The October 2009 Patch to CoursePlus
CoursePlus was updated on Thursday, October 22, with some significant new features. The focal point of this release is the update to Quiz Generator 5, which brings CoursePlus in line with online courses at JHSPH in terms of what can be done inside of the Quiz Generator. Highlights of the new Quiz Generator include:
Multiple Choice Questions with Multiple Answers
- Multiple choice questions can now require that multiple responses be selected by the student. Partial credit can be awarded if the student makes a partial set of correct matches, or you can require that all responses be selected correctly in order to get credit for the question.
Rich Text Editor for Essay Question Answers
- Students now answer essay questions using a rich text editor so that they can create numbered or bulleted lists, add text formatting, and have at their fingertips basic word processing tools while they create their answers.
Revamped Quiz Setup Screen and New Options
- The quiz setup screen has been simplified and reorganized to make it easier to see how your quiz is set up.
- Post-quiz screen and email notification options now have a preview tool so you can see what students will see after they take a quiz.
- You can choose to have the full set of student responses to a quiz emailed to you as soon as the student submits their answers to a quiz.
- You can now display custom instructional text after the students submit their answers to a quiz.
Answer Key Changes
- Students who took the quiz now see their answers inline with the correct answers in the answer key.
- You can specify a minimum passing grade which the student must achieve in order to view the answer key.
- You can let students see the answer key before manually graded questions in the quiz have been scored.
Special Permissions Changes
- You can specify that specific students get more time than others to complete the quiz.
- You can specify both dates and times when you grant special permissions to take a quiz.
Scoring Changes
- You can change the score of an automatically scored question. A history is kept of all changes made to question scores.
- You can opt to give all students full credit for a question, even if students originally got that question wrong.
- Scores for each question and the overall quiz score can be exported to Excel.
- You can recalculate an individual student's score on a quiz, or recalculate the scores of everyone in the class.
- When a question is removed from a quiz, all scores are automatically recalculated.
Changes to Emailing Results
- You can set up the quiz so that results are held until you decide that the results should be sent to students.
- You can send or re-send results to individual students, multiple students, or all students in the class from the same page.
There are many other changes to the Quiz Generator. You can see a complete "What's New" list when you access the Quiz Generator in your CoursePlus site.
The other significant addition in this release is to the Online Library. The Online Library will now automatically display a simple movie player for any .flv (Flash video) or QuickTime (.mov, .mp4) movie file which is uploaded to the Online Library. Previously, if faculty or editors uploaded a Flash video in to their Online Library, most students could not play the file. That's because Flash video requires some kind of Flash movie in which the video is played back. Flash videos won't play back on their own, and require a special player. The Online Library now takes care of this for you.
Keep in mind that although the Online Library now has enhanced video playback capabilities, it is still the responsibility of the individual who uploads the video in to the Online Library to secure copyright clearance before posting the movie to the Online Library.
If you have any questions or feedback about the new features in this update to CoursePlus, please let us know!