What’s new on Problem Roulette?

The number of students using Problem Roulette has moved to Group Study Mode to better inform student's use of Group Study.

The speed of Problem Roulette continues to improve, including adjustments to the Admin Console.

Bug fixes and interface improvements for this specialized study mode.

Adjustments provide a better representation of study volume in Exam Mode.

Performance improvements for course library and student dashboard and bug fixes.

Performance improvements and bug fixes.

Several backend upgrades combine to make the study session experience smoother and faster.

Problem Roulette is a more accessible tool with site-wide adjustments to buttons, links, and more.

Students will notice improvements to the way study volume is represented. For questions with multiple correct answers, they will find it easier to clearly see the answers they chose and compare their choices to the correct answers.

Subtle animation and a closeable side panel bring streaks into the study session experience. In Study Mode, students can open a new side panel to reveal their session streaks. Students with an active streak will be notified with a subtle animation and will see their active streak in the side panel.

When instructors add topics to exam dates in the Admin Console, students will be able to select an exam when they set up a study session, and the resulting session will include all topics associated with that exam.

Problem Roulette better handles questions with tables and other special formatting considerations in the Questions page of the Admin Console.

The team is thrilled to welcome Earth 222: Introductory Oceanography and PUBHLTH 500: Investigating Public Health Issues (Epidemiology) to Problem Roulette this term! Want your course to be the next new course on Problem Roulette? Contact problemroulette-support@umich.edu to get started.

Questions with math symbols have a new and improved look in study sessions and in the question preview for instructors.

Problem Roulette will filter out topics with no questions when listing the topics associated with an Exam Date for students.

Students are encouraged to take these research-backed study actions through visualizations on their dashboard and study session summaries, including the ability to earn badges for certain streak sizes and for milestones in the number of questions they have attempted in the course. Learn more about streaks and study volume.

It’s easier to find your way around Problem Roulette with new headers for both students and instructors. Students’ most important pages are one click away, and instructors can find everything they need for editing and viewing content in a single menu.

Problem Roulette’s personality shines in a new set of icons for the Last 3 Study Sessions on the Student Dashboard, clarifying the type and duration of each study session.

Study Reminders has a new look and expanded options. Students can choose reminders for a low, medium, and high grade boost based on the team’s latest research on study volume.

Students will notice upgrades to two key pages after their study sessions, including an updated look to match the rest of the site, the ability to search saved questions, the ability to study all saved questions in a course, and clearer designations of which questions were correct, incorrect, skipped, or had multiple correct answers within a study session.

The list of recent study sessions on the student dashboard now includes a button to review the Study Session Summary for each session.

From the Course Library, students can see all of the available courses on Problem Roulette and which courses they’ve studied before, and they can add and remove courses from their dashboard.

New on the Student Dashboard, Problem Roulette uses exam dates to show students how many days remain until their exam, what topics are on their exam, study tips, and a prompt to start a study session.

Problem Roulette can now support courses that aren’t tied to the traditional term structure, unlocking a variety of new use cases for the tool, including the incorporation of Problem Roulette into Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs.

When external users access Problem Roulette, they will not be able to see U-M courses in their Course Library.

Instructors will benefit from a clearer, more intuitive, and easy-to-use new design for the Permissions tab of the Admin Console.

Updates to the Study Tips page help students use Problem Roulette to practice the best study strategies known to research.

The team was delighted to welcome BIOLOGY 305 to Problem Roulette in Summer 2023. Want your course to be the next new course on Problem Roulette? Contact problemroulette-support@umich.edu to get started.

With so many major updates in this release, we want to hear from you. What’s working for you, what do you wish were different, what would you like to see that isn’t there yet? Tell us what you think.

The new Student Dashboard incorporates the latest research on study patterns to nudge students toward beneficial learning behaviors and better results on their exams. Upgrades include new visualizations of streaks and study volume, improved study reminders, a redesigned study session summary, added functionality for Exam Dates, and more.

Problem Roulette has been updated to the latest version of the Django web framework.

PUBHLTH 512: Principles Of Epidemiology For Public Health launched in Problem Roulette in the Winter 2023 term. Want your course to be the next new course on Problem Roulette? Contact problemroulette-support@umich.edu to get started.

Problem Roulette’s LTI integration has been updated to include support for LTI 1.3.

Team Members can add, edit, and delete topic groups and topics for exam dates from the Admin Console.

GF_Periodontics joined Problem Roulette in Winter 2023 as a new use case for the tool — instead of a single course, Periodontics students can use Problem Roulette to review content across their entire program of study to refresh knowledge or prepare for culminating exams. Want your course to be the next new course on Problem Roulette? Contact problemroulette-support@umich.edu to get started.

A new field in the Create Question and Edit Question forms provides a fixed set of tags to characterize questions as Factual, Conceptual, Procedural, or Metacognitive. This feature lays the groundwork for future research and student readiness metrics.

