Question banks: banks no longer accessible.

[rvralph]

TL;DR:

Question banks on quizzes shared to another person vanish from the creator's library of banks, but are still accessible by quizzes that reference them.

The Situation:

I have created about 5 question banks, each containing three similar questions each so that students could be served up one of those questions randomly on a quiz or test, with the hope of reusing these for Tests and the final.

I have a coworker I work closely with who teaches the same subject. So after creating these banks and the quiz that pulled them I shared the quiz over to her.

Today as I'm attempting to build the test I can no longer see these banks, but the quiz that references the banks apparently still can, because it pulls those questions just fine.

Question:
What in the high hell is going on? How is this platform and question banking coded so utterly poorly that things simply vanish? This simply isn't acceptable and from my searches it seems like this is an issue that has been going on for years with no attempt to solve it form Canvas' end. 

I am so thoroughly gutted by this I'm questioning if I'll ever use banks again.

[ProfessorBeyrer · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community, @rvralph . I am sorry that frustration inspired your first contribution but am glad that you are here.

I had a hunch regarding what's going on and did some testing. I have a quiz in a course where the questions are linked to a question bank:
Quiz questions linked from question bank

I then shared this quiz in a couple of ways (copying to another course and sending to another user). Here's what I see where I copied the quiz to another one of my courses:
Broken link to question bank

The same thing occurred with the quiz that I sent to another user.

Note that if the quiz questions are included within the group (instead of a linked question bank) then the questions are included with the quiz copy/send, so the solution is to copy the questions from the bank into the question group and then share with your coworker. It would be great if the linked question banks were included with the send/copy, but alas they are not.

How can this be improved in the future? The best option is to switch to New Quizzes, where the links to item banks (that's what question banks are called in New Quizzes) are preserved within the same Canvas instance.