Do you prefer question groups or question banks?

[James_Kocher_UF]

So at CanvasCon in Florida yesterday, the question about groups vs. banks came up.  Here are my thoughts on them:

Right now, I prefer groups over banks for 2 reasons. 1, you can edit a question in a live quiz with groups and regrade automatically.  You have to go through speed grader to fix bad questions from banks, and in larger classes, this can be a hassle!  2. Aligning outcomes with banks isn't fully functional yet.  Hopefully one day it will be, and soon, but with out this functioning properly, banks seem to be of no use to me!

So what are YOUR preferences and why?  Thanks!

[kona]

 @James_Kocher_UF ​, I have to agree with you on the groups vs. banks. We prefer them for pretty much the same reasons, ability to actually see the questions students are getting & ability to regrade. We don't use outcomes that much so that doesn't effect us, but I can see where it would be better to use groups.

[dhulsey]

I use a combination! Specifically, I use an empty class to house all of my banks. By bookmarking the banks, I can link a question group to a bank to serve up questions for all my classes from a centralized repository. If I need to make corrections, deletions, revisions, or whatever, I can make them in one place and automatically update every quiz in every class linked to that bank: Quiz Bank Repository - YouTube.

[kroeninm]

Typically I recommend as you do, to use Question Groups for most faculty makes sense.  They are easily able to "see" and access the questions, edit them as needed, and regrade.

However, for faculty that need the "reuse" ability of questions, then I recommend banks.  There are some courses in which questions are reused on the midterms/exams/etc. so having the questions organized into the banks makes the most sense for these types of course. 

- Melanie

[Stef_retired]

Deactivated user, since the old community is going away in a few days' time, I thought this would be a good place to preserve your thoughtful evaluation of the pros and cons of Banks and Groups:

1.  No Randomization Wanted: IF the faculty does not want randomization on their Quizzes, then they can create a quiz without using Question Banks.

• Pros:  The faculty can update the questions within their quizzes and then the quiz can be regraded.  It makes sense to faculty as it's intuitive.
• Cons:  Minor con is that the Question Banks are a little messy with this standard way of creating quizzes.  However if a faculty is using this method, they won't be looking at the Question Banks.  There is an Unfiled Question Bank that contains any quiz questions that are created within quizzes and then when the course is copied, a 2nd Question Bank is generated matching the quiz name with the same questions.  If the Quiz name changes at some point in the future, the Question Bank is generated a 3rd time to match the quiz name with the same questions.  It’s a safe design to ensure Canvas doesn’t delete something and the faculty knows where the questions are as the quiz always has a Question Bank with the same name but it’s a bit messy.

2.  Randomization Wanted:  IF the faculty does want randomization on their Quizzes (which I think we’ll strongly suggest), then they should create a Question Bank and LINK the Question Group to the Question Bank.

• Pros: The faculty can update the questions easily and there is no confusion.  The Question Banks stay in sync throughout the course.
• Cons: The faculty cannot edit a question and have a quiz regrade if the question bank is linked.  A minor issue but a small con.

3.  Randomization - less recommended method:  IF faculty wants randomization, another method is to create a Question Group that does not LINK but instead pulls the questions from a question bank into the Quiz so that the questions display INLINE.

• Pros: If the faculty is copying from shared bank, it allows the faculty to modify the questions.  If the faculty modifies the questions within the quiz, the quiz can be regraded.
• Cons: Faculty can update the quiz questions within the quiz and then the quiz questions are no longer in sync with the Question Bank.  So if the faculty were going to reuse the question in the future, they will get the old version of the question from the bank unless they duplicate the editing in both the quiz and the Question Bank.

[Beth_Young]

I use Stefanie's option 3. The Cons are definitely real. However, there's a Pro to bringing the questions inline: Often I don't want to randomly draw from every question in a bank.

My question banks are often organized by task (e.g., identify whether this morpheme is inflectional or derivational) or by textbook exercise (e.g., all the questions from Smith ch. 3 exercise 22).  I use the same question banks in the same courses year after year. Sometimes I want to use very similar questions on quizzes and then on higher-stakes tests.

