Canvas has officially rolled out New Quizzes, a new quiz alternative! Don’t worry, classic quizzes are still available.
In this post, we’ll explain:
- What’s new
- What to watch out for
- How to get started
Are New Quizzes right for you?
Engineering courses tend to use quizzes for a variety of assessment purposes, often sharing course materials between rotating instructors or sharing question banks. New Quizzes may not be right for your course.
We recommend New Quizzes for:
- Creating ordering questions
- Printing quizzes
- Courses with fixed instructors
- Customizing how answers are shown and graded
We do not recommend New Quizzes for:
- Courses with rotating instructors
- Quizzes that randomly sample from question banks
If you are an instructor of a rotating course with random sampling from question banks, and you are interested in other new quiz features, come see us at CEETE to talk about keeping your item banks sustainable.
What’s new
New Quizzes introduces several enhancements, listed below with links for more information.
- Printable quizzes: Print quizzes as blank forms or with answer keys—ideal for offline review or accommodations.
- Duplicate Quizzes: Easily copy a quiz for reuse or versioning
- New question types:
- Ordering: Ask students to arrange items into a sequence
- Stimulus: Pair a reading with related questions (note: not accessible for all students)
- Hot Spot: Visual-based questions (note: not accessible for all students)
- Improved delivery settings:
- Shuffle questions globally
- Shuffle answers within each question (you can lock specific choices like “None of the above”)
- Require a waiting period between attempts
- Assign different point values to each answer
- Student accommodations:
- Add accommodations at the student level (only applies to New Quizzes)
- New option to reduce number of answer choices
- Advanced item bank management:
- Tag questions with metadata
- Search and filter item banks
- Categorize question types
Item Banks vs. Question Banks
Question Banks are used in Classic Quizzes and are associated with each course.
Item Banks are used in New Quizzes and are associated with user accounts. Consult the table below for more details
| Feature | Classic Quizzes | New Quizzes |
|---|---|---|
| Bank Type | Question Bank | Item Bank |
| Ownership | Course-based | User-based |
| Transfers with course? | Yes | Yes |
| Editing Impact | Static | Dynamic (see note below) |
Watch out! Edits to the item bank retroactively apply to all courses using that item bank
Note: If students have already taken a quiz, edits to the item bank won’t be displayed when viewing their submissions.
Limitations
While New Quizzes brings exciting upgrades, there are a few limitations:
- Limited support for practice or ungraded quizzes, please see How do I create surveys in New Quizzes?
- Accommodations in New Quizzes don’t carry over to Classic Quizzes, you’ll need to add them manually.
- Item banks are tied to individual users, which can make it harder to reuse content in courses with new instructors.
- Some question types are not accessible: Stimulus, Hot Spot, and Matching. These questions impair the learning experience for students using assistive technology
Get started
Visit How to Get Started with Canvas New Quizzes from our campus Knowledge Base.
Migrating from Classic to New Quizzes
Migration is simple, but double check your content.
- Use Canvas’s built-in migration tool
- Review formatting and question types after migrating, some may need manual adjustment
- Practice quizzes don’t migrate and must be recreated manually.
- You can migrate a Classic Quiz to a New Quiz, but not the other way around.
How questions migrate:
| Classic Quizzes | How it’s migrated to New Quizzes |
|---|---|
| Single question: not in a question bank or group | Single question located in the quiz |
| Single question: in a question bank or group | Within an Item Bank |
| Inline question in Question Groups | Within an Item Bank |
| Question Banks | As an Item Bank |
Moving New Quizzes between Courses
For courses with rotating instructors, migrate the entire course rather than selecting specific items. The item bank’s author should also give edit access to the item banks.
A few other guidelines:
- Enable New Quizzes in new course before import
- Instructors in new course can edit New Quizzes, but need permission to edit Item Banks
- Imported Item Banks can be viewed and duplicated
- Item Bank editor access can be granted by any account with “Edit” permissions (Usually the original instructor)
- CEETE can import item banks, but we cannot change permission settings for other people’s item banks. The original author of the item bank should give edit access to us
- CEETE can help you at any step!