next chapter in the next chapter.
And so maybe as they're taking the test
they don't know that their friends have different questions.
So it makes it a little harder for them to collude
if they should want to do that.
So pools are just question
banks really.
And sometimes nobody ever uses the pool.
When you click on test,
by the way, surveys are very much like tests,
except for there's no grading
on students
you can't tell what they answered,
you can only see that there's a check mark that they did it.
So that's for a whole different purpose
than what we're going to talk about.
Do you have any questions so far?
Okay, go ahead.
-: I actually have one Ines.
So
I have existing paper tests.
Would a pool be a good place
to put all of the existing tests for a particular course
and then construct
a midterm and a second test
based on the material you covered that semester?
-: Yeah. You can do that, but paper tests,
excuse me.
I'm assuming that you have them in a digital file,
like a word document.
-: Yes.
-: Okay, yep.
And so one of the things that I hope to get to
is that
there are a couple of tools
out on the internet that I can show you.
Well, I'll show you one of them
where you can format your word document questions
in a very particular precise,
exacting model
that they require and you put them into this tool,
it's a little field where you paste your questions
and then you can generate
a file that Blackboard can read.
So the work comes into making sure your formatting is right
you know, and I can explain all of that
but then once you do it's magical.
It just puts a file that you can then pull into Blackboard
and create pools or tests with them.
-: Okay. Thank you.
-: Yes,
Justin Schimmel, can you remind me when this ends?
I wanna make sure I.
-: It will end end at 10:00.
-: 10:00, okay, all right.
So I have a number of tests
in my test area
and they're just all different experiments.
And you can see over here in this column
are any of them deployed?
Meaning can students in my class take them,
there's one that is deployed.
And it says where
I made a folder
up here in my course materials
and I put this to just a fake,
it's just a few questions but
I put a test here first
for the so-called students,
it's just a sandbox courses
we call it for us to play in.
And although my only students
are my colleagues that never log in.
So I do have,
you know, in Blackboard,
I don't know if anybody is aware of this
but you can make your own student account
so that at any time you can log in as a student,
well, it's not really logging in.
You simply click this button over here per student preview
and it puts you into this new mode
called student preview mode
and then interesting that I can still see my control panel.
That shouldn't be there
but let me just refresh for a second.
Okay, that's weird.
Usually you don't see this
but it allows you to go in and try things out.
Now, bear in mind that when you put up a test in your course
if you go in as a student,
a fake student to take the test and answer the questions,
you do have to make it available.
And if you have students already in your class
they can see it,
but you can always turn
your course off for a little while
and I'm gonna ask is, does anybody remember how
or not remember how to turn your course
basically to open it and close it to students?
When you start out your course isn't available
then right beforehand, you have to make it available.
So if anybody just raise your hand,
if you want to refresh her and doing that.
But the student preview mode,
I'm just gonna exit it now.
Go back to where the tests are.
So down here, under course tools
test surveys and pools and tests.
So if I want to start to build a new test
what I would do is I click build test,
and first window I just have to give it a name.
So I'm gonna give it a name of
AA
only so it floats to the top of my long list.
I'm showing,
and all I'm doing right now is just naming it
and then shows you that now you're on this Canvas.
And so that Canvas is basically a blank Canvas
where you can start to build your questions.
And there are different ways,
different types of questions you can create,
and also different ways of doing it.
Mainly if you did them one by one manually
you would go over here or say,
you have a bunch of questions on your test already,
but you want to add one more.
You just go here to create question
and you can choose the question type
and then you can see this list.
I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit on my screen.
Most common often,
I mean, generally speaking is multiple choice.
So I'm gonna try that.
So it's saying create multiple choice question.
Now in anything in Blackboard
that the little orange asterisk
indicates that it's a required field.
And you'll notice that the title
isn't really required that's because
in Blackboard the question itself is the better way
to just find your questions later
is to just look at the question
rather than trying to name the question.
And that would, this is just for your own purposes
but you don't need to do it.
The students wouldn't see it.
So the question texts could be something like
who is the current president of US?
Okay, so I'm putting my question
in the debt question text box
then I scroll down and I can see these different options.
Do I want to have the answers numbered?
Yeah, sure.
I'll put them as lowercase letters,
whatever I choose.
I like vertical
and I'm not allowing partial credit.
Yeah, sure, I'd like to show
the answers in random order.