So, one year I might put questions 1-5 from a bank into my quiz question group and have the quiz randomly pick 2 of them. I might use questions 6-10 the next year. And I might use questions 11-15 for the final. I don't want the exact same questions showing up on the quiz and on the final, but I do want them all saved in the same question bank so that when I'm building my assessments I can find the right kinds of questions easily.

If you link to a question bank, I believe your quiz will always draw from the whole bank, not from a subset of that bank. If you put specific questions from the bank into a question group on the quiz, the quiz will draw only from the questions in that group.

Also, I like being able to regrade questions automatically. I just have to be sure that when I edit questions, I edit them in the bank as well as in the quiz.

[DaleDrees]

Great Explanation - Thanks stefaniesanders​

[john_morris]

stefaniesanders​, HELP! I appreciate the detailed explanation you have provided... but, I'm still having trouble reconciling the differences between groups and banks. From this description, it sounds like groups are specific to a course in a term and banks are usable across courses. Therefore, even though I may spend a lot of time perfecting and growing my question banks, I'll still want to create course quizzes using question groups.

I'm familiar with banks and have already used them. I had the trouble of finding a question typo (miskeyed answer on a MC question) and had to manually update the scores of the 29 students who received that question. By the way,  @kona ​ helped me figure out how to find which students were impacted (thank you) without painstakingly opening and searching each individual quiz for the trouble question, but it was not a simple process!

I am not familiar with groups. IF had I created the quiz using both groups and banks, would I have avoided manual regrading?

[Stef_retired]

 @john_morris , question groups are not only specific to a course--they are specific to the particular quiz in which you have created them. If you've designed your quizzes so as to place the questions in a question group--without specifying the bank--you don't have access to the regrade functionality, as far as I understand it. The manual regrade process  @kona ​ described in the other discussion would therefore still apply. I put quiz questions in question groups for the sole purpose of randomizing them--and personally, I've never designed a question group by pulling from a bank (in other words, I manually select the questions from the banks rather than specifying a bank and "letting the quiz decide" which questions to pull). I hope I've expressed that clearly!

[kona]

 @john_morris , as Stefanie indicated a quiz group is associated only with a specific quiz. Yet, many of our faculty pull questions from a question bank into a question group so that they do have the regrade option. What's the difference? By adding the question to a question group (rather than linking) you are breaking the connection between the question in the quiz and the question in your bank. Yes, depending on the question type you can regrade it, but on the downside if you need to fix the question in one place it doesn't fix it everywhere. You have to manually go into every place you have the question and update it.

Hope this helps!

[john_morris]

Now that I have a clearer idea of the distinction between a question group and question bank, I can see I also didn't appreciate the difference between "linking" and "adding" (or "pulling" as Stefanie said in her June 14 post in this discussion).

When I set up my original quiz I "linked" each of three question banks to a separate question group (I didn't realize this is what I was doing). For my multiple choice questions, I can add individual question items by writing the item (question, it's correct answer and several answer distractors along with feedback) one-question-at-a-time OR shortcut the process by using the Find Questions button and pulling questions from question banks into the question group.

Now, I can see why I use question groups to randomize my questions; why adding (writing) or pulling (Find Questions) a question isolates it from the question bank; and why linking a question bank to a question group maintains the relationship between the quiz and the question bank via the question groups. Plus, I can now see why the question group options are slightly different -- Group 1 and 2 versus Group 3 in my screenshot.

Thanks  @kona ​ and stefaniesanders​ for sticking with me on my personal discovery... I now see why Instructure setup quizzes the way they did allowing question groups to be regraded while not allowing this feature for question banks. BUT, that limitation introduces a significant handicap for instructors. I can also now see why this feature request, " modifiedtitle="true" title="Create 2 way link between quiz questions and the question bank​, is so important! I hope folks vote this UP!

[kona]

It's a lot to wrap your brain around, but you did it!

