[ARCHIVED] Quizzes.Next Question Banks

[sharris]

We just finished speaking with our CSM about the Quizzes.Next rollout. One thing that is concerning is that question banks in Quizzes.Next are tied to individual users and not courses. While that may work well for K12, it's a big problem for HiEd, especially those with large online learning initiatives. Our campus works from a master course model (e.g., one course template is developed and then copied to teaching sections each term). One course template, created by a course developer and faculty expert, can be copied into dozens of live sections each term (every 8 weeks). That course copy includes everything (materials, modules, assignments, quizzes...etc.) required to teach that course online. The person who developed the master shell template is almost never the person who actually teaches the live course (our course developers would have all of these question banks tied to their user accounts).

What are we supposed to do ? Go into every online course template every 8 weeks and share the question banks with thousands of instructors and risk the chance that they could delete the whole thing ?

[gouldt]

Thank you for asking this question! This is actually one of the main things that is keeping us from jumping in and migrating all of our quizzes. Over 90% of the test banks in our instance are created by support people. We use master courses, and everyone teaching that course uses the master course shell. One of my concerns with this set up is that whoever created the test bank has the ability to delete it. I foresee many issues related to this feature. I also am concerned with the number of testbanks that will end up tied to my account. I have started naming test banks with course IDs at the front, but we have some courses that have more than 20 testbanks. We have more than 300 unique master courses. I could potentially have 1/4 of those testbanks tied to my account. Well over 1,000 test banks. That doesn't even begin to take into consideration that courses are generally updated every 4 years. So I will have the original 1,000 + testbanks tied to my account, and each semester that number will likely increase by 100+. And I am just one person on the team.

The other problem is how will we be able to track who the test banks are tied to?

[sharris]

Agreed. We have over 500 master shells, with thousands of question banks. Another wrinkle - we also work with an OPM (Pearson). I don't want thousands of question banks tied to users from an external company. 

[kroeninm]

We use a similar model but for some reason I hadn't really absorbed this.  I didn't realize this was setup this way...any details as to the impacts would be helpful.

• It sounds like the creator can delete which is not good, we use student employees for some work.
• It sounds like the new instructor may / may not be able to access the banks.
• It adds clutter to whoever created them.

It sounds like the banks copy with the course and still function though?

Melanie

[sharris]

Having the question banks tied to users is basically a non-starter for us to move forward with implementation. That's really concerning, given that they've already announced a Feb 2021 deprecation for old quizzes. I can't understand why they would deprecate the old system, when the new system doesn't have feature parity. It doesn't even work with proctoring services, yet. 

[kroeninm]

In the timeline it looks like July is when students will need to take all quizzes in the new system but changing processes and/or waiting for an update on this feature really puts us under a time crunch.

This functionality change doesn't seem to be highlighted clearly in either the guides or feature comparison.  I started testing the New Quizzes well over a year ago and didn't notice the difference.  I read through all the guides last week and didn't notice it either.  I'd love to see it called out more clearly for faculty transitioning.  I ended up deleting a series of item banks earlier this week before I started reading the Q&As to figure out what happened, and I thought I was Canvas-saavy. :smileygrin:.   I don't think there is an undo button yet on the banks either... 

Melanie 

[kroeninm]

 Here's a feature request and more details which I found helpful. https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/14541-new-quizzes-allow-item-banks-to-be-tied-to-a-course-rath... 

Melanie

[sharris]

I added my vote. I also followed up with our CSM to see if someone from the product line would be available to talk.

[lshulman]

I too found that If the old quiz included questions from a quiz bank, those questions do not get included in the migrated Quizzes Next version of the old quiz. Quizzes Next does not access the old question banks.

[kroeninm]

Yes, it sounds like the updated migration tool coming out towards December? Might have the banks built into the migration but right now you can migration the banks a bit more manually.  There's a thread in the community about the various processes.  One way is to export and then use the Import option in New Quizzes to pull in the bank.  But there are a few different ways I think.  

Melanie

[lshulman]

Too much hassle, not worth the effort when I can get by still using Classic quizzes.

- Laura Shulman

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/lshulman/<https://mail.nvcc.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=1c304ebbbd9647619d0159857a...;

~~~~~~~~~~

The more we know, the more we know, there's more to know, than we think we know!

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, Sam,

Thanks for asking these questions! I recently went through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-12076-faq-new-quizzes  and revised it help answer some of your concerns. You'll see that a real migration for Question Banks is in development right now. We've also pushed out the enforcement date from December to July 2021, and we'll update the roadmap appropriately when that migration gets closer to being completed.

Thanks,

Erin

[sharris]

I'm still really concerned that Canvas will not be creating functionality where questions/banks stay within a course, as opposed to attach to an individual user account. 

Does anyone from Canvas have an update ? If questions/quizzes/banks in New.Quizzes will be tied to individuals, then there is no possible way for us to move forward with the product. 

[mpobocik]

Just got off a call with our CSM. He wasn't aware that the item banks are tied to individuals so he's no help. I'm trying to copy an item bank from one instructor to another. The only way I can "break" the connection is to create a new item bank for instructor #1, copy each question individually (because developers don't think this is a necessary function) to the newly created Item Bank. Next share the item bank with instructor #2, then delete instructor #1 from the 2nd item bank. Worked fine for a 10 question bank. Not doing it for a 300 question bank. 

[sharris]

Right. We have 1k Master Shells for our online courses, each with potentially dozens of question banks. Instead of quizzes living with the course, the New Quizzes tool attached them to the individual user. So, our instructional designers (some external to our organization) are going to have thousands of quizzes/question banks tied to them in the new tool. THat's not workable for our situation. 

[sharris]

Can anyone from Instructure reply to this and provide information about the concern ?