Creating Surveys in Bulk

[maryam_khaqan]

Hello Canvas Community, 

After every class, I want to give students a "Summary Exercise", a one-question survey which just prompts them to write down a couple of sentences summarizing what they learnt in this class. 

From what I understand, I should be able to do this using Canvas Surveys (I want it graded for completion, so I'm looking for Canvas to automatically assign a 0 or 1 depending on whether a student submitted something or not). 

The issue I'm having is the following: Currently, the only way I can do this is making a new survey for every single class which is a lot of work. Is there any way to make these in bulk? It's the same question every time.

[James]

 @maryam_khaqan ,

If you're using New Quizzes to do the survey, then you can duplicate assignments and rename them. This lesson in the Canvas Instructor Guide explains how: How do I duplicate an assignment? That's still time consuming, but quicker than creating each quiz manually by hand.

Legacy Quizzes cannot be duplicated easily. There are some workarounds that may work once, but they are not quick or suitable for mass duplication.

One way to bulk create assignments like this is to use the Canvas REST API. That is an advanced technique, requiring some programming skills if you want to automate it. 

The creation of quizzes is not trivial. Before Canvas had the ability to duplicate assignments, I once set out to write code that would duplicate an existing assignment, including quiz. After exploring it, I gave up on the notion. Canvas came along and added the ability to duplicate assignments, but still not quizzes, which confirmed my investigations of the difficulty involved. Creating them is simpler than duplicating them and since your question is always the same, it would be easier than most issues.

Note that when I say simpler, it's a relative term. Creating is simpler than duplicating, but still not a simple process. You have to create a quiz and then add questions to it (minimum of 2 API calls per quiz), rather than making a single API call that does both.