Exporting New Quizzes as a Common Cartridge

[MPioRoda]

Exporting New Quizzes Using Common Cartridge was released to Beta on May 10, 2024 (see release notes).  We are looking to release to production environments on June 15, 2024. 

Workflow to export New Quizzes in a Common Cartridge package

To export a Canvas Course, click on Export Course Content from the Settings in Course Navigation and use Export Type: Course.  An export file is created.

When importing course content, select the Content Type: Common Cartridge 1.x Package or Canvas Course Export Package. Then click on Content: All Content.

To import existing quizzes as New Quizzes, select the checkbox in the Options section. If this option is not chosen, Classic Quizzes will import as Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes will import as New Quizzes.

Import Content

When exporting a quiz that contains a question from an item bank, a file is created that contains all the questions in the item bank. If quizzes are using multiple item banks, each of those item banks will be included in the export. 

​​Images in quiz questions and in item banks are included in the export packages. (Note: currently HotSpot images are not imported because they are stored in Amazon S3 instead of the Canvas file system, however, it will be available around the time we release to production environments.

New Quizzes files in Common Cartridge packages

The work we have done around exporting New Quizzes relates to exporting a course as a Common Cartridge in Canvas.  While there will not be any user interface changes or changes to the workflow of exporting a common cartridge package, this work makes exporting more reliable because of the changes we made in the file format. Previously, New Quizzes were exported as a JSON object containing IDs referencing those quizzes, now the export package will export New Quizzes assignments and their associated objects, item banks and non-item bank questions, as QTI/XML files.

With the new export files, users will be able to use the export packages as backups for their data. If a user deletes their original quizzes for any reason, or they move to a different region, account, or LMS, their exports will remain intact.

File	Location and description
New Quizzes files	Each quiz has its own folder named with a unique identifier that contains two files: files: assessment_meta.xml and assessment_qti.xml
assessment_meta.xml	contains quiz information and settings
assessment_qti.xml	contains some quiz settings. It is used to create the quiz shell during import and creates a connection to the files that contain more data such as the imsmanifest.xml file.
NQ Item Banks	included in the non_cc_assessments folder, and be named with a unique identifier
New Quizzes questions that are not loaded from banks	included in the non_cc_assessments folder, and be named with a unique identifier

Here is an example of an export package:

Export Package Files

In this example, we can see that there are two quizzes in the export file, each with their own assessment_meta.xml file and an assesment_qti.xml file.

From the non_cc_assessments folder, we can see that there are two item banks and two files with questions used in a quiz.

• If a *.xml.qti has a folder with the same identifier in the name, it means the file contains questions used in the quiz including those that are associated with item banks.
• If a *.xml.qti doesn’t have a folder with the same identifier in the name, it means it is an item bank file which contains all the questions in the item bank.

In the example above, the file that ends with 4ec42f.cml.qti, matches the quiz folder above that also ends in 4ec42f, so this file contains questions used in the quiz, including those that were pulled from an item bank.