by Amanda Brown (amariebr@umich.edu)

Each year, thousands of students take the Spanish Placement Exam at the University of Michigan. At first, the exam was proctored in-person during freshman and new student orientation. The Office of New Student Programs (ONSP), though, eventually requested a version of the exam that could be taken at home. With a remote exam, instead of spending time taking tests at orientation, students could be exploring and learning about U-M’s campus.

“If the Spanish Placement Exam was going to happen online,” says Senior Associate Librarian Diana Perpich, explaining the decision-making process behind the shift to an online exam,  “it should take advantage of the online testing tools already supported on campus. At first, that was CTools, then it was Canvas.” CTools was U-M’s former learning management system (LMS). Today, U-M uses Canvas as its LMS.

When the University adopted Canvas as the official campus learning management system in 2015, the Spanish Placement Exam that had been hosted on CTools had to be migrated to Canvas.

“There was a business need to move the exam to Canvas,” explains Cathy Crouch, a Business Systems Analyst Senior for the Teaching and Learning Team at U-M’s Information and Technology Services (ITS).

Moving the exam from CTools to Canvas, though, would require collaboration across a number of departments. While the exam is owned by the Romance Languages and Literatures department, it is supported by three additional units: the Language Resource Center, U-M Library, and ITS. All four units needed to collaborate for the migration to be successful.

“The Language Resource Center has done a lot of instructional design work. In this case, we were able to look at the previous version of the Spanish Placement Exam and find language improvements and workflow efficiencies in the new online environment,” explained  Instructional Designer Phill Cameron of the LRC’s role in moving the exam to Canvas. “Putting something into modules is an online workflow for a student. But, we also had to, for example, design a workflow that allows students to test their computing setup, so we made sure that workflow is functional, and then worked to fit it smoothly into their overall Spanish Placement Exam experience.”

Cathy Crouch detailed the role of ITS in the project: “ITS brought to the exam a way to administer it through Canvas and then deliver a results report to academic advisors that can be used to place students in the appropriate course.”

Diana Perpich elaborated on what she brought to the project from the U-M Library as well: “In the original iteration, I brought a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to the project. There were things that CTools could do, and things that Spanish needed, and I figured out a way to trick CTools into doing what Spanish needed. Canvas still uses the same trick to report subscores.”

The value of collaboration in this project was highlighted by members of all departments involved. Phill Cameron explained, “It made sense to bring everyone together, so that nobody had to learn a whole new skill set…The nice thing about collaboration is that we got to see a larger picture of what is happening across the University, and forming close relationships with other departments was very enlightening.”