Notes on the D2L/Brightspace New Quiz Creation Experience

D2L is changing the user interface for creating and editing quizzes. This is part of some ongoing work they are doing to modernize their interface and hopefully make it more approachable while still providing existing functionality.

You will see this change enforced in late July. As mentioned, much of the functionality of the existing quiz experience is present, but may be found in a different place or be worded differently.

This page provides a full overview and you can watch this video. There is also a walkthrough to create a quiz with the new experience. You can also schedule a 1:1 consultation if you have further questions.

Replacing Tabs with Accordions

One of the goals of the new experience is to ensure that everything is on the same page. That means that restrictions, special access, display options (like paging) and feedback are all on the main quiz page, underneath the accordions on the right hand side. We recommend you take some time to expand these and see what options are available.

Some options are also not displayed if they do not apply to the current configuration. For example, the options to display page headers and footers is only displayed if one of the options to split questions onto separate pages is chosen. If you are expecting particular settings to be available check that the corresponding settings are already set.

Grade Out Of

The grade out of options now work the same way they work in setting up an assignment. By default quizzes are not attached to the gradebook, but you have the option to create a new item in the grade book, or connect to an existing item. New items are created with an automatic 10% weight and if a grade book item exists with the same name, a duplicate item will be created. We strongly recommend creating all items in the gradebook first and choosing Edit or Link to Existing, then Link to an existing grade item to ensure that your gradebook continues to show correct information to your students.

Create New and Add Existing Have Swapped Sides

You will notice that the two buttons in the middle to add questions to the quiz are reversed from the old interface. The add existing button is now blue and on the left and the create new question button is grey and on the right.

Making Quizzes Visible

The control for visibility is now at the panel at the bottom, next to the Save and Close buttons. You can also still control visibility for the quiz list view, through the context menu, the same way you could with the old experience.

Time Limit

A “No Time Limit” option has been added to quizzes and is now the default.

Page Breaks

It is no longer possible to set arbitrary page breaks. The only options are “No Page Breaks” “1, 5 or 10 Questions Per Page” or “Add Page Breaks after each Section”. Note: if users launch an existing quiz in the new quiz experience, question paging is retained with the “Use legacy paging” option until manually overridden in the new experience.

Publishing Grades

The options to publish results to students is now checked by default. The option to having grades automatically populated in the gradebook will not be checked by default, if you have connected the quiz to an existing gradebook item. Please make sure you look at these options before you make your quiz visible to your students.

Submission Views

Submission views have been renamed to Quiz Results Displays. There are five basic views available from a drop down menu, but if you have a specific view in mind or you want to change the student’s view after a time, you can customize the views. Some of the wording about viewing questions has changed as well.