[New Quizzes] SubFolders for Item Banks

PLEASE develop folders and subfolders within question banks so questions can be organized for easier access in quiz creation.  If a teacher chooses to develop a quiz with a selected number of questions randomly being chosen from several different question banks, it becomes very difficult to filter through the hundreds of question banks created, especially when canvas lumps all questions banks from all courses together in the quiz creation.  For example it would be nice if a teacher could create a folder for each unit and within that folder have subfolders for M.C., fill in blank, Graph interpretation, essay etc.  Right now you have to create a different question bank for each question type, point value and subject area.  Teaching 4 different subjects creates hundreds of banks and becomes chaotic really fast.  It is like trying to save everything on your desktop and then be expected to go find one document in the thousands of items.  Folders with subfolder capability is only logical to file questions in a bank.  Please make this needed addition this summer!!
51 Comments
scain
Community Contributor

Here's what I found.​ Does that answer your question? It might require an administrator to connect an LTI since that's an external tool.

broxholm
Community Member

Thank you. I found this too. I noted the last bullet item. I will been an official school account with an administrator who can activate that feature. It does not appear to be available to free or test account which is what I'm currently using.

Once again thank you for looking for me.

Tom Broxholm

415-577-9610

Sent from my iPhone

tbunag
Community Champion

Currently, they are alphabetical, but no sub-folders.  Since I also like more organized banks, I am looking forward to seeing the demo of the new quizzing engine at InstructureCon in July.  Hopefully, it will have a bit more of this structure available.

Perhaps we could help with some work-arounds in the meantime.  When you say you move the question banks around to create the quizzes, what do you mean?  You can still pull a number of questions from a bank, but there might be other ways of doing what you were doing in Moodle in Canvas.

ronmarx
Community Contributor

I'm very happy to cast an up vote for this idea because it supports a more general request of Instructure to allow users to create folders and sub-folders (directories and sub-directories) in order to aggregate individual Canvas items—question banks/assessments, content pages, and most noteworthy: modules.

Not only will this make the job of course designers more efficient, it will standardize creation and organization across the Canvas development environment. Today, we can create folders to organize assignments—called groups—but these can't be nested or embedded to create a multi-level organizational structure. Nevertheless, it's better than nothing, which is what we have in the content Pages area. When developers have to resort to elaborate naming conventions so that items are grouped logically instead of just grouping items within folders/directories, it's an inefficient way of working.

Whatever we should be able to do with question banks, so too we should be able to do with modules, pages, assignments, etc. I encourage you, d717afda035c4eaae09f102c1da3b3544c51256d7ebc774472e13c68d8a1b5b9​, and everyone else who voted here, to visit Selecting Multiple Content Items in Modules and VOTE UP so the Canvas engineers can finally implement this organizational structure across the Canvas development environment. It will save both developers and teachers a great deal of time, and make Canvas more competitive against many other LMS products.

Cheers,

iRon_Mrx

jsparks
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Hello, Fellow Quizzlers!

This is an excellent idea.  As we dive deeper into the Canvas Studio: Modern Quizzing Engine , we will do our best to enhance the item banking toolset. There's a lot of work to be done, but we will do what we can. For now, I will add this idea to our backlog.

Kind regards,

Jason

lisahistory
Community Novice

I don't use folders to group quiz bank questions by type, but rather by source: textbook questions, alternate textbook questions, lecture questions, wiki questions. This would be SO helpful!

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

This idea was moved from Under Consideration stage (no longer in use) to the Product Radar stage.  

This change was made as part of a feature idea process evolution.  Find more information, and contribute insights, by joining Focus Group: DRAFT Feature Idea Space

rfd131
Community Novice

Has this actually gone anywhere?  Searches on Quiz Bank Organization don't seem to turn up anything more recent than 2016. Others have probably figured this out, but the "solution" that is working for me is to name question banks with an Id as follows:  CourseID-SemesterID-QuizID-QuestionID  

I still have to scroll through too many question banks to get to the ones I need.  The one saving grace is that when you add another bank, Canvas mercifully brings me to the same point in the list I was at when I added the last question group.  

coonsj
Community Novice

Bump/encouragement - as a new Canvas user, coming over from Desire2Learn, this is the biggest issue I have so far. For all its clunkiness, one thing I really valued in D2L was the Quiz Question Library that could keep all my items neat and tidy across multiple courses. Adding that, or at least the ability to categorize questions/quizzes more systematically, would gigantically improve my experience with Canvas in the long run.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process.  You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.

 

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities.  This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.