Quercus Updates

In this Weekly Update:

1. Canvas Updates
2. This Week's Faculty Question

Canvas Updates

This week's update highlights even more new features from the Canvas release from October 16, 2021, including: 

1. Course Notification Customization

You can now customize your notification preferences for individual courses directly from your main Account Notifications page, without having to access the course-level Notifications page for each course. If you have active course enrollments, you'll see a drop-down menu with the name of each course. You can use this menu to navigate between your courses and set specific notification options for each course.

Note: Account-level notifications apply to all your courses. If you change a notification setting in a specific course, that course notification setting will override notifications set in your Account Settings (but only for that specific course).

For more information on managing your account-level and course-level notifications in Quercus, please review the following Canvas guides:

• How do I manage my Canvas notification settings as an instructor?
• How do I manage notifications for a single course as an instructor?

2. Microsoft Immersive Reader 

You can now make text more accessible and easier to read in Quercus by enabling the Microsoft Immersive Reader in your Quercus Account Settings. Once enabled, the Reader is supported in the following areas of your course: Individual Assignments, Pages, and the Syllabus. In these areas, you'll see the Microsoft Immersive Reader button in the page header. 

For more information on using the Microsoft Immersive Reader in Quercus, please review the Canvas guide:

• How do I use the Microsoft Immersive Reader in a course as an instructor?

3. Rich Content Editor Accessibility Checker Notifications

As of mid-October, Accessibility Checker Notifications have been enabled for all Quercus courses. Any accessibility issues detected within the Rich Content Editor now display an indicator, making easier to identify and address these issues. The screenshot below shows the indicator on a course Home Page. To view and address the accessibility issues detected, simply select the Accessibility Checker icon and follow the recommendations.

For more information on using the Accessibility Checker, please review the Canvas guide: How do I use the Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor as an instructor?

For information on creating accessible content in Quercus, please review the General Accessibility Design Guidelines document.

This Week's Faculty Question

Q: I used the Copy to function to send a quiz from my 2020 course to my 2021 course, but when I open the copied Quiz it has no questions in it. It has the overall structure of the quiz I copied but all the questions are missing. Is there a way to copy the quiz along with all the questions?

A: From your description of what happened when you tried to copy the quiz from one course to another, it's likely that the original quiz had questions that were linked to a question bank. In order to successfully copy such a quiz from one course to another you need to also copy the question bank(s) containing the questions. For complete step-by-step instructions, please have a look at our guide:

• How can I copy a quiz with a linked question bank from one course to another?

Have a Quercus (or EdTech) question? Please contact FASE's EdTech Office.