Hi @gtang
Great question!
A question bank is a repository for questions that can then be added to a Canvas quiz or quizzes. I'll bet you are thinking, "Then why not just build them in a quiz and save the extra work?" With a question bank (soon to be more accurately called "Item Banks" in Canvas) you can literally create hundreds of questions around a single topic, or upload hundreds of question per chapter from publisher resources. This provides an opportunity for teachers to select from a wide variety of questions when developing a quiz, developing more than one quiz for a specific assessment strategy and rotate them between terms, or even draw a random set of questions into a quiz using question groups. It even permits the development of more individualized tests using differentiated assignments in Canvas, and also supports assessment security. Using bookmarked question banks it is even possible to create quizzes in several courses for which the question items are drawn from the same banks. And in fact, question banks can be created at the account or sub-account levels and then be made available to all courses (or a subset based on a sub-account) for the development of quizzes.
Question Banks are good juju!
Question groups allow you to place multiple questions within a group for students to answer. You can choose the number of questions that should be answered from the group and how many points to assign each question. Creating a question group randomizes questions within a quiz, and all questions in a group come from a question bank. This ability to use question groups, helps improve the security of an online assessment.
I hope this helps,
Kelley.