That means,
if I'm taking the test
and my friend and I are both looking at the same question,
if I just say it's answer A and they put in A
their answer A is gonna be different from my answer A.
It's just jumbling the answers.
So again, makes collusion a little more,
it's a little bit of a detriment there.
So you notice that this answer one has,
is highlighted here where it says, correct.
And this is where you can edit
and remove your different answers.
Answer two is not highlighted.
If I didn't want to randomize,
I would have to go in here
and make sure that when I put in my answers
that I do put the correct one in the right place.
So say this first one
I can then remember to,
I have to click that because that is the correct one
and the other ones are now incorrect.
And I could say,
okay, so I've got four answers
and you don't have to only have four answers.
You can change that number up here
to goodness gracious is,
you can keep on going forever,
but four is what the default is
and you can just go ahead and change it
if you prefer three or five or something.
So now I have,
manually I'd have to randomize
where the correct one is on every question
but if I just always put the correct one
in the top and left it highlighted
and chose randomized
then I wouldn't have to worry about that.
If you know what I'm talking about,
I can still do that
but it was just randomized them for people.
So let me pause for a second and say
does anything that I just said seem confusing
because I feel like
I might've been a little confusing sounding just that.
-: You know, as we do have a couple of questions.
First one is a little bit more broad.
Is the test Canvas a special way
of entering the formation of a test
or is it the same as ordinary create test?
-: It isn't
It's the only place where you can put in the questions.
It's just like first you name the test
and then when you're done naming it
it takes you to this Canvas
and all it is is the place where questions are created
and or are pulled in
and there are different ways,
but it's every test only has one Canvas
and all of them have a Canvas, it isn't special,
but it's the place where you build questions.
Does that make sense?
-: And then there's one more.
Is there a way to make it default to five answers?
In the past, I've had to change
the dropdown from four to five answers
for every single question I create.
-: Oh, that's a pain.
Let me see, you know, it may or may not remember
but I'll put in a fifth answer here.
I said, Justin Schimmel
If I were taking this test,
I would choose that, right Justin?
All right, so that's my first question.
Now I can just click submit
and create another and let's see what happens.
And now I'm on the next one.
I see what you're saying, that's the pain.
Sometimes if you go up,
I'm not sure if this will work,
but let me just clicks cancel
cause I just have one question right now.
So I canceled making a new one
but I wanna look at question settings
and see if there's something there that I can change.
Nope, not seeing that.
But while we're on the settings page,
if images are something that you use
and you want students to.
If you want students to be able to add images
and files to their answers
you can click that individual feedback is
yeah, I doubt anybody does that.
But individual feedback means when you're grading it
you could write feedback
to the student
on every single question.
And that checkbox would say
you can also upload an image to it
but nobody does all of that, that I know of
but it's available.
And again, if anything that I'm,
I know there's a lot here
and so bear in mind that,
you know,
these tools aren't like easy,
this is like a demo.
And when you go to build it, you might feel like
you are still uncertain and have a lot of questions
and of course, contact the CTL and we'll work with you
and we can make appointments
and walk you through it
but this is just like a a demo
to get you familiar with basically how it works.
And you can either take off with it
or you can set up an appointment for more guidance.
So I have my one question on this test.
And over here, you'll notice that
it's just then automatically given 10 points.
And I may or may not want all my questions to be 10 points
but I could go ahead and build up
a whole bunch of questions,
just ignoring the points for now.
And then afterwards, I can say
I want all my questions to be worth two points.
So what I would do is
go over here to select all,
like I could just select,
I only have one question
that means it's selected right now.
But if I say select all,
we'll select my whole list.
And then I can say points
I'll make every question be worth two points
and then update.
And now I have two over here
and it would apply to all questions that I have.
And then if there was one
that I wanted to be worth more
like except for that one question,
which is an essay
maybe I wanna make that be worth 10
and then I can go scroll down and see them all.
And let me show you what a test with more questions
and it looks like,
but I can individually change points
on any question
after changing the bulk of them by doing select all.
So I'm gonna go back to tests.
It shows my list of all of my tests.
I'm not sure what's in this one,
13 questions.
Oh look, that's a theme,
but this is the first president.
So you'll notice that the default is 10 here on the points
and I have multiple answer questions in some cases
where students can select
one of these would be correct.
And hopefully they would choose all of them
which they couldn't do in a multiple answer question.
