[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
chemlectures
Community Participant

This would be very helpful.  Even before using banks for randomization, just organizing questions by subsections of chapter topics builds a huge list.  Managing that list across multiple courses gets messy very quickly.

Other related features:

  • Add meta tags to questions in banks
  • Searchable meta tags when building quizzes
  • Ability to copy quiz questions back into banks (not linked, just copy-able)
  • Easier export/import of banks as editable text files 
ronmarx
Community Contributor

No LMS is an island.

Wouldn't it be nice if Canvas simply adopted its own version of the most popular features of competing LMS platforms that it's still missing?

Organization folders like D2L: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/7532-allow-folders-in-pages" modifiedtitle="true" title="Allow...

Rubrics like real world convention: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12350-adapt-canvas-rubrics-to-conventional-rubric-design 

Bulk question import like Blackboard: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12874 

Discrete, independent, nesting modules: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/4636-modules-within-modules 

Expanded HTML like Blackboard: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5982 

Please feel free to add to this list using previously posted ideas in Canvas Community.

chemlectures
Community Participant

This would be a great feature, I'd still like sub-folders so I can organize questions along sub-topics of my course while still grouping them into a larger bank of all the questions in a particular module or chapter.

mathieu
Community Participant

This is an essential feature.  As it stands, the New Quiz tool in canvas is pure torture to use when authoring questions and question sets, particularly when you want to allow multiple attempts and ensure question variation between attempts.

jason_adkins
Community Novice

From an organizational and efficiency standpoint, the ability for teachers to create folders and sub-folders and move them around to change the order is a necessary feature that I hope can be included in the new quiz system rolling out in July.

lbach
Community Participant

YES. With all the question banks across all the courses I'm teaching in the same New Quizzes list of item banks, having the ability to sort question banks into folders for each course, chapter, or exam would be incredibly useful.

mclark311
Community Novice

PLEASE for the love of my sanity make this an option. We have SO many question banks for our course. It would really mean so much to us to be able to organize our banks into folders.

kimberly_smith1
Community Participant

Hello  @ronmarx  ,

Adding to your list...

Extra credit quizzes (like other LMS): https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1326-mark-a-quiz-as-extra-credit 

Have a correct Gradebook total (even w/drops in assignment group): https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/9718-include-a-keep-highest-scores-rule-instead-of-ignore-lowe... 

cnapolitano
Community Explorer

I am not sure if this is still being monitored for feedback or not, but having folders and subfolders is ESSENTIAL for efficient organization.  I have multiple classes I teach (3 to 4 depending on the year) and managing all the item banks is a giant waste of time.  Being able to create folders seems like such a logical way of fixing this issue, I am not sure why it wasn't implemented from the start and why it has yet to be implemented.

jsutter1025
Community Member

Since COVID started, we have been moving everything online. Can we please sort our banks ot make it easier when we want to find material? We are trying to not have students cheat, so we created a 20 question test with 4 different questions to shuffle through. So far that is 20 banks. This is Unit 1 of 12. That will be 240 banks... that is a problem with a list interface.