Automatically reassign quiz after expiration

[jasoncrandall]

I have a course with rolling enrollment that students sign up for to use machine shop tools. All students have to periodically complete a safety quiz. All students are currently in a single section and remain enrolled in the course for as long as they are at my institution. Some students sign up and don't complete the quiz; some sign up and only need to take the quiz once before they graduate; some sign up and have to finish the quiz more than once because their score expires.

Other than manually reassigning the quiz to students whose score has expired one-by-one, is there some way to use submission dates to reassign the quiz only to those who are still enrolled and whose score has expired? I thought about using different sections for each semester of students; can I reassign an assignment to an entire section when some students have a valid (but expired) score and others have no score at all? If it is reassigned (even manually), is there an easy way to determine which students have "new" scores and which ones have "old" scores? 

Thanks in advance for any thoughts here.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @jasoncrandall,

What you're looking to do isn't really in the standard functionality for Canvas at this point, as in my opinion it's designed more around one-time courses/assignments than things like a recurring certification.  With that being said, there are some potential ways to go about this, and it sounds like you've already found the start to one.

While Canvas can't automatically reassign something itself, you could likely write an API script to crawl through the course and do that for you.  You'd need someone with at least a little bit of API/scripting knowledge to do this, but I think it's possible.  The downside of this method (again in my opinion) is that it may not be super clear to the "students" in the course that things have to be redone.

Another possible option, which we have implemented in a couple cases at my institution, would be to create new quizzes or completely new courses each year.  You could have a "2024-2025 safety quiz" and a "2025-2026 safety quiz" and so on, or a "2024-2025 certifications" course and a "2025-2026 certifications" course each with their own "safety quiz".  In Canvas itself, I'd say this is an easier method, but at least the way we do things someone could have to take the quiz twice in a short period (say they take it April 2025, we'd ask them to retake it again in September, as we just look at the results of the current year course/quiz).  You could look at results differently to avoid this small complication, but it honestly hasn't turned out to be much of an issue for us.

I know this may not be exactly what you were hoping to hear.  It's totally possible there are other solutions/ideas that someone else will post, but I at least wanted to get you an idea or two here to start with.

-Chris