New Quizzes CD2

[pgentry]

Hello!

I am new to developing with Canvas data and had two questions:

1.  I saw a question from January about new quizzes and the response was that New quizzzes are not in the CD2 data.  Is that still the case?  For our own analytics we are pulling this data and right now using the API is quite cumbersome.

2. In regards to old quizzes - the API offers a quiz statistics endpoint with biserial information and other stats.  Where exactly does that data connect to in the CD2 data?  Is that stats data available in CD2 for old quizzes? 

[stimme · Accepted solution]

Hello @pgentry . Welcome!

1. New Quizzes are still only reflected in the canvas.assignments table. They're external_tool assignments. New Quizzes is called 'Quizzes 2' in canvas.context_external_tools.
2. The Quiz Statistics for Classic Quizzes are reports that Canvas generates on demand. They are not in Canvas Data.

[pgentry]

Thank you for that info!  I've spent the day looking at the data and part way through the day did realize the new quizzes are represented as assignments.  Now what my business users are looking for are like the Alpha value, and those kinds of stat numbers for new quizzes.  Knowing these are assignments now - I see some tables that provide some data like score_statistics - mean, min and max.  Is there other tables I should be looking at that would provide enough data to do those statistics on my own if needed? 

I had a feeling the classic quiz API statistics was generating the stats and it wasn't a persisted value but wanted to verify.

[pgentry]

Just a followup - which field do I use to figure out which Assignments are new quizzes?  I have pulled the context_external_tools but am having trouble figuring out which field there hooks me up to an assignment. 

[stimme]

The content_tags table holds the records of which external tools are used with which assignments (as well as which items are in which modules, etc.). Here's an SQL query that would return all of the New Quizzes assignments.

SELECT *
FROM canvas.content_tags ct
JOIN canvas.assignments a ON a.id = ct.context_id
WHERE ct.context_type = 'Assignment'
AND ct.content_type = 'ContextExternalTool'
AND ct.content_id IN (
  SELECT id 
  FROM canvas.context_external_tools 
  WHERE name = 'Quizzes 2')
;

[pgentry]

So I've been wracking my brain - if I then wanted to know what questions are attached to a new quiz - I now have the assignment id - I tried seeing if there was a connection in the content tags table and I was looking at the lti line items table but wasn't seeing a way there.  Can I see what questions from the item bank are attached to a particular assignment? 

[stimme]

CD2 doesn't have the NQ items or item banks yet, and there is not yet (but may be soon) an estimated delivery date for these data sets. If your goal is building CD2-only reports, then I'd recommend waiting for the data sets.

If you want to get reports about NQ items now, there are two NQ APIs: New Quizzes & New Quizzes Items. Since you have the list of assignment IDs from CD2, you could skip the process of listing NQs in courses and start with the items API.

[Milty]

Hello!
In this Entity Relationship Diagram for CD2 it lists "canvas.quiz_statistics" as an entity. However, in reality, it doesn't seem to exist as you mentioned in your reply. (In this context I mean the classic quizzes.)

Does this mean there are plans to add quiz statistics in the future or is this just a mistake in the diagram?

[LeventeHunyadi]

I think the diagram might need some adjustments. Tables like quiz_statistics in the namespace canvas are not exposed but exist only as the target of a foreign key or discriminated key relationship (i.e. as determined by columns context_type and context_id in the other table). Currently, the entity relationship diagram presents these tables with a single field id but no other fields. Description text or extra visual cues could clarify the difference from regular tables.

[Milty]

Ah I see what you mean. Thank you for the explanation.

Are the formulas used to get the statistic values available anywhere? We could use the API to get these reports but we are looking to generate them for a lot of quizzes and it would be much faster if we could just use SQL to recreate them.

[BobODell]

@pgentry @sgergely Hello pgentry and welcome to Canvas Data. We are your Product Management team here at Instructure. As a new developer, we'd love to learn more about your experience, onboarding with Canvas Data, what worked, what didn't, and what can we do better to improve the new developer experience. Please feel free to DM us or even respond here for all to see. Also please let us know what continued support we can provide.

Bob & Gergely

[stimme]

Hello @BobODell & @sgergely! I'd like to ask if you have a time horizon to release a new quizzes dataset in CD2.

[sgergely]

Since Instructure is a publicly traded company I cannot share any details about the roadmap in advance. However I can tell you that the roadmap.instructure.com is going to be updated pretty soon as we are working on it and hopefully it will answer your question.
We see and understand that the New Quizzes dataset is one of the most requested feature for the CD2 datasets.

[amcdona]

One month later:

Q3,Q4 and beyond for CD2: No new items announced this quarter.

Will the roadmap only show past accomplishments or future goals?