Assessments

With VidaNovaVLE™, you can assess your learners’ understanding with formative or summative online assessments (quizzes, unit tests, self-tests, exams, etc.) through the Assessment activity. With over 15 different question types (from multiple choice, fill in the blank, true/false, essay, and short answer, to more complex drag and drop into text or onto an image and calculation question types), users with permission to create questions can populate a question bank. Each question type has a list of unique settings and options that impact how the question behaves and how the system should grade it.

From the question bank, you can see a list of questions in the bank, along with their type, name and id number, status (draft or ready to use), version number, who created it and when, and whether there are any internal comments. You can also access several question actions, such as duplicate, preview, view question history, export a question, etc. The bank also shows the question’s facility index (average percentage score of all versions used in all assessments using the question) and discrimination index (how well the question assesses learners) and, based on these statistics, indicates whether the question requires a review. Finally, you can see the number of times the question has been used and optionally view those assessments and the number of attempts at the question. 

Questions are associated with a hierarchical category structure correlating to contexts in the platform that, in combination with roles and their permissions, assists with question bank oversight and permits multi-faculty collaboration on question creation and finalization.

VidaNovaVLE™’s abundant assessment settings allow for a customized approach to the delivery of each assessment, including:

• Timing: set the time frame during which learners can attempt the assessment and set whether or not to apply a time limit, which provides a countdown timer, and then specify your preferred behavior when that time limit is up (auto submit, allow a grace period, or choose not to count attempts that are not submitted before the time limit ends)
• Attempts: allow learners multiple attempts at a formative assessment
• Grade to pass: set the grade required to pass the assessment, which can optionally restrict access to subsequent activities as needed.
• Grading method: choose to accept the highest grade, average grade, or first or last grade.
• Pagination and Navigation: select your layout and whether the learners have to work through questions sequentially or freely
• Question Behaviour: impact the learner experience as they interact with questions; for example:
  • Defer feedback until the entire assessment is submitted.
  • Provide immediate feedback during the assessment when questions are submitted.
    • Defer feedback or provide immediate feedback with Certainty-based marking (CBM)
      • With CBM, in addition to answering the question, the learner must also indicate how confident they are that they have responded correctly. The grading is adjusted based on the choice of certainty so that learners have to reflect honestly on their level of knowledge to get the best mark.
    • Allow learners multiple attempts at answering a question before moving on to the next question, with or without a penalty for incorrect answers.
    • Allow multiple attempts on the same question, with or without a penalty for an incorrect answer, and the opportunity for learners to check their answer and choose to try again if they answer incorrectly. The question may provide hints to help learners answer correctly on their next attempt. 
    • Optionally, choose to manually grade the entire assessment rather than only short answer or essay-type questions.
• Control what information learners see during an attempt at an assessment when multiple attempts are permitted, immediately after the assessment, later when the assessment is still open, and after the assessment has closed.
  • For each of the above time frames, you can choose what the learners should see, from permitting them to see some, all, or none of the various options. Learns can see their response to each question, whether their answers are correct or incorrect, their marks and total grade for the assessment, question feedback, and more.
• Security: require Safe Exam Browser, integrate with Respondus (if your institution has a contract with them), require a password to attempt an assessment, or restrict access to an assessment to particular subnets on the Local Area Network (LAN) or Internet by specifying a comma-separated list of partial or full IP addresses.
• Accommodations: adjustments can be made to the open and close dates, time limit, and the number of attempts for particular learners and groups of learners. You can also set a distinct password for particular learners and groups of learners to restrict access to the quiz to specific learners.

VidaNovaVLE™’s Assessment activity and question bank functionality is extensive, top-of-the-line, and should support any institution’s assessment delivery and performance tracking needs. If there is something we haven’t mentioned above that your institution requires, please reach out to us and let us know so we can work to ensure VidaNovaVLE™’s Assessment activity meets your needs.

Oh, and we haven’t even gotten into leveraging our Taxonomy Management module to visualize learner performance via the Assessment activity…stay tuned!