The Network is an organization-wide shared activities area that lets instructors easily share material with colleagues. If you create activities, quizzes, or surveys that you think other instructors might find useful, you can share them here. Or if your students rave about the Quia activities another teacher created, you can go to the Network to copy them into your account and adapt them to your own needs.

In addition, the Network allows you to administer tests across an entire organization and aggregate, or collect, results from all instructors' students. You can compare averages by class or instructor and analyze how individual students in the organization perform.

Using the Network

If the administrator for your organization has created groups, such as School and Department, you can find colleagues' activities by expanding Department, then expanding the department in which they teach (for example, Math). If these groups do not exist or are empty, you can find your colleagues by expanding the Entire Network folder, where every instructor in your organization is listed.

To expand a folder, click it. Quia displays folders that contain shared content in bold text. When you expand the folder of an instructor who has shared content, you will see a list showing all of his or her shared quizzes, activities, and surveys.

Quizzes

When you share a quiz on the Network, you can collect results from students in other instructors' classes. Similarly, the quiz creator collects the results of quizzes you see on the Network. This makes the Network a simple way to administer a quiz to all of the students in your organization and keep results sorted by instructor or class.

You'll notice that many of the links and icons in the quizzes list are grayed-out on the Network when you first open it. That's because you haven't yet assigned the quiz to your students, so you cannot send the quiz via e-mail or view its results. Click the Assign link for the quizzes you want your students to take and Quia will automatically activate these icons.

To assign a quiz from the Network to your students, click the Assign link for it. Quia will instantly generate a URL for the quiz. You can change other distribution settings, like access dates or secret word. Each instructor who assigns the quiz will receive a unique URL, so you can limit the quiz to only your classes even though other instructors are giving the same quiz at the same time - their students access the same material from a different URL.

You can add a quiz from the Network to your account by clicking the icon for it. Quia will add it to your account and prompt you to assign it to your classes.

Once you have assigned a quiz, you can do almost everything you would with your own quizzes: grade students' results, view reports analyzing students' performance, e-mail a link to the quiz to your students, print the quiz, or export student results. Because another instructor is managing the quiz and collecting results, you cannot edit it. To customize your own version, copy the quiz to your account. Quia will display it in your My Quizzes list alongside quizzes you have created. You can edit the copy. The original quiz creator will no longer collect quiz results.

Activities and Surveys

You can interact with activities and surveys on the Network in the same way you interact with your own material. Click the URL below an activity or survey to open it, and click to send an e-mail with a link to the activity to a friend or to your students. You can also add an activity or survey to your account by clicking the icon.

You cannot edit other instructors' material. If you want to adapt their activities to your own needs, click next to an activity to copy it to your account. The copy will have its own URL, and Quia will display it in your My Activities or My Surveys list, where you can edit it, e-mail the new link to your students, or assign it to your class.

Sharing material on the Network

To share the content you have created on your organization's Network, select the check boxes in the Other column that correspond to the activities, quizzes, or surveys you want to share. In the Other actions menu, choose Sharing: on under Network options. If you later decide you want to stop sharing material, select the items you no longer want to share and choose Sharing: off from the Other actions menu.

When you share material on the Network, any updates you make to the quiz, activity, or survey you share are reflected in the Network copy, and if you delete the material from your account, Quia removes it from the Network. The Updated column on the Network shows when a quiz, activity, or survey was last edited.

Administering quizzes over the Network

If you share a quiz over the Network, you will automatically collect results of all the students who take the quiz in other instructors' classes. This makes it easy to administer a school-wide assessment or compare the success of different teaching approaches for a given unit. Reports and grading clearly differentiate between your students and other instructors' students, so you can continue to manage your own class while collecting results across your organization.

To notify instructors that they should give the quiz to their students, you can send an e-mail from the Network. Click e-mail next to the appropriate group or groups of instructors.

Be sure to inform instructors that they should assign the quiz directly from the Network (by clicking the Assign link or clicking the icon to add the quiz to their account) rather than creating their own copy. Quia will generate a unique URL for each instructor who assigns the quiz, and you will collect all students' results. Any edits you make will show up in each instructor's version. (If the instructor copies it, the quiz is his or her own; you do not collect the results, and your changes are independent from any edits the instructor may make to his or her copy.)

As students take the quiz, both you and their instructor can see and grade their results by clicking on the Grade link from the Quizzes page. You can sort students by instructor or by class to make grading easier.

When you're done collecting results, click to generate powerful summary reports that analyze scores by class, instructor, or both, comparing results across different groups.