And I'm also, I've got a true or false question.
If you have interest in another question type
just give a shout out right now
and I can show you what it looks like
to build something other than multiple choice.
And again, these are the question types.
So I'm not hearing from anybody but.
Once all your questions are created
right now this says it's a total of 130 points.
Really Blackboard will grade this up based on a percentage.
So if somebody gets all of them correct
they get 100 on the test.
It doesn't really matter what the points are
but what is valuable about the points,
If I say select all
and I go ahead and change the points to two,
and then I update it.
And now they're all two, you can see over here.
And then maybe I wanna take one of them.
Do I have an essay question here? Maybe not.
So let's say I want this one to be worth five.
Then I just enter a five and I click submit.
So everything else is worth two.
And then let's just see what our points add up to 29.
So it's a little odd, but it doesn't matter
cause Blackboard will still say they got all 29 right,
they got 100 on it and it will figure it out for you.
Now,
questions so far.
Does anybody want to take?
-: Ines.
-: Yeah, sure, go ahead.
-: I just wanted to know if there was a recommendation
from CTL about
how many questions
are suitable for a 50 minute versus a 75 minute class.
I'm just sort of thinking about this logistically
they will do this on their own.
So you give them the time,
you make it available for that time.
I have a pretty good sense of how to do this in class
and how many questions are about right,
for a certain period of time,
but not having done this electronically
I'm less sure of that.
-: Less sure about that.
Well, what I would say is
whatever time you would give in class,
add maybe 15 minutes or something,
just in case there were problems.
If normally your class,
if people come in and sit down
and they take an hour to do a test,
you could think of it the same way.
It's a 60 minute test,
but just add on 10 minutes or something
to give them a little extra time
in case they have problem,
they have to restart their computer or something.
But it's not different really.
I don't think,
but we don't have a necessarily a recommendation
for the number of questions, no,
that'd be based on your content
and the kinds of questions, of course.
If they essays, they're gonna take longer, so.
-: I might ask some colleagues what their experiences.
Do you have an estimate of how many people on campus
are using Blackboard testing?
Is it widespread?
-: Yes, it's widespread.
And you know, on the CTL website
we have a link to our CTL faculty associates.
We have a whole bunch of faculty
who are working part time for the CTL,
and they are available for consults
about all kinds of things
Down here at this, so this is the homepage.
If we go to new faculty associates
it takes you to this list of everybody
and kind of what they're doing.
And you can choose one of them to, you know, contact
they're all available for consults.
-: And so the student are well socialized
into this format already.
You don't really have to talk to them
about how to do this, or?
-: I mean it's possible that you could have students
that somehow randomly I've just never encountered it
because they've only had teachers that didn't use it.
But for the most part,
people you have been using it even before the pandemic
but especially after a lot of people are using it.
So I would, and students aren't,
you know, it's not very hard when to log in
and take a test in Blackboard.
It's pretty intuitive,
but I'm gonna move on to the deploying part now,
unless there are any other questions
so that I can show you how to set up your test.
And the other thing I wanted to, excuse me,
show you is if you go to the UVM knowledge base
and the address is up here
it's uvm.edu/it/KB for knowledge base,
it is also linked all over the place from our website.
We write the articles are related to Blackboard.
So they're basically what used to be the CTL, how to page.
We moved everything here to have it all centrally located.
If I just put it in the search term test
it's got a good search capability
and I'm just gonna click tests and surveys.
And on this page, you can see a table of contents over here.
And you can just to go over some of these things.
If you have a test from another course
that you want to import
like maybe a different faculty member or anything,
someone can share a test with you.
You can just import an entire test,
excuse me, I'm gonna mute for a second.
All right.
And you can create a new test
this just different directions
but the big one right here
is imported from a word document.
And basically it says that the information,
those converters that I was talking about
are linked on this page.
And so importing test questions for the Word document
and there are these two tools.
And I recommend the Oklahoma Christian University one
because somebody had a problem with this one recently.
I didn't find a problem with it,
but they're both a little different
in what they require for formatting.
And I'll just click on it
and it takes you to their website,
but anyone can use this.
And it has some basic information.
It's also got this little help question here
for detailed instructions, like how to build questions
which I'm not gonna go into too deeply right there
but you can create a sample question here
by choosing the question type.
These are the only types this generator will make.
