[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
debbie2
Community Novice

This is a fantastic idea! It gets too hairy in the question banks when you can't organize them questions into folders--especially in year long courses. Please vote on this feature and help us get this rolling! Thanks!

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hello  @nathan_blackner 

Thank you for submitting this feature idea.  It will open for vote today.  Please note that the idea has been put to vote previously ( ), but did not receive sufficient votes for it to be moved forward to the next stage in the process.  Perhaps it will gain more momentum this time.

Thanks,

Scott

mpurzycki
Community Novice

Teaching multiple courses in canvas (I have 4 preps) it would be nice to be able to not have to search through all my test banks, and some random others that seem to come up, I have multiple banks based on question style (essay, fill-in, labeling etc)

Thanks hope they listen

dmg34
Community Contributor

Yes, yes, yes! I'm just starting to use Canvas, and already have quite a few question banks. I was thinking about the need for this exact feature.

tbunag
Community Champion

Hopefully, the Quizzing Engine Project (Canvas Studio: Modern Quizzing Engine ) will address this in some way!  I don't know whether subfolders are the best approach or if there will be another way to find the questions, but anything that makes it easier to find questions would make me much happier.

scain
Community Contributor

I've been working on a course where a professor has multiple versions of each question (three versions each) and the only way to do this right now is with a whole mess of question banks. The sub-folders option is the obvious one, but alternatively I'd like to suggest the idea of question versioning where the question can actually hold multiple questions with the implication being that quizzes using those questions will always select one version at random. This addresses the need for simplifying question randomization without requiring a whole slug of question banks and without the, IMO, clunky sub-folder UI model. I haven't submitted this as a feature request yet both because of the Quiz.2 project currently in development and because I wanted to see if I could find support in the community before putting it forward. Any thoughts from people in this thread? Would my idea support the needs you're looking for, or is it not thorough enough?  @tbunag ​  @nathan_blackner ​

tbunag
Community Champion

Ideally, I'd like to have both options, but I think this question versioning option would actually work better than the subfolders for how I use question banks.  I could see some situations where the opposite would be true.

broxholm
Community Member

I'm being forced to switch from Moodle to Canvas.  I have been told how much better it is but I'm struggling.  I use questions banks very heavily and my subject has multiple sub-subjects to which I would have question bank sub-folders. I was able to move these question banks around and create quizzes that would pull a specified number of questions from each bank.  I don't see anything like that here.  I can't even move the question banks around to create some kind of order.  This is going to be hell if all my question banks are lumped together in any order Canvas wants.

scain
Community Contributor

Since you're brand new to the community (even newer than myself in fact) you may not have heard about the quiz engine overhaul that is in development.

broxholm
Community Member

Thank you. I'm so new my school won't even give me a school account yet. Only certain instructor will get an account for fall. I have to wait until spring. I can't wait that long to learn canvas so I'm staring early this summer and fall with a free account. I have another problem. I use a lot of SCORMS but from what I can see is the free account doesn't support SCORMS. Would you know anything about this? I'm finding it very difficult to get any kind of tech support. It appears to be all on me to search for my answer. I can't even find a general message board to post to.

Thanks again.

Tom Broxholm

415-577-9610

Sent from my iPhone