Assigning quizzes to a large class?

[WilliamASims]

Hi all,

I am an instructor for an in-person class of 200 undergraduate students.  I am trying to create multiple versions of a Canvas quiz to give to my students, and I noticed that this is very difficult to do with the current features on Canvas.  I do not have the prerequisites to submit new feature requests, so I am explaining the issues here.  The first bullet below addresses the lack of a "multiple version quiz" feature and the second  bullet below addresses the shortcomings of how Quizzes can currently be assigned to students.

• When creating a quiz through Canvas, I do not see a way to make multiple versions of the quiz so that not all students take the same quiz.  I found an archived feature request on this topic, and Canvas decided this feature would not be implemented.  Given the rise of online education and the use of online technology in in-person classes, I think some feature to allow multiple quiz versions needs to be implemented.  Perhaps allow Questions to pull a random question from a bank.
  
  
• The next best solution is to create multiple quizzes and assign them to different sets of students.  However, the assignment features do not make this easy.  The best way I can find to do this is to assign each student to a version of the quiz one by one, but that is very cumbersome for a large class.  You can assign quizzes to Sections, but all of my students are in one section and I cannot create custom sections.  You can easily create Groups of students, but you cannot assign quizzes to groups.

Hopefully, the issues are clear.

[JeffCampbell · Accepted solution]

This functionality is already present in both Classic and New Quizzes. I am going to explain it using New Quizzes, but if you look up "Question Banks," you will find resources in Canvas's help pages for Classic Quizzes. The concept is the same, the steps to use it are different.

In New Quizzes, it will require that you have an Item Bank set up with questions already in the bank first. Then, when adding a question in Build mode, you will be prompted to select a question type. In the upper right corner of that popup is an icon that looks similar to a file folder. Click on that to pull up a menu to select an item bank. At the top of the bank, select the button that says +All/Random. This will load a spot into your quiz. Close the Item Bank side panel and click on that spot that was added. You will see an option to choose all questions or a random set of questions. If you choose random, it will expand and let you choose how many questions to pull from the bank and the point value.

Do this procedure for whichever item banks you want to use. When you assign the quiz to students, it will randomly pull questions from the bank(s) you have used in your quiz for each student. The more questions in your item bank, the more random each quiz becomes.

For best practices, I usually suggest that narrow topic item banks are better than wide topic banks. The example I often use is math related. If a teacher is wanting to evaluate solving for volume, then they would not want to use questions that evaluate perimeter. An item bank with a bunch of varying volume questions helps increase the validity and reliability of the results. Another teacher once told a group of us that he would try to add at least one question a week to an item bank. Over time, his banks had a bunch of questions to pull from when building an assessment.