And you can say, okay
just create a multiple choice question.
So which of the following is a prime number?
and you'll notice that
I'm gonna zoom in a little so it's easier to see.
The first question number is just,
everything is flush left all the way.
There are no indents, there are no spaces.
You have a number,
everything has to be numbered, 1, 2, 3, every question.
And then there's a number, period, space.
Your question on one line.
I mean the question can be long enough
to be a whole paragraph
but you can't like hit return
and make a different line and make it complicated.
Everything has to be sort of in one block.
And then the answers follow
with the correct answer being
with the asterisk in front of it.
And they have to have a parentheses right after it.
So that's the multiple choice.
And if I click it again
it's just gonna create another one
but it shows you that now there's a space.
I'm gonna change that to two.
And there's one space between questions.
Everything is flush left.
If I choose multiple answer
I could say, okay, oops, it jumps down.
And so I couldn't change that
to question number three, blah, blah, blah.
Everything's flush left,
asterisks in front of the correct ones.
When I'm all done, say these are my own questions
that I brought in from Word.
And I recommend actually doing it in word first
before you paste them in here.
So you're in your Word document
and you do this editing where
there are no spaces between the answers.
Everything is flush left.
You arrange this, make sure you've only got one space.
Now watch what happens if I make an extra space there
and then I say, generate test questions.
It might throw an error.
Oh it didn't.
So that seems okay.
What if I did something like,
so basically it's giving me a green light.
Everything's green.
If there was a problem with one of these,
I wonder if I can go back.
Yes. So how could I make a problem?
Say, my first one doesn't have a correct answer on it.
Now, if I go ahead and generate them
you can see you have red.
One of them is a problem
and you have to look at it and then correct it.
So these are just examples to show you how to
but then you can paste in your own.
And once you're done, you can say generate test questions.
They should all be green now. Okay.
So they're all green, looking good.
Now you say, you download it.
You can either download it as a pool
which you can upload into your pools,
or you can just download it this way,
it's downloading here.
And it is blackboardquiz.txt that I've downloaded.
I just have things dropped into my text box,
I mean, onto my desktop.
Text box, I don't know where that came from.
But anyway,
let's say I'm looking at this exam one,
I wanna add those questions to it.
Let's say, upload questions.
Or I could just give this on a blank Canvas,
I don't need to be adding them to a new one.
I'm gonna browse.
Look at my desktop,
there it is
and then submit.
And then, let's see if they're added to the bottom here.
Yes, so I have two of the identical ones,
one you know, multiple answer.
So notice they came in with 10 points.
So you have to be careful, you know,
as you're building your test
to make sure your points are correct.
And then you can look up here
and say yes I have 16 questions.
The other thing you can do when you like,
and again you can consult with us
more about doing this
and read about it on the knowledge base
but you can create questions sets
which allow you to either
when you're doing your,
say you've given quizzes every week
and they're in Blackboard
and a quiz is the same thing as a test,
it's just lower stakes.
And so you can call them quizzes.
You can have all your quizzes
in Blackboard with the date and quiz.
And then, you can make a final exam
which could draw a few questions from each quiz
and add your own extra ones.
But if you did want to do that,
I would say you would go to reuse question,
create a question set
and then you could say,
look at some of my old tests
that I've already given.
I wanna get some questions
from these different chapters.
Notice they're kind of ordered late
because it's doing this.
Did sort of numeric things, one is, 1 and 1,1.
So anyway, so then I want chapter 2, chapter 3.
I want some questions from all of those,
I'm going to, maybe I'll just make it one chapter.
Shows you what questions you've chosen
for that bank of questions that you had.
And you can say you're adding them basically.
What does it say?
They're calling it the cart
like a shopping cart or something.
You're getting all of these questions.
And if you look on page 2, they're not selected
so you have to select those.
So they should both, now they're all selected
and click submit.
But it's a question set,
so I came down to the very bottom
and here it is, the question set.
I could have renamed it
to be called chapter 1 question set
and there are 33 questions in that whole block
but I only want students to see five.
So I can change that number
by going here and clicking five.
So when students take this test,
they're gonna get five questions from chapter 1.
And I should have named that chapter 1
to make it easy to identify.
And then you can do that with every single chapter
and say I want five from chapter 2,
I want five from chapter 3
and keep adding questions sets
so that students will then randomly get any five
from whatever you put in your cart.
