Question Bank Questions Disappearing

[kas789]

Question bank questions are disappearing after importing QTI files from a course pack. I will import the QTI, create a quiz from the quiz bank, return to the quiz a few minutes to hours later and the quiz bank went from having 100+ questions to less than 20 or none.

[whitman_11]

I can't tell you how many hours I have spent simply REPAIRING quizzes I've already created that I had intended to spend creating new quizzes. It seems like every time I'm not looking, one of my question banks will disappear, or get overwritten by another one and plugged into the wrong quiz. 

I understand that (for whatever reason) you can't duplicate question banks.

I understand that (for whatever reason) you CAN copy individual quiz questions from one bank to another, but CANNOT copy multiple quiz questions from one bank to another--you can only MOVE them. 

I have tried to work within these constraints, and after two months of doing it in a serious and sustained way, I am now convinced that it's not me, it's the awkward, unintuitive, klunky and stupid way that quizzes and question banks are set up in the first place. 

First of all, why are the question banks hidden? To access them, I have to know the secret passage: Edit a quiz, go to add some questions, then click on "Find questions" to open up the vault of question banks. Why isn't there a front door to the question banks?

Second, even when I use the workarounds for copying multiple questions by importing the desired question bank, the imported bank is not safe. Suppose I want to duplicate the question bank ABC in order to plug new content into the existing question templates. So I import question bank from this course to itself (or from another course into this one, it doesn't matter). Now I have 2 question banks called ABC. I rename one of them DEF, and revise the questions. Now suppose I want to create another duplicate bank. I import ABC again, or maybe DEF. I'm likely to discover that question bank ABC at some point has disappeared, or that its questions have been replaced by those in DEF.

I tried to get smart, by creating a question bank called Dummy. Any question banks that I imported, I would move their questions into the Dummy bank, then rename it with the desired new title, say XYZ. It didn't work: The next time I imported the Dummy bank, it came in with its set of questions, and then bank XYZ would have all its questions erased. 

What clever combination of importing, renaming, and other safeguards will let me (a) import a question bank, (b) give it a new name, (c) revise its questions, and (d) not have to worry that those questions will disappear or be replaced by another set of questions the next time I import the source question bank?

[zwxq]

This program is so hard to use!!

After a semester, creating banks of 20 questions for EVERY question type I might need to use...they ALL disappeared!!  With nothing in the commons to explain how to get my question banks back.

What a waste of time this application has proven to be.  Even if I do find them in the next minute, I'll never get back the hour I've already spent trying to find a solution!!

Did you ever find the solution???

[apanagopoulos]

Is Canvas for real??? Can it be that test banks are disappearing on their own? It seems that this is the case... 

[rmiller6dcsdk12]

These new quizzes are so user unfriendly. After I spent nearly 5 hours making a bank of 45 physics questions, including making diagrams, writing equations in their horrible latex editor that doesn't have a shortcut key stroke, and making sure they were saved. Everything is completely gone, except for the images I uploaded. I seriously hate canvas.

What's even worse, it's so hard to figure out where to go to get to the question banks. I have to make a new quiz every time I want to make a question bank. Why isn't this feature on the side bar? Why can't we share our question banks to commons automatically or easily (it wouldn't surprise me if you can't share them). This whole platform is a matchstick house built upon a house of cards, built on a foundation of sand.

And please explain to my why in the world there are about three ways to access question banks and make questions, but they don't work together in any way. If you make your questions by accessing your question banks through the quiz, it doesn't show up and/or disappears, but if you go into settings, and find the tab where you can put question banks on the side bar, then it looks completely different.

[rebeccastacey]

We really need an answer to this! Why is it so hard to bank quiz questions and access them in a new course??

[rmiller6dcsdk12]

I did come up with a couple of things that make it easier (I've put action items in bold):

1. Access the item banks the correct way.
   1. Go to your course and click on the settings at the bottom of the white side bar.
   2. On the settings page in the middle near the top are some tabs. Click on the navigation tab.
   3. There should be a list in the middle of the new tab. That list is seperated into two sections. The section above the text break is what should be displayed and the section below the text are things that aren't displayed. Locate the Item Banks option and drag it to the top section.
   4. CLICK SAVE!!!! (I moved that thing like 5 times across 2 different classes and forgot to save it, had to go back and do it again).
   5. Now, on your white side bar (to the left side of your screen) there should be an Item Banks option. Always use this to access your question banks when making changes/creating/deleting questions. This should prevent the issue of questions dissapearing but the banks still being there.
      
      
2. For the dissapearing banks there are two possible reasons. You didn't share the bank with your class.
   1. Go to the Item Banks option from item 1 of this list.
   2. Make a new bank, call it whatever you want you're going to delete it anyway.
   3. Once the new bank is made you should see your the question bank you're interested in show up. Click on the edit button and share it with your course. You can try to search for your course name, but I've found it best to search by the course ID which you can get from the address in your browser and it looks like this:
      
      school_site.instructure.com/courses/########/<ignore this stuff here>
   4. Delete the question bank you made in step b.
      
      
3. The other thing that can happen is you accidently deleted the question bank. If you want to restore a deleted question bank just go to:
   
   school_site.instructure.com/courses/########/undelete
   
   You should be able to restore anything deleted in the past 30 days.

Unfortunately the solution for the dissapearing questions inside the bank couldn't be fixed and I had to start over, but accessing it the correct way should prevent it from happening again. I really wish this was something that was advertised a little better.