Canvas quiz bank questions become uneditable?

[JohnBlair]

I was surprised when I went to link a question bank I'd created a few semesters back to a new quiz in a new course to find that the "pencil" icon that gives me access to editing the questions in the bank was absent and so the questions weren't editable. Do the questions in the banks become locked after a certain period of time? I'd like to reuse the bank, but some of the questions need tweaking, and since it's a large bank I'm facing the prospect of trying to export the questions, edit them elsewhere, then type them back in one by one. Am I missing something?

[chriscas]

Hi @JohnBlair,

Do you happen to know if you made a copy of the question bank in your new Canvas course shell?  If you're trying to use the bank from your prior course shell without importing a new version of it into your new course, there are two main reasons I know of that the bank wouldn't be editable.  1 - The course the bank belongs to may be concluded (either manually or by term date), preventing changes there.  2 - The bank was used in a quiz already, which could make the questions unable to be modified as to not disturb results of that existing quiz.

Let us know if either of these scenarios could be the case for you.   If not, someone else may come along and offer additional possibilities that I haven't thought of yet.

-Chris

[JohnBlair]

Hi, Chris. Thanks for the reply.

Honestly, I don't know how to either make a copy of the question bank in a new course shell or how to import a new version of it into the current course (unless you mean a wholly typed-in again anew copy of the old bank), so those probably aren't the cases.

I was just kind of working under the assumption (likely erroneous)  that the "Bookmarked Banks" could be linked to by any of the quizzes in my new courses. I probably should have noted that it's bookmarked banks that I'm trying to work with. It's what I've been doing in the two years or so I've been using Canvas, but that's not to say it's the right way to do it.

John

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @JohnBlair,

I do believe the bookmarked banks still live in the course where they originated.  For example, if you bookmarked a bank in a Fall 2017 course, but are using it in a Fall 2024 course, the bank is still residing in Fall 2017.  This isn't necessarily right or wrong, just multiple ways you could work with this.  At my institution, our courses go into read-only mode at the end of each term, so while banks from old term courses could work, they couldn't be edited anymore.

What our faculty do is import content from one course to the next, which should create a new copy of the question bank associated with the new course, where you'll be able to edit things to your lining (and also not affect your old, completed course).  This is just one approach to this problem, but it may help you out here.  You definitely should not have to retype any questions!

-Chris