You don't have to put all of them,
you can just select the ones you want.
And this shows you, which questions are in there.
And if you don't want some of them afterwards,
you can just click here and say, remove those.
I'll do one.
So now you'll see that it goes from 33 to 31.
And so this is how you can modify the randomness
of what students are seeing when they take tests.
But anyway, I don't digress because that's important
but I wanted to show you now how to deploy your test.
So I'm going to go to, and in this case,
I just throwing everything in course materials.
You can make a content area
to turn my toggle, to edit mode on.
You can add a content area if you want
and call it exams and submit.
And it's down here.
And I would like it actually
not be at the bottom of my list
but instead, maybe right there under tools
and the other like active tools in Blackboard
and the rest of these are more resources
although that is more of a tool.
But anyway,
so I go to exams
and it's an empty content area.
I go to assessments and I choose test.
And which test here is asking me do I want
from all of my tests,
I'm gonna say exam one and click submit.
And this test options page I wanted to,
this is the important series of questions
that you answer that decide how all kinds of features
of students taking this test.
Does someone have a question?
I'm going to go back to that knowledge based article
and show you
when to go to, I bookmarked the knowledge based
on my toolbar up here,
you can, whoops, put a Blackboard
tests and surveys.
And over here you can see deploy the test.
So step one is important.
Create a test and add questions.
Step two is deploy it.
And so I want to show you
this page here, is a page I did up.
It's an image that shows the exact same window,
that this is the active Blackboard window
for test options that I can change.
This is an image that I made that shows
what we recommend you choosing on these options.
So as we go through this, I'll explain.
You do need a name for the test.
You can change it there if you want.
You do not need to have a content link description.
Students will see exam one
and they'll just click on it,
you don't need to describe it.
Open test in new window that is up to you.
And it doesn't really matter.
It's just maybe a little cleaner
than it within the Blackboard window
with a menu there and everything.
So I can choose yes
but that's not that important.
Make it available to students
is really important right now.
It's just gonna be not available no matter what we do.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click yes,
but I'm gonna put a time constraint on it down below.
And when we get there, I'll show you what I mean.
Do you want there to be an announcement
that goes out to students that the test has been added?
I'm going to say no,
because my students will know
when the exam is happening.
This might confuse them
if it comes in their email, but you could.
Multiple attempts is not likely to be chosen for an exam.
What it could be chosen for is if you have quizzes
that are really like practice tests
and you can make practice tests
that students can try to take again and again
until they get it all right
if that's what they want to do.
You can even not include any of those results
in the grade center calculation
so that they're really just for students to study.
But in this case, that's not what we're going to do.
And forced completion is also not going to be chosen,
I'll show you on this list here.
This page forced completion
we say, leave it unchecked.
So students who lose their connection mid test
if that happens, can reenter the test
and continue where they left off.
If you say forced completion,
it means that if they get bumped out of Blackboard,
Blackboard considers the test done.
If you then say the student had a technical problem
I wanna let them take the test again.
And you give it to them again,
they have to start at the very beginning
and answer all those questions again.
So leave there unchecked.
Set timer is something that usually people do do.
It defaults to 60
but you can change that time to anything you want.
Auto submit means that when that time is up,
Blackboard is just gonna close the test on them
and save all their questions.
And that can be actually a good thing sometimes
because on rare occasions,
students sometimes log out when they're all done
and they've forgotten to submit it.
Normally, if you feel like 60 minutes
is what you would give for this exam
because that's what you do
and you add on some extra time like wiggle room,
then you can go ahead and click auto submit.
And when you have someone with accommodations request
where they need time and a half,
we'll deal with that down below.
But right now, I'm gonna say set timer, 70 minutes
auto submit on cause I've given some extra wiggle room.
This is where you decide when students will take the test.
So in fact, I don't want it to be available right now
even though I chose yes up above.
You have to choose yes
and then you go here and you're gonna say
I wanna make it available tomorrow,
I'm gonna make it available at 9:00 AM.
And then we always recommend that
whenever you choose this top part in Blackboard
that you also choose a display until.
You can't just leave it open
because sometimes Blackboard gets screwed up
if you don't do that.
So say it's also tomorrow,
they're both the same day
and I want it to be available.
Now, available is not the same thing as the timer,
available means that's when students see the link.
If I chose 10:30,
it's available for an hour and a half.
