Hiding Content When Student Takes a Quiz?

baseballphd420

Situation:  New user and I'm teaching an online, asynchronous class.  Students can log in whenever to do their work.

I'm planning to give a quiz, but I am concerned about students' wandering eyes when they don't know the answer to a question and try to look back through the content.  Does Canvas make everything not visible/accessible when a student is taking a quiz?  If so - is it automatic, or is there a setting/trick I have to go for?

Right now, I see no such route, and with the asynchronous nature of the course, I'd like students to be able to take the quiz within a 12-hour window.

Is my only course of action just to unpublish things for that 12-hour period?

DecoyLex

Hi Robert,

The short answer is no--Canvas doesn't provide an out-of-the-box way for you to hide content from a student taking a quiz. Even if it did, depending on your school's settings, students could simply download the entire course as a eBook and reference it that way.

Depending on your school, you may have proctoring tools available, such as Proctorio or Respondus LockDown Browser. These tools can help prevent students from opening up course materials during a quiz in addition to preventing them from searching for materials on other sites, but they come with privacy and legal implications that you may need to consider, depending on your school and legal jurisdiction. Do note, however, that your school may require special training for these tools and so they may not be enabled in courses by default (mine certainly does). Moreover, these tools aren't a silver bullet to prevent wandering eyes or more intentional academic dishonesty.

If these tools aren't available to you, or if the privacy/legal implications outweigh their value, the most reliable option would be to redesign your quizzes to assume open-note and open-book. Generally, this means moving away from simple reading comprehension/memorization questions (e.g., what are the five parts of a speech introduction) to more application/analysis questions (Label the five parts of this speech's introduction: ...). For ideas about the kinds of questions test these higher levels of thinking, look into using Bloom's Taxonomy verbs as starting points. Alternatively, though this does definitely require more instructional design and grading work on your end, you can migrate your quizzes to using more authentic assessments such as portfolios, essays, and presentations.

I hope this helps!