[Stef_retired]

 @john_morris ​, thank you for taking the time to synthesize the process and share it in the form of clear visuals and explanatory text. Your work will be a valuable resource for present and future Canvassarians.

[DaleDrees]

Thanks  @john_morris ​! This has been excellent thread on the differences between questions groups and question banks and one that will help me to clearly explain the differences to our faculty!

[Cindy_Masek]

@John, This is a great resource!  Thank you for this very helpful diagram.  I've been struggling to understand these relationships and this has been most helpful!

[kopitzkep]

John, thank your for clarifying the metalanguage of canvas.  Stefanie also gives fully developed answers.  All of you give a very new user confidence and answers!   Beth Young's method to create unique tests was also helpful

Still one question:   If more than one group is created in a specific quiz does the quiz choose and randomize from all the groups?   If a specific quiz is the storage area for groups, what is the best way to organize for access later.  Quiz Banks are easy to access, but should I keep a table in a  Word document that will tell me what groups are in which quiz and what content is in each group. 

Actually two:  We have access to Exam View's test questions for our textbooks.  I have directions from ExamView telling me how to export into Canvas.  Now I need the Canvas end of that process.  Can someone steer me to these helpful threads?

Thank you all!

Pam

[john_morris]

Hi Pam,

Sorry that nobody has replied to your questions... I can't answer the second one, I've only had success at manually adding questions, the import/export integration has always seemed cludgy. As for the first question, Question Groups are indeed attached to individual quizzes but when you "roll forward" a course from the current term to the next term you have the option of including the Groups; this has the advantage of allowing you to continue to edit and perfect the questions and answers. As for keeping a "master" document in Word... I did this for a while but found it too tedious -- it essentially doubles your work whenever you make a modification to a question. Instead, I've found that using Ctrl+F in the Group helps to find questions quickly, I typically pick a unique word from the question to search and then quickly go to through the results until I find the right one. Even when the list is long, this is relatively quick and beats a visual search by a long shot. I hope this helps!

John

[kopitzkep]

Thank you for your reply! I understandnowthe difference between question groups (will randomize want it or not) and just accepting the selected questions from the Test Bank. You are correct; both are needed.

My favorite feature of Test Banks it the ability to copy a question to a question bank -- I use unfiled -- and copy it back in multiple times. So frequently are parts of a quiz question repeated and by the copy out and paste in, I need only to edit specific terms.

Canvas is great only because people like you keep information flowing

Pam

[James_Kocher_UF]

Moved this to the Instructional Designer group, as I asked it while we were still in beta and there weren't groups yet!  Plus, it's not something that can be answered.  Thanks for all the input!  Keep the discussion going!

[DaleDrees]

Hi James Kocher , I noticed in the guides, How do I align an Outcome with a Question Bank? and was wondering if this is a new update and if aligning outcomes with banks is working now? Thanks,

Dale

[James_Kocher_UF]

That is the original post from April 4 (though I see it's been recently updated).  This was how I linked the outcomes and it wasn't working as intended.  Haven't really played with this much, though, after outcomes got a makeover!

[DaleDrees]

Thanks  @James_Kocher_UF ​ -

Wanted to double check before pursuing any further! Thanks!

[michelle_fourne]

Hi.  I know this post was originally done in 2015. I am wondering if anything has changed that you know of in Canvas that would alter your great information? 

After reading everything in this post, I think I should be creating a Question Bank but there's one thing I'm not sure of. My scenario is, we have a course with numerous quizzes. We want them to randomize and pull 50 questions from (either a group or a bank) a pool of approximately 1000 questions, so the student gets a different quiz each time (they can take these "practice" quizzes as many times as they want). Sometimes we do find a question we don't like or that has an incorrect answer, so I only want to have to correct it or remove it one time, which I believe a Question Bank will do that. When I create the quiz, I believe I should link to the question bank.  But let's say 6 months later we find a mistake in a question in the bank. We update it in the bank. All of the instructions I've read say it won't update in the existing quizzes. If the quiz is pulling from the Question Bank, why would that be so?