Change, even when we must, is trying! In this post, we share our journey from Classic to New Quizzes in Canvas, acknowledge that change does equal turbulence, and document the steps we took to avoid crashes.
At the College of Southern Idaho (CSI), we knew that the transition to New Quizzes in Canvas was coming—and that how we communicated about the conversion, how we approached the shift, and when we incorporated the switchover, would matter as much as the functional change itself. Rather than nosedive into compliance, we charted a glide path. Our sincere hope was to work with our faculty to approach this mandatory change as a smooth descent shaped by intention, partnership, and patience.
Our Flight Plan: Collaboration at the Controls
Our success didn’t come from a single pilot in the cockpit. It came from assembling a strong crew:
- College leadership provided altitude and air cover—essential support that was conveyed through clear communication about the need for change.
- A faculty-representative committee acted as our navigation team, steering decisions on timing and approach. With their guidance, we spent an entire spring semester in discovery mode with server settings that supported but did not require Classic Quiz migration to New Quizzes. We enforced “migration upon course copy” at the start of the summer semester, when course sizes are smaller and fewer instructors teach. This afforded our team ample time to provide support and to pilot the rollout. With clear communication, all instructors returned to campus for the fall semester to courses that had every quiz auto migrated to New Quizzes, but with the option to publish Classic Quizzes still available. In December and ahead of the next spring semester, we brought Classic Quizzes in for a final landing, meaning a strategic decision to fully transition to New Quizzes and its expanded functionality. Classic Quizzes can be copied forward into perpetuity, but instructors can no longer publish them.
- Instructure’s resources acted as a dependable flight manual, offering timelines, templates, a friendly face or voice when needed, and step-by-step guidance to help us stay on course.
- Our internal working group—faculty, IT, and our team, the Teaching & Learning Center— formed the ground crew and mission control. A core group of three of us did the heavy lifting: planning, building, communicating, and supporting the rollout day by day.
Phased Takeoff, Not Freefall
Yes, we took a year to implement the change. That gave us time to build trust, answer questions, and respond to uncertainty with calm, clarity, and:
- Workshops
- Flyers
- Campus-wide email blasts
- One-on-one support
- Phased enforcement
It wasn't always easy—but we followed an intentional itinerary and, we might say, an over-communicated flight path.
Some instructors struggled. That’s real. But because of a phased rollout, we had time to meet challenges individually by offering personal support. In one memorable instance, we escalated an instructor’s concern through our Canvas Success Manager all the way to the New Quizzes engineering team. Answers can be found, but we also found that patience and persistence are required.
Seeing the Horizon
As the Teaching & Learning Center, we knew we had to understand New Quizzes deeply ourselves—not just the how, but the why. So, we learned its benefits, showcased its strengths, and championed its possibilities. As adjunct instructors, we adopted New Quizzes in our own courses. Today, faculty who once felt wary are now discovering time-saving features with new item bank sharing capabilities, enhanced feedback options, and new ways to align assessments with learning outcomes. The expanded variety of question types in New Quizzes—such as hot spots, categorization, and stimulus-based questions—offers instructors more flexible and authentic ways to assess student understanding, strengthening alignment with pedagogical best practices.
We still have small bursts of turbulence, yes! For example, it has been a challenge to ensure that all our 3rd party textbook publishers are backward-compliant with the New Quizzes .qti file type. Again, this has been surmounted with patience and persistence. We’ve shared this feedback with Instructure and know we’re not alone—other institutions have echoed similar sentiment about limitations with third-party authoring tools. Instructure has acknowledged these challenges and is actively exploring long-term solutions to improve interoperability and streamline assessment workflows.
Overall, the positive message we hope to broadcast to you is this: adoption doesn’t have to feel like an abrupt drop. With a coordinated glide path, change can feel not just possible—but promising.
