Updating Questions in Quizzes, and updating in Question Banks

[alan_mathison]

I have a question about updating titles of questions in the Question Bank.

I created a series of quizzes and tests broken down into domains and subdomains, but did not replace default "Question" name when making the quizzes. When I go into the Question Bank all of my 900+ questions fell into "Unfiled Questions" with the default name of Question.

To making sorting these easier, I went back into my individual quizzes and changed all the names of the questions to their domains and subdomains.

I was expecting this would update all the questions in the Question Bank with the updated titles to make sorting easier. Unfortunately, it did not.

Is there a way to force the Question Bank to recheck all the quizzes for updates to questions?

This also makes me worry if I made a correction to an actual question besides the title, did it also fix in the question bank?

[Ron_Bowman]

@alan_mathison -

Unfortunately, I believe you are out of luck with what you are trying to do. If I understand things correctly, the flow of information on Quiz questions is one direction - from the quiz bank to the quiz. Furthermore, once the question has been put into a quiz, modifying the question in the quiz bank will not change the question in the quiz - you have to delete the old version and add the new version of the question into the quiz. 99% of my experience is with classic quizzes, so I really do not know about New Quizzes. My guess is that it is the same. Also, once a student starts a quiz, any modifications you make to the quiz are not visible to that student.

There are a couple of ways that quizzes operate that people would like to see changed, but from an operational standpoint it makes sense what Canvas does.

[alan_mathison]

Thanks Ron.

If I delete the question out of the question bank, will the question bank rediscover the new version?
(I really don't want to go rename almost 1000 questions again!)

[Ron_Bowman]

@alan_mathison -

I do not think so(99.9% sure, but I'll leave myself an out). The thought process is that questions in a question bank would be used in multiple quizzes and that you would not want a change to a specific quiz to migrate to the others or back to the question bank. So, once a question is pulled from the question bank into a quiz that is the version for the quiz and modifying it in any way will not change the question in the question bank. So you are going to have to go in and rename all the questions. Before starting though, I would make sure you have a good naming scheme setup and whatever question banks to hold the various questions.

I feel your pain for having to go back and rename all the questions. Too bad you did not realize this issue a lot sooner. It would be nice if there were a way you could export the questions to a text or word format and then go in and modify the questions in that format and reupload them. That would make the job much easier. The first LMS I used was webCT and it was setup that way - you create a text document with all the information needed with various field names and then upload the question. Alas, Canvas does not have that capability.

[greydon]

Hello @alan_mathison

If you were to export your quizzes, you can then re-import them back to Canvas. You will have the option to create new question banks and they will be divved out per quiz instead of having them all grouped together in one large unfiled bank. This should save lots of time but you will likely want to remove the duplicates or keep them unpublished.

Here is the Canvas guide:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-export-quiz-content-from-a-course/ta-p/...

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-import-a-Canvas-course-export-package/t...

However, if students have already taken the quizzes - deleting the originals would also delete their submissions.