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CheckIt Dashboard

A platform for authoring free and open randomized exercises for practice and assessment.

Exercise banks are hosted for the public using the CheckIt Viewer, available at https://checkit.clontz.org.

Running the CheckIt Dashboard

The CheckIt Dashboard runs completely inside your web browser, powered by CoCalc.com. Open the template project and click the green "Open with one click!" button. (CoCalc trial accounts take some time to load and compute, so consider purchasing a CoCalc subscription if you like using CheckIt.)

Open dashboard.ipynb to get started. The dashboard contains instructions on previewing exercises to get a new randomly generated exercise, and building banks to get files for a bank that can be used with your LMS or the CheckIt Viewer.

Connect with the community

Our community of authors and developers is organized in the #checkit-app channel of the Mastery Grading Slack workspace. Come join us!

Using your bank with the CheckIt Viewer

Using custom generated banks with the CheckIt Viewer at https://checkit.clontz.org is not yet supported, but will be in the future. For now, contact Steven Clontz if you have a bank you'd like to share with the public on the Viewer.

Using your bank with Canvas

First use the dashboard to build a private version of the bank you wish to use with Canvas. The output from the dashboard will tell you where to browse using CoCalc's file manager to download canvas-outcomes.csv and canvas-qtibank.zip.

Instructions for uploading outcomes: community.canvaslms.com
Instructions for uploading QTI bank (exercises for use on quizzes): community.canvaslms.com.

Developing the CheckIt Dashboard

The following lines will get you set up to start developing. Note that the Jupyter notebook serving as the dashboard GUI changes every time it is used to save the latest output, so we want to ignore those changes in general.

git clone git@github.com:StevenClontz/checkit.git
git update-index --skip-worktree dashboard.ipynb

If the dashboard's underlying code needs to be updated, copy each Code cell to a new one (without running) and delete each old one for a clean result. Then do the following.

git update-index --no-skip-worktree dashboard.ipynb
git add dashboard.ipynb
git commit -m "Updated dashboard notebook."
git update-index --skip-worktree dashboard.ipynb

Why "CheckIt"?

This platform was known as "Mastr/MasterIt" in the past. While the exercise banks on this platform are generally designed with Mastery/Pointless Grading in mind, there's no hard-requirement that they be used for this purpose. But as Jean-Sébastien pointed out, "CheckIt" emphasizes the purpose of the platform: to check student understanding, while also reflecting the use of checkmarks in many outcomes-based grading systems.

An important note: CheckIt aims to provide instructors a tool to efficiently check students' understanding directly by quickly providing randomly-generated exercises that typically ask for full explanations rather than just typing in a "final answer"; there is no automatic grading of these exercises.