[ARCHIVED] Are surveys and evaluations too far of a reach for the product team to implement with Canvas?

[romann]

I'm only a few-years in administering our Canvas instance, and our team has only touched the surface on the essentials Canvas offers to our users. Before they became known as Classic Quizzes, we've deployed a few surveys and some quizzes and dealt with its quirks. We are in the position to move all of our users forward with New Quizzes, as it's clear the product team is focused on assessment. Thus, it's not a surprise to see the omission of surveys from New Quizzes.

Within the community, I have only been able to find relevant discussions around Surveys and New Quizzes as recent as December 2017 - where "surveys" are on the longer-term roadmap.

I get it. Surveys are for information gathering, offer no immediate outcomes like quizzes, require more detailed analysis, and are more complex based on their relations to multiple entities (i.e., evaluation of courses, instructors, students peers, guest lectures, etc.). Surveys have no business with fitting the New Quizzes engine.

So, we need to "tell it as it is." It's three years later, and many other institutions are waiting for several other Classic Quiz features to appear in New-Quizzes. That road map for surveys is getting longer.

For those of you listening, I'd rather see New Quizzes improve where it should and have an assertion that the Canvas product team is not in the business of being another paperless provider of electronic surveys and evaluations. I would like to hear from other Canvas users utilizing LTI solutions specific to surveys and their corresponding service providers. If there are more straightforward means using URLs of Google/Microsoft Forms in course assignments, please share.

If I've missed any recent position from Instructure on surveys, I'm listening, and I'm still thumbing around for a road atlas.

[Steven_S]

Although it is not precisely a survey, it is possible to set the new quiz assignment settings to do not count towards grades.  It clutters the gradebook, but could be used as a practice quiz.  (There are other issues with interactions with the late policy that make classic quizzes still a better choice for my practice quizzes though.) 

To make a similar survey you can set the quiz value to zero in assignment settings and entirely hide results from students with the quiz settings to keep students from interpreting any indication of correct/incorrect.  This will also clutter the gradebook, and I don't think you can avoid having correct/incorrect answers marked in teacher views of the quiz. I would stick to classic quizzes if I needed a survey within canvas for now.  You might like this related idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/True-surveys/idi-p/376385

[romann]

Thank you @Steven_S for pointing me toward the True survey idea. From my reading, it highlights many of the quirks I encountered with survey type questions intermingled with Classic Quizzes. From my take on New Quizzes, I do like the focus on assessment, and I hope to see more classic features arrive; however, trying to intermingle surveys with New Quizzes brings unnecessary complexity. That's why I called for the distinction of two distinct product features between quizzing and surveying. They have similar structures but serve radically different purposes.

We need to fill the gap at our organization and find a product vendor who specialize in providing a robust survey and evaluation service. If the Canvas product team were to implement a solution we could jump back and utilize it - to save expenses.

[Steven_S]

For now the easiest solution I see is to keep using classic quizzes for practice quizzes and surveys.  Canvas could choose to continue using that part of classic quizzes, and let it evolve into a survey and practice activity tool.