Any changes in your course examination that deviates from the information you provided in the study guide (course manual) should first be checked with your Programme Director or Director of Education. You cannot change the type of examination without express consent from the examinations board.

On this page:
Handing in assignments
Quizzes
Interactive options

Handing in assignments

Assignment in Canvas
The easiest way for students to submit work is by using Assignments. You can have students upload work in different formats, like Word-documents, PDFs, a text box, website-links, and even media recordings. For reading the submissions you can use SpeedGrader (see below) or download all submissions.

How to make an assignment in Canvas

Using SpeedGrader for feedback
After you have set up an assignment, you can use SpeedGrader for providing feedback on students’ submissions. This built-in tool allows you to highlight elements in the text, provide inline written comments, write overall comments, and you can even leave a voice or video recording.

How to use SpeedGrader

Rubrics
To make grading more consistent between different graders, to speed up grading, and to give students insight into how their grades were arrived at, you can consider adding a rubric to your assignment. Setting up a new rubric is a time investment, but if the rubric is used more often, it will save you a lot of time in the long run. Some things to be aware of:

• When you add a rubric to an assignment, students can also see it;
• After someone has started to use the rubric for grading, you cannot change it.

How to set up and add rubrics to an assignment
How to use rubrics for grading submissions

Read more about rubrics and how to make them in the TLC rubrics guide.

Quizzes

Canvas quizzes
You can use Canvas quizzes for closed-ended and short essay questions. This is useful for formative (practice) assessment. NB: do not use Canvas quizzes for summative assessment.

How to set up a quiz in Canvas

SOWISO
SOWISO can be used for (randomized) mathematics assessments. A number of basic courses are available and you can create your own assignments, but this is fairly involved and requires some practice.

Interactive options

Group assignments
Even though students might be working from home, that doesn’t mean that they cannot work together on an assignment. Most students are used to working together remotely already and will probably use channels they are used to. All UvA students can use Microsoft 365 for working together.

Microsoft Teams for staff  Microsoft Teams for students

In Canvas, you can set up a group assignment. This has a couple of benefits:

• Students get a separate work environment in Canvas in which they can make discussion boards, use conferences, and share documents;
• Only one student  from the group has to submit for all students of the group to see the teacher’s feedback;

It is important that students are divided into groups before handing in their assignment. There are different options for making groups: have them assign themselves, divide them manually, or divide them automatically.

How to make groups & group sets (for smaller courses this quite straight-forward, for larger courses, consider checking with your ICTO-support first)
How to set up a group assignment

Peer feedback assignments
Having students check their own and their peers’ work is a great way to have students learn from each other. The UvA offers two different tools for peer feedback in Canvas: Canvas Assignments and Peerceptiv Peer reviewPeerceptiv Peer Review.

Video assignments
Video assignments are a good option for online courses. The TLC Central page on creating video assignments gives helpful tips and a how-to video.