Team Members who choose to delete content will no longer be taking a permanent action. Instead, deleted content will remain archived and retrievable.

The Problem Roulette team was delighted to welcome BIOSTAT 501 during the Fall 2022 term. BIOSTAT 501 is the first online course to study with Problem Roulette and the first to add the tool to Coursera with our LTI integration. Want your course to be the next new course on Problem Roulette? Contact problemroulette-support@umich.edu to get started.

The Course Settings and User Permissions pages of the Admin Console are nicer to look at and easier to use than ever. Users have been relabeled Team Members for clarity.

The addition of this confirmation step gives Team Members peace of mind when emailing a Question Set to the enrolled students in your course.

Important Dates have been repurposed to Exam Dates in the Admin Console. Team Members can link topics to exam dates each term, and Problem Roulette will eventually use Exam Dates to develop smarter, more accurate topic proficiency estimates.

An update to Problem Roulette’s auto-enrollment feature laid the foundation to make Problem Roulette aware of term-specific enrollment information, such as which section of a course a student is enrolled in.

We’ve added our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to the footer of Problem Roulette.

An expanded question selection interface lets Team Members build custom Question Sets for their students with ease.

An updated design for answer choices in Problem Roulette helps students know when questions have one right answer or more than one right answer.

We’ve added new capabilities to the bulk edit feature! When you select multiple questions in the Admin Console, you can publish, unpublish, delete, or assign topics to all of them at once. You can also select multiple questions and update the question text for each one from the same page.

Problem Roulette is a more accessible tool with a larger font size that is easier to read and a color palette that passes the color contrast ratio test. This fresh color palette and a modern font bring new energy to your study sessions, while maintaining Problem Roulette’s classic aesthetic.

Performance upgrades for the PDF Exam Export and the Site Analytics page brought these newer features up to speed.

Improvements to the QTI import feature include setting the topic created on import to inactive, automatically pulling question titles from the LMS, and allowing for more flexibility in the name of the uploaded file.

When you save your edits to a question, Problem Roulette automatically returns you to the page of the question list that you were working from.

Editing questions just got a lot easier! Now you can select multiple questions in the Admin Console and publish, unpublish or delete all of them at once.

Superusers now have the ability to download a .csv file of all the questions in a course, a useful option for large-scale content initiatives. This feature is not available to instructors at this time.

The multipart question feature is now fully-functional! Both Study Mode and Exam Mode will respect the order of multipart questions, even if the student chooses a smaller number of questions for their study session.

We’ve made some quality improvements to the printable PDF download for practice exams.

Before deleting a topic, users will be prompted to reassign its questions to an active topic and can migrate questions in bulk.

The Problem Roulette team is thrilled to welcome a new computer science course for Winter 2022. EECS 203: Discrete Mathematics used our new QTI import feature to offer a starter set of over 200 questions. Want your course to be the next new course on Problem Roulette? Contact problemroulette-support@umich.edu to get started.

Instructors have a new option for importing questions to Problem Roulette themselves. In addition to .csv files, instructors can now import QTI .zip files in the Admin Console. This empowers instructors to easily import content downloaded from Canvas (and anywhere that will download .zip files in QTI version 1.2). For more information, check out our Instructor Toolkit.

Instructors have more flexibility around if and when students can see a histogram of how many students chose each answer option for a question. In addition to the existing option to “Display answer histogram after students answer a question,” instructors can now set a specific number of failed attempts after which to show the histogram. This option is available in the Settings tab of the Admin Console.

When selecting which topics to include in a study session in Study Mode, students will now see the average overall course accuracy for each topic, as well as the number of questions in each topic.

Problem Roulette now considers which questions a student has seen before when serving up random questions in Study Mode. Students will first see questions they’ve never seen before in any session for the course, followed by questions they’ve seen before but not in the current study session.

Students have more control over their studying with the ability to take a quiz from their Saved Questions. As students save questions in a study session, the quiz becomes automatically available in Exam Mode under “My Practice Exams.” Students can also start the quiz anytime from My Dashboard > Saved Problems > Study Saved Problems.

Students and instructors have a new option to download and/or print a practice exam. For students, the download option is available in the top right corner when taking a practice exam. Instructors can start the exam from the Exam Templates tab of the Admin Console and select Download from the top right corner.

Your study experience is faster than ever! Problem Roulette is running twice as fast thanks to a migration to a new database in the cloud.

Group Study Mode better facilitates ongoing study groups by allowing students to resume in-progress group study sessions. Students enrolled in multiple courses on Problem Roulette can also join a study session in another course without losing their current group session.

Students can now enjoy a dynamic new upgrade to Problem Roulette’s Exam Mode, including the ability to enter notes to themselves during a session as well as save questions to their dashboards for later review.

Problem Roulette’s student dashboard has a brand new design, including UI improvements and usability improvements such as the ability to filter, sort, and search saved problems.

