iCollege Updates for July 2021

The new assignment creation experience, which is currently available as an opt-in feature in iCollege, now supports the alignment of Assignments to Categories. You can add new or existing Assignment Categories when creating or editing an Assignment in the New Assignment Creation Experience.

For more information on this feature, please review the New Assignment Creation information from December 2020. Please note the New Assignment Creation experience will become the only option for creating assignments after Fall 2021.

To differentiate from the similar generic download icon, the external learning tool icon is now changing to a building block icon. This new icon better represents the building block approach of external resource functionality.

This feature enables you to better organize your gradebook by adding categories to text, calculated, and formula grade items. This improved organization does not impact the calculation of the category these grade items are in.

To reduce redundancy in the Quizzes tool, the Introduction field is being phased out. In this release, when you create and/or edit a quiz, the Introduction field is no longer available.

If any quiz previously had text in the Introduction field, on clicking Edit, the text is automatically appended to the Description field. A message appears indicating that these two fields have been merged. You can review the modified quiz description prior to saving the quiz.

The Reports Setup tab that was previously located in the Quiz Edit window has now moved to the context menu (dropdown arrow) for your quiz. When opening this menu, you will now see Setup Reports. Additionally, the reports option that you use to view your quiz reports has been renamed to View Reports.

When setting an enforced time limit for a quiz, you can now set the grace period for a quiz to 0 minutes, in place of the default grace period setting of 5 minutes. Entering a 0 minute grace period flags the quiz attempt as exceeded immediately when the quiz time limit is reached by the learner. Quiz attempt logs display when the learner attempt exceeds the regular time limit, grace period time limit or any extended time limit. Grace period of 0 minutes can be set for quizzes with special access restrictions as well. 

To support instructors who need to manually score questions within quizzes, updates have been made to the quiz status and grading workflow. Quizzes that contain questions that need to be manually scored (such as Written Response questions) AND that have the “Allow attempt to be set as graded immediately upon completion” option disabled now have a Pending Evaluation status beside the quiz attempt on the Grade Quiz page. When grading a quiz attempt with unevaluated questions, you can now select Pending evaluations in the Question View drop-down menu to filter for only the questions that require manual evaluation, and you can also filter the Users tab by status. 

The view of Assignments during grading is being updated with a more modern interface.

Learner Submission List

The first improvement will be on the Learner Submission List. This is the list you see when first entering the evaluation experience for an Assignment. It lists the files that the learner has submitted to the assignment, along with the time, date, and any comments entered by the learner for each submission.

In the new Learner Submission List, files are grouped by submission with each submission displaying comments, files, indicators to show lateness, flags, and evaluation status. The updated list design means you can see more files on the screen at once, while making it easier to find unevaluated submissions or files that need their attention.

Inline Rubric Component

The next improvement is the Inline Rubric component. Instead of always opening in another window or dialog, it now expands down the evaluation panel, allowing you to see both the rubric and the submission at the same time. If you are using a more complex rubric, you will be able to pop out the rubric into a larger view using the button in the top right of the component. 

Submission File Picker

For Assignment submissions that include multiple files, you can quickly select and view other files submitted by a learner without having to go back to the learner submissions list.

A new Toolbar is coming to iCollege in all locations where text can be entered by Instructors or Students. This toolbar retains all of the features you use today although they have been rearranged. Most notably, the Insert Stuff button along with icons for adding links and images have been moved to the center-right of the toolbar.