[ARCHIVED] Is the survey function going away?

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ashleya2
Community Participant

Hi team,

I have noticed these two related bits of information on the Canvas Community:

Together, these seem to imply that the existing survey functionality will go away.

Right now our team has a set of surveys in Commons that we are importing into each course. If the functionality is going to be discontinued in 2020, though, we should probably stop adding surveys to new courses, and flag the existing subjects to get updated. (With Qualtrics links maybe....)

Can anyone shed light on the future of Surveys?

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James
Community Champion

 @ashleya2  

Your first link doesn't mention New Quizzes replacing Quizzes in 2020 (at least not when I checked just now). That date seems overly ambitious given the current state of new quizzes and the lack of feature parity between the two. I haven't seen a formal announcement of when the New Quizzes will replace the legacy quizzes, but it would be listed on the Upcoming Canvas Changes if there was a definitive date when old quizzes was being deprecated.

The second link says that you cannot do surveys but you can do assessments without points. That's not quite the same thing. Assessments indicate correct vs incorrect responses and this has been commented on many times about the old surveys and Canvas has made changes to it. I see this as a "not yet developed" rather than a "won't ever be developed" thing. On the list of features, it's not one of those things that has been marked with a footnote (like practice quizzes). What they might mean is that for the time being, until surveys are ready, you can use an assessment without points. Then again, they may have some really nifty way incorporated into assessments so that it doesn't indicate a right or wrong value (I don't see it and multiple choice questions still force you to specify a correct response).

Canvas has been pushing the notion that they release things incrementally. They argue that if they wait until something is completely done and ready, you may never see it. This may be partially due to the deliver on the new quizzes after promising it for years under different names. You still have access to the old quizzes for the time being and I'm still developing content for there, hoping that the quizzes will have a clean migration path to new quizzes when that becomes the only option.

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