Now available on the student dashboard, students can opt to have Problem Roulette email them regular study reminders to help reduce cramming and make studying a habit. Students can select one of five levels of engagement based on their preferences for the frequency of the reminders and the number of problems to study each time. From these reminder emails (or their dashboards), students can click into an auto-generated study session and work through the number of problems they specified.

Instructors have a new ability to show or hide inactive topics when editing questions. Courses now automatically default to hiding inactive topics, but instructors can change this in their Admin Console under Settings > General Options.

With this exciting new feature, exam dates and other important course milestones can inform the active/inactive status of topics and topic groups. Instructors can now add important dates to their course and link them to certain topics or groups, reducing student confusion around what to study and removing the need for instructors to manually activate topics as a course progresses.

Students who access Problem Roulette via their Canvas course are now conveniently directed to their specific course page to start studying.

Problem Roulette now preserves font size and formatting when importing new problems.

This latest improvement to our content pipeline allows bulk imports of multiple-choice quizzes stored in Canvas. Our current import record is 24 quizzes at once!

The Problem Roulette team is thrilled to welcome a new course from the School of Kinesiology. AES 220: Applied Human Physiology launched on Problem Roulette during the Winter 2021 term using our improved Canvas content import. Want your course to be the next new course on Problem Roulette? Contact problemroulette-support@umich.edu to get started.

Learn about the features and benefits of Problem Roulette in less than 3 minutes in this new promotional video created by our Software Portfolio Manager

Finding study partners in Problem Roulette is easier than ever. Students can now set their status to available or unavailable for Group Study invitations. When students create a Group Study session, they can see which other students are online and accepting invitations. Invited students are notified in-app if online and by email if offline.

When students finish a study session, they’ll be greeted with a new and improved summary of their studying, including their overall accuracy percentage, number of correct answers, duration of session, and a list of all of the problems they completed in the session. Students can filter the list by correct/incorrect answers and by topic, reveal the correct answer for problems they got wrong, and save problems to their dashboard to review later.

Problem Roulette now supports importing equation-heavy content through the use of Text2QTI, a tool that converts plain text files into Canvas-supported quiz files. If you are an instructor interested in using Problem Roulette with equations, please contact: problemroulette-support@umich.edu.

Students and instructors can now enjoy a fresh set of course icons designed and built for Problem Roulette by a student fellow.

Problem Roulette encourages students to use 4 of the best study strategies known to research. To help students make the most of those strategies, our Behavioral Science Team compiled a set of study tips, including tips for online classes and remote learning. Students and instructors can view those tips on our new Study Tips page.

Students and instructors can now enjoy Problem Roulette without needing to leave Canvas or other LTI integrated services. If you are an instructor interested in integrating your course please contact: problemroulette-support@umich.edu

This update introduces a new “adaptive question difficulty” option for courses on the platform. If an instructor chooses to enable this feature, Problem Roulette will adapt as a student progresses through a study session and provide them with subtle nudges toward easier or more difficult content to keep them engaged.

Students will now see “collections you might like” on the homepage. These collections of relevant questions are automatically generated using aggregated data.

Importing exams into Problem Roulette has never been easier. Our new content pipeline reduces instructor workload to only tasks requiring subject matter expertise and leaves the rest to us. In addition, Problem Roulette can now easily support exams stored in Canvas, Google Drive, Word, and more.

Instructors now have the option to enable and disable topics and groups of topics on a per semester basis. E.g. if you teach certain topics only in Spring or Fall, instructors can set a semester and Problem Roulette will automatically hide or show that to your students.

We created an Instructor Toolkit full of feature descriptions, how-tos, and best practices to help instructors get the most out of Problem Roulette in their courses.

We were lucky to have a student fellow design and build a custom icon set to guide users through the Problem Roulette experience.

Instructors can now review historical course analytics by term; you can see this on the course analytics page. Sorry, but this is visible for instructors only. That being said, students can always view their own analytics on their dashboard.

A couple new courses have started to make their way onto Problem Roulette; it looks like both PSYCH 401 and BIO 171 will be coming soon. Want to see one of your courses on Problem Roulette? Request a new course.

We have a new process that helps guide students when creating a new study session. Our goal with this change was to make it more simple and to highlight more study modes and features.

We’ve made it easier for instructors to review and edit questions within the Admin Console. Sorry; that pge is only for instructors or Problem Roulette admin.

Our new Content Manager reviews flagged content, makes content updates, and encourages instructors to address student feedback to maintain updated content.

Students can now see how many other people are studying at any one time at the top of the homepage. In addition, some other new stats have been added at the bottom of the homepage.

The homepage should now load a lot more quickly when lots of users are on Problem Roulette. We’ve also been able to reduce the time required to load a new question from as many as 10 seconds in some cases to just 2 seconds.

We've updated the way students can give feedback on questions and the way instructors review feedback.