If a student, for some reasons says to you
I'm late because I don't know my internet went out
and I couldn't take the test,
I couldn't even start to log in until 9:30.
They'll still see the link
or maybe even 10:00 or 10:30.
They're up until 10:30, they'll see that link
and they'll have 70 minutes to do it.
After 10:30, that link will disappear.
But you can change that for one person,
if they're sick or something
and I'll show you where to do that.
Password is not necessary.
This is where you choose to either make it available
to someone who said something like I just described
or if you have someone with an accommodation requirement.
So what you do is you click add user group,
you see your list of students,
you find who needs the accommodation.
I'm gonna just check one person and click submit.
And here's, she just appears on this page
and you can have a list of students here.
And you can say,
what kind of accommodation you want?
Do you want her to be able to do it twice?
Do you want her to have longer time?
Yes, so I'm gonna say 105 minutes.
Maybe I don't want it to auto submit at the end,
just in case she has to go over,
but you can leave that on also.
And here's where you can say
I do want it available later that day
because whatever reason
she couldn't do it in the morning
and she contacted you and you said,
okay you can take it at one o'clock
and here's where you can change the date and time
and do all that just for her.
So that's where you do accommodations
and each student has their own.
And then here due date is fine to choose.
It will show up in the student's Blackboard calendar.
But I recommend that if you have other things
your tools that you're using in a Blackboard
like the assignment tool
and other things that are due in Blackboard
that you choose,
if you're going to choose,
if you're going to select this
so that it appears in their calendar
then you wanna select it
for everything you do in Blackboard
so that their calendars are comprehensive
and not just random.
Well, a test was on my calendar
but there were no quizzes on my calendar.
So you need to use it consistently
if you're gonna use it at all.
So do not choose that
because that screws things up
for people with accommodations.
But that is an option if you have a due date,
you can choose that.
But let me say no on both of those,
just up to you really for the due date.
And then self self-assessment options.
Basically, if this is just a practice test,
you could choose that.
It can't be practice cause I have an essay question in it,
which requires my grading.
I wanna go back.
Here we go, okay.
And then show test results and feedback to students.
This is also kind of important
because you have a lot of options.
This is why this page can be very helpful
to help you understand some of these decisions
and why we recommend what we do.
So when the student has submitted the test
after their 70 minutes are up, you could say,
yes show them everything they got right,
everything they submitted.
Feedback means, like if there's automatic feedback
on those questions,
you can say, you know,
on each question you can give feedback
like correct or incorrect.
You should go back and read the chapter again
or you can do that manually on every question
that you have after your test is built
but not many people take that time.
But if they did, you could choose feedback
and you could just say only show what they got wrong
and instead unselect all of those.
But people sometimes are worried
about again collusion and sharing with each other.
And sometimes they just say,
don't show anything after submission
or show the score per question.
Meaning, the questions might be like,
question one you got two points,
question two you got zero points,
question three, you got two points,
that kind of thing.
And they could get it
as soon as they're done with their test
or of course we have more options.
They could see it only once, like right afterwards
but then they would never see it again.
So it would be hard for them to go back
and gather that information for friends
if they were so inclined
or to share on some test sharing site
where people use for massive cheating.
I hate to talk like this about students
but occasionally there are people that do this
and some faculty are concerned about it.
So you can say on a specific date
like I'm going to actually,
I don't want them to see anything, any scores they got
until I know that everybody's taking the class
including that student who couldn't take it today
because she's going to a funeral
and she's going to take it tomorrow.
Instead, you can say, okay
nobody gets any results until after everybody's.
I know everybody's taking it
on the 23rd and I can choose the time,
that kind of thing.
So this is when they find out what they got.
You could make it after the due date
after the availability end date
which was 10:30 in the morning
and after all attempts are graded.
So this particular option is like
once everybody's got their score,
including that student who has to take it the next day
then everybody can see it.
But if you have someone who's just blowing it off
and is going to get a zero
this will hang up for everyone else.
So I do not recommend that.
So I usually recommend on a specific date.
So you have control assuming you know
that everyone will have taken it by that date.
And then, I know this is exhausting.
How do you present the questions?
Some people really want to do all at once
and I understand that it replicates
what you have when you're looking at paper at a desk.
But the reason why we recommend one at a time
is sometimes each time the student sees a question,
they have to answer it and click next
then Blackboard saves that question.
