Set up the assessment schedule

In Administration, go to the Assessment tab. The procedure to set up the assessment schedule is similar to setting up lectures.

Add your assessment schedule by clicking Add new.

There are many options to customize your assessments:

• Assessment title (required) - Name of the assessment
  
• Type (required) - Select between a self-test, exam, assignment, or presentation. Self-tests are typically ungraded and great for self-study.
• Team (optional) - For group assessments
• Graded (optional) - Allows you to make an assessment count towards the final grade, and to assign a weight to the assessment (the final grade will be calculated based on the sum of all assessment weights)
• Passing threshold (optional) - The grade percentage required to pass the assessment
• Maximum attempts (required) - The maximum number of tries students are allotted for the assessment
• Duration (Min) (optional) - Set a time limit, in minutes, for the students to complete the assessment once it is opened
• Link to lecture (optional) - Connect the assessment to a specific lecture; at the end of the respective lecture, students will see a direct link to test their knowledge in the assessment
• Publication date (required) - When the students can view the assessment in the summary list of all assessments‍
• Start date (required) - When students can access the assessment and start answering the questions
• End date (optional) - When the assessment is no longer accessible (questions are no longer shown)
• Manual grading (optional) - Check this when you will manually grade each student's assessment (currently only available for presentations)

Add as many assessments as your course schedule requires. I’ll quickly add a few assessments.

Assessments are listed as unpublished when the publish dates are set in the future.

Assign content to the assessments

All assessments are created in the authoring tool CREO. When we create new assessments, we need to make sure we assign the content to the appropriate Project, which is the course name. The file name is for reference only - we will assign the file to a specific assessment in the assessment schedule afterwards.

Feel free to customize your assessment as much as possible. You can include informational welcome text and rules on the Introduction tab. Then include as many questions as you would like on the Questions tab. See other tutorials for detailed instructions on how to create specific question types.

After we are finished creating our assessment, we deploy it to SYLVA by clicking the paper airplane icon on the main toolbar at the top.

A pop-up window will open. Select the relevant assessment from the assessment schedule we previously made to assign the new assessment content. Then click OK.

Accepting proposals and publishing assessments

After we deploy the assessment, a preview of the assessment is opened in the browser.

We call this a proposal so that you can preview the content before confirming the assessment for your course. Similarly for courseware, you and your colleagues can send several proposals.

At the bottom of the preview, you can reject or accept the proposal. If you are unhappy with the proposal because of a mistake or you want the content to be revised, click Reject this proposal. If the content is according to your expectations, click Accept this proposal. It is possible to review, accept, or reject past proposals anytime in Administration (as long as they haven‘t started yet).

After accepting a proposal, the assessment is published based on the assessment schedule dates. The students will be able to view the assessment listed under their Assessments tab based on the Publish date.

The students can only open and start the assessment based on the Start date.

In the below example, the students can see the entire assessment schedule since the publish dates have already passed.

Recap

We reviewed how to set up an assessment schedule and went through the different options to customize each assessment. After creating a basic assessment in the authoring tool CREO, we then assigned the content to the corresponding assessment. The additional step of previewing and accepting the content proposal helps us confirm the accuracy of the content before we publish it according to the assessment schedule.