Last month, Eyde Olson, senior instructional designer, shared how low-stakes quizzes can help students and instructors. For instructors, using these types of quizzes helps them understand how their teaching is working. For students, these in-class quizzes can provide an incentive for attending in addition to helping them learn and practice new concepts, knowledge, and skills.
However, creating sets of questions, especially large sets of questions that would allow for the use of randomization and support practice sessions for students as a form of study, can be prohibitively time consuming. To address this issue, the Center for Transformative Teaching recommends using the recently updated Machine Graded Question agent.
The MGQ agent was created using the enterprise version of Microsoft Copilot available to all UNL users through their Microsoft 365 accounts. You may have noticed the Copilot buttons in Outlook and other applications. You know you are using the enterprise version when you see the green check mark in the upper right corner of the chat interface.
The enterprise version does not train the model with the prompts that are entered or the data to which it has access, unless you intentionally act to give feedback and choose to include information. What this means is that instructors may upload course content, such as their PowerPoint slides, along with their prompts and generate quiz questions centered on specific course content.
To further aid this process, the AI to machine-graded questions process that has been described in prior editions of Teacher Connect has been refined and is now accessible via the MGQ Copilot agent.
The agent will ask users to provide information about the course that it needs to generate the questions. Users may also supply course documents if desired to increase the specificity of the questions. The agent will then generate the specified number of questions, displaying them in a table for previewing, and supplying them in a downloadable .CSV file. The downloaded file can be used with K-State's Classic to QTI converter tool to create a .zip package that can be imported directly into Canvas quizzes.
Visit the MGQ Copilot webpage for step-by-step instructions and links to helpful tools.
More details at: https://teaching.unl.edu/ai/mgq-agent/