So it's actually making the connection
to the Blackboard server
and they know their internet connection is still good.
And if for some reason in the background,
their internet connection dropped
and they didn't know it
and they answered a question
and they went to save it,
it would just kind of hang up
and they'd probably have to quit their browser
and start again or it would give an answer saying
your connection is lost.
Somehow they would know, oh no.
Just tried to answer question five
and it's not working.
I have to restart my browser, log back in
and continue taking it.
If it was all at once,
they could go merrily along
answering you know, 60 questions,
not realizing that they lost their internet connection
way back at question number five.
And they wouldn't know
until they clicked submit at the end
and it will say your internet connection isn't good.
And so sometimes students are on poor connections
and things drop in behind the scenes
and they don't realize it.
So one at a time allows them
to save every question as they go.
They can still go back and view
what their answers were on previous questions
if you want them to have that option like on paper
where you go through and you check
or maybe you skip the hardest questions until later
and then you go back and answer them
when you have time,
all of those tests, excuse me,
testing tips that students learn one at a time
allows them to do that
as long as this is not selected.
Some people say, don't let them backtrack.
And they're worried that if they backtrack
it'll help them collude with each other
and that is a possibility.
So it's just still no,
we don't recommend it
and the access office doesn't recommend it
because students especially
with accommodation needs sometimes.
Really need to have the option to review
before they finish the whole test.
-: Ines,
-: Sure, yeah, go ahead.
-: Do students know how you're programming this
and what their options...
-: Yeah, they will give them notification.
It will say things like you have one hour.
I can show you what it looks like.
I'm gonna say randomized questions.
In order to show you what it looks like as a student,
I'm gonna turn off
so that it's just available right now to students.
Right here it says, make available.
Yes, everything else, I'm gonna keep the same
and I'm gonna click submit.
And now I'm gonna go in as my fake student account.
And when you go to the student preview,
now you can see this is proper.
Cause now I don't see my control panel
and that's how it should be.
When you do student preview,
you should have the same exact view that students have.
So I'm gonna be a student right now
and my name as a student is called,
my name and then underscore preview user.
And you can even see it
in the grade center when you go to look.
So there's the exam.
And it tells me that I have a limit
of one hour and 10 minutes.
This test will save and submit automatically
when the time expires for its completion.
This test can be saved and resumed at any point
until the time has expired.
The timer will continue to run if you leave the test.
Again, that forced completion thing
leaving the unchecked allows them,
say the test is 70 minutes.
After they get to question five
they've lost their internet connection.
They have to restart their computer,
their cable box or something.
They get back on finally,
meanwhile, that timer's ticking away
and they've lost 10 minutes of time
but that's why you've given them
some extra wiggle room in the timer.
And they could just resume and continue exactly
on question number six and continue the test.
But as it says here the timer will continue to run
and it will be saved and resumed at any point
until time has expired.
And also bear in mind
that availability time frame that I chose
of having it being available till 10:30,
from 9:00 to 10:30.
If a student got knocked off,
if they started the test at at 9:15 for some odd reason
normally they would still get 70 minutes for it.
But if for some reason they lost their internet connection
and they tried to go back in at 10:45,
that link would be gone
because you chose to make that link away at 10:30.
I feel like I'm just probably overwhelming people
with all these details.
But again, this is just like
to familiarize you with everything
and then the CTL can help you.
But as a student, I would then click begin
and this is what it looks like.
So the Brooklyn Borough of New York City
was previously known as,
what? I guess I have to,
question number one,
doesn't seem to be formatting correctly,
I don't know why.
All right, question number one.
Let me just see what question number two looks like,
it's a saving answer.
Seems to be something kind of screwy,
question is unanswered,
okay, yeah, I'm trying to answer it.
I'm not seeing where to type,
maybe it's invisible.
Oh, there it is, okay.
So you can't really see in Blackboard anymore
where the fields are,
I hate that they're like so pale
but anyway, I'm gonna say, I don't know what it was,
I'll just put in some King County or something.
So that's a fill in the blank
and it's barely able to tell where that is.
So now I'm gonna say save,
now it's happy, it's gonna save
and I can go to question two.
It says I have an hour and eight minutes remaining.
So it lets the student know that the timer's going down.
Put these in order of the Harry Potter
so I can say, let's see.
"The Chamber of Secrets" I think was one.
You know what I mean?
