Can't Copy a Quiz from Commons or Course without Overwriting

[jsirkis]

Each week my students complete a worksheet -which I have set up as a Canvas quiz using "essay" answers. The questions asked are the same each week, only the title of the quiz changes. (Essentially the students reflect on what they've learned so the questions are the same) 

Rather than rewrite the set of questions 10 times (for 10 modules) , I thought I would create one "quiz"and then keep duplicating and renaming it. I've wasted about 5 hours on this and should have just  rewritten the questions over and over again!

I tried creating one quiz and  importing the quiz from the existing course back into the existing course. This was slow going but eventually I had about 5 of them. I created a duplicate, gave it anew name and then tried to copy both of the new quizzes. Only one copied. Ok...so I just kept this up and imported one at a time and then renamed each one. 

By the time I had 9 of these quizzes (one created in the course and 8 "imported," Canvas completely gave out and would no longer allow me to import a quiz. Each time I imported a quiz, one of the existing quizzes would disappear. I kept this up for hours - and I still don't understand why I can't just keep importing these - but apparently that's a bug.

Next, I tried sharing one of the quizzes to commons so that I could import it that way. The same thing has happened. So now I have 9 quizzes, each renamed with different names to represent the topic being covered each week - but for the life of me, I cannot get the 10th quiz in. 

This seems like it should be a very, very basic function. There should be a way to duplicate a quiz or even a page without difficulty. I notice that I have no trouble duplicating rubrics. The new rubric is automatically renamed with a -1 at the end of the name. Why can't quizzes and files be copied the same way? I can't believe that I am the only person who uses a consistent worksheet week after week with only the title changed. What if a teacher just wanted to run a weekly quiz asking students to identify the "muddiest point" they found for the weekly topic covered?Is there a way to do this?

Sorry for the long post. In essence, this is my issue: Each week my students are presented with information about a topic and each week they complete a type of reflection quiz. I want the questions to be the same each week and have only the topic change. In an electronic environment, I should not have to recreate this every week. I should be easily able to duplicate the worksheet and give it a new name. How can I do this in Canvas?

[jsirkis · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Yes, thank you. I got it to work!

Please mark as answered.

Sent from my iPad

[kona]

What I've done in the past is create the questions in the question bank and then create the quiz and add all of them it just link to the bank - which might be better because if you tweak a question it will automatically adjust everywhere you have linked to that bank. Then create the next quiz and link to the question bank. Overall it doesn't take that long and works pretty well. 

The following guides will help you with this - 

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10739-6795275173?sr=search&searchId=49299103-3ca1-4688-b61c...‌

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10410-415298625?sr=search&searchId=4c37395c-7c6f-44ca-a7c6-...‌

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello  @jsirkis ‌...

I noticed that we have not heard from you since you first posted this question back on May 7th and then received a response from  @kona ‌ later that day.  Have you had an opportunity to review the reply that you received from Kona?  If so, did it help to answer your question?  Or, are you still looking for some help with this question?  If you feel that Kona's response did help to answer your question, please feel free to mark it as "Correct".  However, if you still have some questions, please let members of the Canvas Community know that by posting a message below.  For now, because we have not heard from you and there hasn't been any new activity in this thread for almost two months, I am going to mark your question as "Assumed Answered", but that won't prevent you or others from posting additional questions/comments below as it relates to this topic.  I hope that's okay wit you, Jocelyn.  Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

[jsirkis · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Yes, thank you. I got it to work!

Please mark as answered.

Sent from my iPad

[mm]

The link below is an alternate solution that I found for anyone else looking. Thank you  @James_Kocher_UF !!!

https://www.unthsc.edu/center-for-innovative-learning/copying-items-in-a-canvas-course/ 

[martin_biermann]

Thanks a lot! To copy parts of a course onto itself via settings/import is a solution that had not occurred to med. I had copied objects from one course to another before but not always with the desired effect.

Basiscally, there are two different types of an "duplicate" operation:

1. I may want to clone the object. I. e., i clone the reference to an object so that clones of the same objects exist i 2 places. I may have one quiz that I run in 2 courses of mine. If I fix a typo in one instance, the other instance is updated automagically.
2. I may want a true copy of the object. The object is copied so that I get 2 objects. When I make changes to copy #2, the original (#1) remains unchanged.

When I produce e-courses I routinely want to employ true copies of an entire quiz. For example, I asked my students to process a PET/CT examination of 5 different patients with lung cancer. The idea is that the students get exactly the same 7 multiple choice questions on each of the 5 cases in form of 1 Canvas quiz per case with identical questions but case-specific answers. 

The problem is that Canvas is very inconsistent in its duplicate operations. It is not clear to me when I clone or when I copy course contents. I often thought I had made a copy, so I started editing, only to find that I overwrote an earlier quiz on another case with information pertaining to a new case.

