Problems related to Item Bank ownership and lack of usage details

[CHSCanvas-Admin]

In New Quizzes, Item Banks are owned by an individual, and not tied to a Canvas course account. This has all kinds of messy ramifications and raises many questions:

1. How can support staff continue to build quizzes and item banks for instructors? The support staff would de facto "own" all the Item Banks - an impossible mess. We have 1000 Canvas courses a year in my college alone, and 15,000 a year across campus.

2. What PRACTICAL methods exist for Instructors to organize all the Item banks created for every Classic question group, in every quiz, in every course they teach? These will all appear in one personal storage space with no indication of which course(s) or quiz(zes) uses the bank.

• Additional complications: Item banks do not need to have unique names!
• There is no info about where Item Bank is used (which Canvas courses)

3. What happens when the instructor leaves the institution or the course is passed on to a new instructor? The original instructor may still be teaching different courses.

• There seems to be no ability to pass the course's question bank ownership to the new instructor.
• The item bank may be used in other course's quizzes the original instructor is teaching AND by the new instructor of the passed over course.
• The item banks cannot be duplicated within the system (yah, you can export and import but that's not an obvious duplication method).

The lack of connection of the Item Banks to specific courses is a complete roadblock for higher education support and rollout from my observation point.

[kroeninm]

Yes, thanks for this post, we are in a similar situation in which we collaborate with instructors to create online courses but then often assist in sharing the courses with subsequent instructors who may/may not want to customize the questions banks in their versions and the initial instructor may/may not be still available.  I see some hints of course based banks where item banks can be more a part of a course than being user based but the features are still rolling in.  And as you mention for courses using lots of banks, it will be very difficult to track and share without naming conventions, clear linkage to courses, etc.  

Below are my notes and concerns from some prior testing which seem similar to yours and what we ran into as a barrier, looking forward to see additional item bank features in the future to help resolve typical workflows.  

Item Bank functionality in New Quizzes

Melanie

[danaleeling]

This is also a concern from an institutional intellectual property rights perspective. When a course and associated quizzes/tests are developed on institutional equipment as a part of an employees contract, that work belongs to the institution, not the author. The item banks should belong to the course and thus to the institution, and not the individual who developed the material. Having item banks belong to the faculty member and not the course runs contrary to the concept of who owns the intellectual property in many institutions. As noted above, there are associated issues that then arise for sharing and subsequent faculty usage of the materials. Changing from course ownership of question banks to user ownership of item banks seems like it was a solution in search of a problem that did not exist. I have to think that the item bank ownership issue is somehow related to New Quizzes being implemented as an LTI, which increasingly seems like it was a problematic decision in terms of unintended and unforeseen complications but is now a "sunk cost" from which the programming team cannot extricate itself. I echo calls voiced elsewhere to delay sunset on classic quizzes until an academic year after parity between the tools to allow institutions time to develop training programs and engage in a phased transition. I continue to wonder whether the driving reason for choosing an LTI approach was to, like Canvas Badges and Badgr, eventually spin out the quizzes unit as a separate entity that could market quizzes and tests to other platforms as a third party LTI.

[kroeninm]

Great point @danaleeling , many institutions have similar intellectual property agreements. It would be ideal if Canvas could default to course-based ownership with a option to share amongst users.  Or for an institution to be able to support their policies by choosing whether the banks are user based or course based by default.

Right now it would be extremely cumbersome and difficult to be accurate in duplicating (so as not to change the originals) and sharing banks from an institutional level when sharing a course.  I've got a few cumbersome workarounds in my head but not sure any will yet work.  Hopefully we'll see more progress and features over the next few months.

Melanie