You can go through, I don't remember what's what,
but I think that was the last one,
I don't know.
Anyway, so you can go through
and answer every question one by one
and then up here, you can see all the questions of the test
and you can see whether you've completed them or not.
I don't know what happens
if you jump to question three,
you can then answer it.
Question number three, student seven, save my answer.
It makes that connection with the internet,
it tells me which questions, you know,
like say I skipped that one
because I want to think about it more,
but I'm worried about my time.
So I'm just gonna go past it
and make sure I get these other ones answer that I know.
And then it's now saved
so it shows you everyone that saved.
Because I didn't prohibit backtracking,
I can go back and look at question one again
and I can review what I did.
I can go back and finish this unfinished one
and I can skip around that way
and it tells me what I've answered or not.
So that's what it looks like to students.
If I try to at the very bottom close window
it's gonna probably give me a warning.
The changes you made might not be saved, that's fine.
If I exit the preview now
If I go down to grade center.
Once you deploy it,
that's the point where the the grade center,
oh, this is not good.
-: Edit mode is off.
-: Oh, did you notice though
that I still had my student groups down there?
-: So anyway, yeah, that was weird.
Oh yeah, so, all right.
So edit mode on.
And if I go down to the grade center,
once you deploy it there's a column
that's automatically added to the grade center.
That's me Ines Berrizbetia preview user.
And you can scroll over to see
where the test showed up here
and that little icon, if you hover over it
a little thing pops up to tell you what it means,
attempt is in progress
meaning I haven't really finished it.
So if a student leaves their test without finishing it
it's going to look like that.
And if the whole day is passed
and you can go in and you can look at what they did
and you can look at the attempt,
here's her attempt.
What did she do?
She's answered some questions.
Oh, look at that I got it right.
And then you can see that there are no answers
given in these other ones,
but I can go through and see
if she's answered all the questions
and just forgot to save it or something.
And what I can do is go to,
I'm not sure where this is again now, but.
-: So when it's done and graded
what shows up in the grade center
is the percent correct?
-: Right.
-: Once you do a grade curve,
you can add your own column
and enter A, B, C, D for that percent correct.
-: If you wanna use letter grades, you could.
-: You can program it so it would.
-: Yeah, yeah, you can do that.
And if I go to full grade center
and then go back to that column and I click edit
all these options here which I won't get into all of them
but down here is this one called edit column information.
And it basically tells me a few things about the column.
One is the score.
I could just give the score
which could be 29 points or something.
I can't remember what it was,
or I could put a letter grade.
-: Got you, so actually if you do a curve
rather than a rigid grading scheme,
letter grading scheme at the outset
it's probably better to have it display the score
rather than the percent.
And then I can imagine you could program this
for Blackboard to convert that score to a letter grade
according to the curve that you program.
-: Well, I'm not really sure exactly about the curve business
but that might be something
that you could consult with us on individually
and certainly the Blackboard administrator would know
even Justin Schimmel might know,
but as far as I,
I don't know if you have a huge class.
-: Well, over 100 students.
-: Okay, so it's not something
that you probably wanna enter everyone's grade
into a blank column manually,
but in the grade center.
So if this is the their earned grade
as Blackboard computes it,
you could hide this column from students for the moment.
You could make a new column,
call it exam one final grade.
This would be the one
where you're gonna have your modified,
value must be provided.
So I'm gonna say points possible.
I don't know exactly what it would be,
but I'm just gonna say, submit,
and then it's gonna appear over here.
I could download this column into Excel
and calculate this and upload it,
with something there.
I don't exactly know how we would approach it
but that's how you could do it.
I don't know that many people
that have been grading on a curve in Blackboard, but.
-: That's fine.
I feel like I have some direction, thank you.
-: Yeah, sure.
Okay, so that's it.
That's making the test,
importing questions from Word document
and deploying the test.
And I think we've definitely gone over time.
So I apologize for that.
And some people have left,
but if you have any questions
I do have a console I have to get to.
I'm grateful that you came
and I think we have a survey we're sending out,
I'm not sure if that's going out on the Blackboard courses
or if it's just the other courses
but if you do get it, please fill it out.
It will be sent to you.
And for now, I'm just gonna say thanks for coming
and contact us with any questions
for setting up your own test for yourself, okay?
-: Thank you Ines, Thank you, Justin.
-: You're very welcome.