New Quizzes: Duplicate Question

[ddrayer]

It would be helpful to be able to duplicate a question in the quiz generator. Let's say I'm quizzing students on the use of figurative language (simile, metaphor, personification, and synecdoche). I could make my first question with multiple choice answers: a. simile, b. metaphor, c. personification, and d. synecdoche. If I could duplicate the questions, I would not have to retype the four answer selections.

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-09-09).

[bogardde]

Are you a K12 person? If it would help, I could put you on my email list of "new feature idea voting recommendations" that I send out to our staff at the start of every new voting period.

My motto to my teachers: "I waste my time so you don't have to waste yours" :smileylaugh:

[Renee_Carney]

Hi  @bsr ​

I can empathize with a busy schedule, and a tug of war of priorities.  I totally understand that it is sometimes hard to dedicate time to things we want/need to do.

If you ever have questions about our voting process, please take a few minutes to review How does the voting process work for feature ideas?​  All of our ideas are open for voting for 3 months.  You could carve time out about 4 times a year (every 13 weeks) and have an opportunity to vote on any/all ideas in the community.

I see that one of your concerns is duplicating or copying content.  You might want to explore Canvas Commons​ a little further.  There are time saving techniques in using Commons as a personal repository.  There are also many tips and tricks that Community members have shared about Master Courses.​

[tejeev_patel]

... YEeeeeaaahhh.  Voting on features like this isn't something that I think should be in my "Need to do" list.  My day job is in software and I appreciate the difficulties of software dev but there are other systems that I've seen used that, as a user, make it MUCH easier to submit and vote on features. You guys just chose one that maybe works for you but NOT for a lot of the rest of us (I'd bet that MOST of your users don't even check on these and just suffer through whatever annoyances they have so that they can get their day done with).  Maybe if you ran some publicity on the actual main page about these votes rather than emails that get shoved in "don't read" we could get an actually representative portion of your users in here and compensate for the downsides of the method you had to choose.  (I understand that other methods have their own problems and maybe out weigh their benefits for your use but the annoyances of these windows and the fact that we have to take time to participate in a community just to get a feature in a software we need to get our job done and get back to the real reason we are here, to teach, is nothing short of an annoyance.)

[bogardde]

Tejeev, I totally get what you're saying. It is a hassle...but I've come to the conclusion that I really like having the opportunity to make our voices/needs heard and considered in a somewhat democratic way. No other companies I've worked with have offered anything quite like this. Kind of like voting in elections, I find it to be an inconvenient, clunky process but important enough to make it a priority every so often. Just another way to look at it...

[scottdennis]

Thank you Deborah.  This is a relatively new process and we're constantly re-evaluating our process.  There are some people who have said they would like the voting periods to be longer, that they don't have time to check in quarterly.  Others would like to see the window be shorter and for the entire product development process to work on shorter sprints.  In my experience, for what it is worth, many companies do have a more simple process for users to submit ideas but I often am left wondering what happens to feedback that is sent in when there isn't a transparent process.  Does it just go into a black box?  Does my input matter? 

I'll be the first one to say that this process is far from perfect but it is getting a lot of interest and feedback within product development circles.  Since implementing this voting/crowd sourcing model we are getting a ton of excellent feedback from users.  Other companies that we have talked to that have similarly sized user bases might get 25-30 suggestions in a quarter where we get that sometimes in a day.  Currently about 13% of ideas that are submitted make it over the 100 vote threshold.  When you peruse those ideas as a group they really are the best ideas.  I wish we could implement them all but having too many good ideas to choose from is a problem I will face any day!

I can tell you from personal experience that the people I work with really do care about the product and the people who have trusted us as their LMS provider.  Thank you for helping us make Canvas better.

[bogardde]

Thanks, Scott. For the record, I just want to say that, despite the complaining tone that my posts may take on at times, I deeply appreciate the Canvas product and the people who keep it purring along and evolving. Snapshots of thoughts that we tend to quickly dump into forum discussions like this one can be so difficult to interpret in terms of context. Thanks to you and to your colleagues for the wonderful things you do.

Now, can we pleeeeeeze have a way to duplicate questions in quizzes??? 😉

[shouser]

seem simple enough for as much help as it would be

Mr. Scott Houser

Roncalli High School

Teacher: Biology, Human Anatomy & Physiology

Assistant Football Coach

Heaven is for all of us. Let's get there together.

[Renee_Carney]

No promises, but keep an eye on Modern Quizzing Engine

[tejeev_patel]

Deborah, I'm not sure how this is more democratic than say the Uservoice system.. In fact, it's arguably less democratic.  I work in software in my day job and there are a number of systems like Uservoice that offer voting for features without making you jump through hoops to do so only to reset afterwards.  You can even set up tiered systems in some of them that resemble the way a successfully voted feature gets passed up the system for more votes (which seems to be a possibly benefit of this system.   I think you misinterpret my comment and maybe haven't had the opportunity to use other software feature voting systems?

[tejeev_patel]

Thank you Scott.  It does make sense and this does seem to fit the sprints pretty well, but what if you got rid of the time limit on voting and had vote thresholds.  So if the item had 300 all time votes, or a product manager evaluated it to be worthwhile otherwise, it would be passed up to a implementation vote which could be used to determine timelines and sprint goals?  I've seen some of our peers use this to seemingly good effect. 

My first introduction to Uservoice (my current favorite system) was through the Tourment Kickstarter 2 or more years back.  It was FILLED with user suggestions and the way it managed them you were encouraged to only suggest or vote for the best at each stage.  Seemed to work out really well all told.  The items that made their way to dev really did appear to be the best out of the lot.