[New Quizzes] Export to or Share in Commons

[abbyrosensweig]

This idea has been developed and is On Canvas Beta •  How do I access the Canvas beta environment?

For more information, please read through the Commons Release Notes (2025-01-18) 

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Problem statement:

Current Instructure documentation states that New Quizzes cannot be imported from Canvas Commons (source: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Commons/How-do-I-import-and-view-a-Commons-resource-in-Can....) This limits the usefulness of both New Quizzes and Commons to not be able to share these specific resource types there.

Proposed solution:

New Quizzes and Canvas Commons should be fully compatible. Instructors should be able to share New Quizzes to Commons and then also import items from Commons that contain New Quizzes.

User role(s):

admin,instructor

[bjones22]

Hey all,

i just had an Aha! moment with Canvas New Quizzes on this issue of their Export/Import not working. Here's what i did and now it seems to be working!

This past weekend i made a 20-problem Canvas "New Quiz" without making an Item Bank or anything and wanted to copy the quiz between sections (and then modify slightly). There are menu items to do it in the Canvas New Quiz: "Copy To" for example seemed the most relevant, but it copies and only puts 1 (out of 20!) of the questions in the new section. So i tried exporting from Canvas Settings to a QTI file, and doesn't work. (so far i only have seen Classic Quizzes working with QTI files).

Interestingly out of the 20 questions, it wasn't question 1 that copied over, but rather question 5. (This was a hint i found out later.) But it was 2 am so i slept on it last "night"; but, just to be safe i used menu item "Duplicate" which worked and made a "Quiz Copy" (just being careful because i only had 1 copy of the Quiz! and didn't want to accidentally delete it or something). This ended up being fortuitous.

I think the "New Quiz" bug in Canvas happens when i moved the questions around after making the quiz. I had moved 4 items in front of what became Question 5. But somehow when it makes a duplicate like "Quiz Copy", this bug seems to be gone.

My thought after sleeping was to try to use New Quiz "Copy To" on this duplicate Quiz Copy in the same section as the Quiz itself. Just did it and it worked! All 20 questions came over into the new section as Quiz Copy.

Wanted to share that.

Cheers!

[austinst]

@Nancy_Webb_CCSF 

I tried it on a coworker's account. I can access the quiz, pull questions from the bank, see that it is linked to the bank, but still not the bank. 

So I tried creating a new quiz where I manually included every question from the bank. Not the selection where it says "add all/random" but the "+" button that adds each question individually into the quiz.

If you export your course, and select only this quiz, each question comes with it, which you can then copy in to a new quiz bank.

There has got to be an easier way than this, but this is better than either losing the bank entirely or having to start from scratch.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

@austinst, thanks for sharing your experience with banks. That's a great workaround for now.

It is so very odd that the bank seems to have copied along with the quiz and yet can't be accessed.  It exists where new quizzes exist, outside of Canvas, I get that. If you copy a new quiz from one of your courses to another, I can see you don't need to copy the bank because it belongs to you anyway.

A bank belongs to the user who created it in the school's Canvas account.  When I view Item Banks in new quizzes, I can choose to share with anyone in our school Canvas account, what a shame we can't share it outside the account.  This document says you can share with "another user in New Quizzes," but it is only your Canvas instance's New Quizzes.  Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-share-an-item-bank-in-New-Quizzes 

Also sharing the bank gives full control of the bank, including rights to delete it, so I'd be very careful about sharing. Would be wonderful if you could share with yourself in another school, but you'd sure need to be careful about making changes. Better to have a copy of it.  Vote on this idea, I just did:  https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/New-Quizzes-Ability-to-copy-entire-item-banks/...

You could share your workaround idea!

[wardex]

@austinst I seem to be having some trouble with your suggestion.

I don't seem to be able to export just the new quiz.

I can export the whole course and when I look inside the imscc file, I can see that the new quiz is there, but the xml file just links to the course content - it doesn't actually have the question. 

I tried manually adding each question to a quiz and then exporting and that didn't change anything. 

Can you explain further?

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Finally I had a case where a course with new quizzes was developed in a different Canvas instance, and I was given access to it for testing.  I confirm what you say, @rcordeiro1 - you can't transfer new quizzes between schools.  In the same school, it's not a problem, except maybe question banks.

When you export a course from school 1 and import the imscc package to Canvas in a different school (school 2), it doesn't include new quiz content. In the school 2 course, it becomes a non-working external tool assignment rather than a new quiz, and the external tool link still points to the original school 1's LTI!  Editing the URL to school 2's LTI turns it into a new quiz, but the content did not transfer so it's basically a blank new quiz.

I contacted support about this, reported a problem.

[Caitlincarmendy]

Would like to be able to copy question banks from new quizzes to old quizzes not just old to new

[rcordeiro1]

I thought that maybe Canvas had fixed this, but I just got off chat with support, and it STILL is not an option. To be clear, I am trying to export from one institution and import to a new institution. It works great from one class to another at the same institution, so that's not an issue. 

I am now going to spend several hours copying over content because I forgot about this, and made my new content using New Quizzes and not Old Quizzes. 😞

[rcordeiro1]

@austinst Is there a way to turn this export selection on? My course export just starts the entire download, it does not let me pick things to export. 

[DeletedUser]

This morning I erased my shell by accident.  But I had the shell saved as an export package. I reimported the package into a fresh shell...and guess what?  All the New Quizzes are gone! -_-

So yea...200+ New Quizzes gone without a warning label of some kind that the export package does not export New Quizzes.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

@DeletedUser, did you use the Reset Course Content button in Settings to erase your course?  If you did, then your administrator should be able to recover the original course shell for you.  When you use that button, it deletes your course and creates a new shell.  Deleted courses can be restored.