This is in my opinion the greatest current weakness in Canvas. It is so serious that I would regard it as a deal-breaker, but I am forced to use my University's LMS if I want to or not. On my e-learning projects where I have a choice I do indeed use Moodle because of its superior authoring tools. (See Specialist training in Nuclear Medicine | Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at UiB | University of Berg... )

[martin_biermann · Accepted solution]

I had also filed a support ticket at my University's IT and got a reply that it is possible to copy a whole quiz by re-importing it from the same course.

So I started making my course material. I started out with a quiz called "Case #1" which is a set of 7 well-validated questions on PET/CT in lung cancer (see my publication in Acta Radiologica Open - doi: 10.1177/2058460119860231).

I adapted it to the new case that I had chosen for my new course in the 10th term and I ended up with 9 questions one hour later. (It took 1 hour since I had to read the entire PET/CT and fill in the correct information in my quiz.) I then imported the quiz "Case #1" from the same course. I got to instances both called "Case #1". I changed the name of one of the two to "Case #2", and started editing it. One hour later I had "Case #1" with 9 questions and "Case #2" with 10. Super! This is what I wanted.

Now I wanted to start with "Case #3". To this end, I re-imported the quiz "Case #2". I ended up with 3 instances of "Case #2" with 10 questions each, but my original "Case #1" was overwritten. One our of work was lost. 

I remember to have written somewhere (but I have forgotten where) that the first action on the import of some object in Canvas is a "copy" but that the 2nd action on the import of the same object is a "clone". This is a silly convention, all the worse when what is the same object is not apparent to the user. Remember that I had called the 2nd instance "Case #2", but apparently Canvas thought it was another instance of "Case #1" .

This limitation in Canvas is in my opinion absolutely hopeless. For my own courses - when I decide -  I use Moodle LMS, which I think is far superior in every aspect except design. Unfortunately, I am held hostage by my university's choice of LMS and I am forced to use Canvas, if I want or not.

Is there anybody who can help me? 

[wendell_hurst]

I just spent hours and hours creating note reading quizzes for my beginning string orchestra students. This is labor intensive, as it involves creating images of musical notation to import into questions. I normally have to make three versions, for violin (treble clef), viola (alto clef) and cello/bass (bass clef.) For this particular quiz i also needed to have separate versions for cello and bass. I copied the cello quiz, then edited it for bass. Only some of the questions needed to be edited, although the header information for the bass quiz was different. Then I copied my four versions (violin, viola, cello, bass) of the quiz into a module for my first class. What showed up in the module was violin, viola and two copies of the cello quiz. My bass quiz was lost. This happened TWICE!!  I am beyond fed up with this. Has Canvas fixed this mess? I have may have no alternative other than to go back to paper and pencil, but with remote teaching due to a pandemic, that is not really an option. Does Canvas have an answer that will save me hours of frustration in the future with this issue?

Wendell Hurst

Elementary Music Teacher

Salt Lake City School District

[martin_biermann]

Yesterday a colleague of mine in Bergen, Harald Wiker, was able to show me that the problem has been fixed. Open a question library. Select some questions, tick the "Copy" box, and you can COPY questions to another library.

[wendell_hurst]

If the problem had been fixed, we would be able to copy and edit items without having the original version destroyed. Or we would be notified when performing a copying operation of the consequences to our original, or of limitations involved in the operation, so we would not blindly do things that make our jobs difficult. A workaround devised by patrons, and shared among a few other patrons, rather than a design change done by Canvas, that prevents the problem from ever recurring for any user again, is not an acceptable solution to this issue.

Wendell Hurst, 

Elementary Music Teacher

Salt Lake City School District

[wendell_hurst]

I don't see how question libraries can be of any help to me. I use quizzes as learning activities, not so much as assessments, for my young students.

[Andrew42]

I've needed to create around 9 versions of a survey, each slightly different from the other. (This is across two courses so about 18 versions altogether). Since surveys can't be duplicated, I've had to copy them and have thus been slowed down by Canvas overwriting my previous versions during this copying. As a consequence, preparing these 18 surveys has taken around 2 days.

Due to deadlines, I haven't had time to work out what exactly causes the overwriting so was obliged to experiment as I went to find which procedure worked most consistently. I found the following procedure gives me around a 60% success rate, which is better than any of my earlier methods.

PART 1 - INITIAL COPY

1. create two temporary courses to go with the final 'target' destination course you want all your surveys to live in

2. create the initial version of the survey in course 1

3. use 'Copy to..' to copy the survey from course 1 to course 2.

4. edit the copied survey in course 2 to create the new version of the survey

5. export the new survey version using Settings > Export Course Content and select to export just the new survey verison

6.in your final target course select Settings > Import Course Content > Canvas Course Export Package, upload the zip file, cross your fingers and click Import

7. check to see if your new version has imported successfully; if not, rename your version in course 1 then  return to step 3

PART 2 - FURTHER COPIES

8. in course 1,  rename your initial survey to the name of the new version

9. follow steps 4 to 7 above