Printable / PDF-exportable quizzes

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas
The Quiz Build page provides quiz printing options. For more information, please read through the  Canvas Release Notes (2021-08-21).

 
As an instructor, I want to be able to export a Canvas quiz as a PDF. This would enable me to easily print quizzes for the purpose of accommodation, for allowing a given student to take a quiz outside the timeframe established for the quiz for all other students, etc.

 

transferred from the old Community

Originally posted by: Pacific Union College admins

Special thanks for contributions from: Betsy Walker, John Louviere

 

 

Community Team Note: This idea remains open for voting. A virtually identical idea was moved forward for consideration in March: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/7285-exporting-quizzes-into-word-or-pdf-documents  Contrary to our customary practice, we are allowing both ideas to continue to move forward. Votes and feedback from both ideas will be evaluated.

341 Comments
Gina_Hutchens
Community Participant

I totally agree with this.  Having an option to have a printed copy of the quiz would be awesome for those teachers that have students that must take tests on paper.  We have students that have concussions during various sports and are not allowed on a computer and everything has to be printed.  At this time a print screen is about the only way to do this without having to do a lot of copying and pasting.

jeremymay
Community Contributor

Though I'm not a huge fan of printing, I definitely agree with  @Gina_Hutchens ​ for the medical reason behind this, but also because some students have documented accommodations to take assessments via pencil/paper.  It's also helpful in the mass chaos unplanned outages cause.  A teacher can run a hard backup for just-in-case situations.

keadmin
Community Novice

I receive the requests from instructors each year on how to effectively print their quizzes in Canvas.  A printing feature would be helpful for special needs, editing, etc.

G_Petruzella
Community Champion

Especially now that all the new Community pages seem to have the handy-dandy "View As PDF" option ... a similar standard feature on Canvas objects would be welcome.canvas-community-view-as-pdf.png

KristinL
Community Team
Community Team

I've heard many teachers in my building ask about this functionality as well. While we'd like to be 100% paperless, sometimes students have accommodations to meet. A nice printing feature would be great!

crafte
Community Champion

If you have Respondus licensing, you can use that software as a workaround to create paper versions of Canvas quizzes. The following link to a page at the University of Utah (thank you!) provides the steps on how to accomplish the task: Knowledge Article 

emwalton
Community Novice

I agree! I've just created a number of quiz banks with the help of my TAs. Unfortunatley, we've discovered a couple of duplications. As this particular bank has 110 questions at the last count, it's really difficult to check this on the screen. A printable version would be much easier.

curtain
Community Participant

Yes, this is a must.  There are a number of use cases for printing out quizzes on paper including as an accommodation, to allow easy editing or review or to allow an alternate attempt in a low tech situation.

A Print option would:

  • format it to break cleanly between questions instead of in the middle
  • include the answer options selections in a way they could be answered on paper so for example drop down boxes would turn into a list to select from
  • would minimize any images, navigation, headers, footers, etc for efficient printing
0383197
Community Novice

I just assumed that this was possible (to print an exam) especially for an accommodation.  I will have to use the Respondus workaround, but it would have been nice to just do it simply from Canvas (as I am a huge fan of the MLS so far.)

lprather
Community Novice

I am having the same issue. Right now, I'm having to copy and paste the quiz to Word and then go in and change the page breaks, font, etc because of accommodation issues. For software that has been very user friendly and efficient, not having the print option wastes a lot of time.