Online Quiz Tools Now Available

The Centre for the Support of Teaching, working with Computing and Network Services, has developed a general-purpose online quiz tool for York instructors - YQuiz.

YQuiz is currently in use for two online tutorials: The Academic Integrity Tutorial and the Library Research Roadmap at http://www.yorku.ca/tutorial/. This site also contains more information on YQuiz and instructions for using the tool. A quiz is under development for the third online tutorial, on Pre-Writing Strategies. For more information on the online tutorials, see the article in this newsletter.

YQuiz features

YQuiz is designed for simple online quizzes and self-tests. It's not intended to replace more sophisticated formal testing tools already in use at York (such as WebCT Quiz); rather, it is a tool for "participation activities".

YQuiz supports three question types (multiple choice, true/false, and matching answers), and allows three levels of feedback (for a correct answer, for an incorrect answer, and for the overall quiz score). Students can attempt a quiz multiple times and see their score. They can also check which of their answers are correct or incorrect, if this option is allowed by the author of the quiz. Quiz availability can also be limited by date and time.

An important feature is quiz "sections", which can be used to group related questions together with a common heading and introductory material, and/or to randomly present a specific number of questions chosen from a larger set.

If desired, quizzes can be set up to require Passport York authentication and to track student participation, allowing the faculty instructor to obtain class-based reports online.

Faculty who want to use any of the existing online tutorials, with quizzes where available, as a participation requirement in their class are welcome to do so. To track student participation you can have your students print out the results page and bring it to class or attach it to an assignment, or check your class participation statistics online. If you wish to check your course statistics for the online tutorials you can arrange to do so by sending a request to cst@yorku.ca, indicating which tutorial you would like to be able to monitor, and including your course code(s) and your Passport York ID. Course statistics can be tracked for any grouping known to the Student Information System, including lectures, seminars, and tutorials.

To try the quizzes yourself, simply move to the end of either the Academic Integrity Tutorial or the Library Research Roadmap.

Coming Soon: YQuiz Writer

The final phase of the YQuiz tool, YQuiz Writer will provide a simple, flexible tool to allow instructors to create, edit and manage quizzes for their courses using their York Central Web account. YQuiz writer will also allow faculty to provide different quizzes to different segments of a class. It is expected that YQuiz Writer will be available later this fall.

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