Migrating to New Quizzes Capability Coming to Beta

[SuSorensen]

In late December, “bulk” migration to New Quizzes will be available. We’ve conferred with the community about how multiple quizzes might migrate, and the results suggested the best mechanism is during the course copy or importing process. 

When using one of those options, you may choose to have the quizzes and banks migrate to New Quizzes. 

This functionality is being released to the Beta environment only, because we’ve made a conscious decision not to release it to Production yet. 

Why? Why:

Having migration available in Beta:

• Provides you with a good opportunity to safely test the tool, create draft documentation, and begin thinking about how it might fit in with training and your overall transition plan. 
• Provides us all time to test against a wide variety of teacher content. Teachers find innovative ways to engage students including with quizzing/testing. While we can make sure there are no failures, only those familiar with the quiz will be certain the result is as anticipated. 

In addition, we would like to improve additional areas of New Quizzes before having the tool readily available to teachers, improvements specifically to the user experience and additional content migration work. We don’t want to miss teacher expectations. For example, in the December release, messaging will inform the users about migration limitations and questions they may want to review. We know this process isn’t ultimately ideal and will continue to work on these scenarios:

• Questions with formula equations migrate as images
• Fill in the blank using rich content editing to include table or multiple drop-down questions migrate but shouldn’t be edited yet
• Text No Question types move as a stimulus (orientation can be changed) but require a question to display to students. This process can still act as subsections but requires the user to edit the quiz.

All this to say, we want to get the tooling into your hands so that you can try it out, and we also want continued feedback so that we can iterate to make the migration better. 

Where are the details?

When migration functionality is available, links to the full details will be posted in the following locations:

• Q4 New Quizzes Roadmap links
• Beta Environment Feature Feedback tab located in the Feature Groups page

[2021-12-22 UPDATE: Migration is available in the beta environment]

Beta Release Notes: New Quizzes Migration (2021-12... - Instructure Community

Thanks for your interest and excitement in this product and helping us continue its development.

[Jeff_F]

@SuSorensen  -

Let's say we have 2,000 course templates.  Does this post mean that in order to transition these to New Quizzes we will need to perform a course copy?  I am hopeful the plan is to empower us with a utility such as an API that can perform a batch process and take care of the details such as renaming the course.  Optimally, we would be able to apply this to a subaccount that has the templates.

Also, we have started our project planning and one of our initial steps is to list out the challenges our peers have listed here in community posts.  That is in process and there are several. One key aspect of the conversion will be will be item bank ownership. For example:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/New-Quizzes-Users/Problems-related-to-Item-Bank-ownership-and-lac...

I'd like to suggest major concerns and open issues such as this above be listed out in one place and therein detail how Canvas will address them. Or list an ETA for when they are to be considered.

Thank you all!

[SuSorensen]

Hiya Jeff, 

Yes! We'll be sure to include the API process in the documentation. You'll be using the Canvas REST APIs to get needed content and the use the same API with flag enabled to post the content to New Quizzes. 

Thanks for the suggestion. That definitely sounds like something useful for the transition toolkit. We are going to continue adding materials to that section. 

[kroeninm]

Thank you for the early access, looking forward to being able to test the initial migration options a bit sooner than expected!

Melanie

[hesspe]

From a granular perspective, should we expect the outcome of a bulk migration done on Beta in December to be any different from what happens when an individual quiz is migrated, as it is currently possible to do within a site?  If so, how so?

Also, can you elaborate on:

"in the December release, messaging will inform the users about migration limitations and questions they may want to review. "

Where will this messaging appear and to whom will it be directed?

[leward]

@hesspe Sounds like the migration will migrate item banks as well as quizzes (and hopefully keep random draw sections intact and linked to the correct banks), which will be a huge improvement.  That's been a huge roadblock for many institutions.

[hesspe]

Right now New Quizzes isn't working in Beta at all (a "known issue").  Assuming that will be fixed soon, New Quiz behavior is slow in our Production instance, relative to Classic Quizzes, and our Beta instance is very slow compared to our Production instance, so I wonder how useful this arrangement is going to be for testing.

[erinhmcmillan]

@hesspe Known issues that are closed will be deployed to the production environment within a week or two of the close date. It'll be working again before this behavior is in beta.

Thanks,

Erin

[DR-BRZ]

Quick question- regarding the following migration element:

• Questions with formula equations migrate as images

How will the process of transforming formulas into images align with accessibility requirements for students?

[kroeninm]

@hesspe just to confirm, I ran the same individual migration of quizzes through the first iteration of the bulk migration on the beta server earlier this morning and received the same results as I did when individually migrating a series of quizzes.  

• Pros - The migration was much quicker than migrating the quizzes one at a time, it seemed instantaneous which was a pleasant surprise given it was in Beta.  
  
  
• Cons - There are still some updates needed to the tool (and/or Item Bank features) so that Question Groups and Question Banks will migrate over smoothly.  

So I would hold off on testing the banks/groups migration as it's not quite there yet.  

Melanie

[sharris]

We are starting our migration to New Quizzes next week (will be a 12 month migration). This migration tool (for item banks) is one thing we are still waiting on. When do you anticipate it will be in production ? Will we be able to use the API to do the same thing the copy does ?

[kroeninm]

@sharris there are a few suggested options for migration in the forums if you have to move sooner (next week, wow!!!) than later.  I think you can export the banks and import them if I remember right.  And for Question Groups I think there is also a workaround though it's a bit manual.

Definitely Item Bank/Question Group migration is one hold-up from us moving forward as well.

Melanie

[sharris]

@kroeninm - We just can't keep waiting on Instructure to settle on a timeline (If you look at the New Quizzes timeline page, they changed the dates again). We've spent months planning this transition (based on the deprecation dates that were published this summer), and it will take about 12 months to complete. Our plan is to start with quizzes that do not have question banks. Every 8 weeks for the next year we will do a migration of approx. 750 quizzes for our fully online programs. 

[venitk]

@sharris I'm sorry you're in this position of transitioning before the tool is ready. That sounds frustrating and overwhelming. We're fully online, too, but we're MUCH smaller. Since we'll still be able to copy CQ from a current course to a new course until past this summer (we just won't create quizzes from scratch), we're punting and hoping our future selves and future NQ have closer harmony than our current selves and current NQ. We're also coincidentally and luckily revising the courses that have the most quizzes now so we don't need to deal with creating quizzes from scratch for a while and will just reuse CQ in next year's courses.  But again, we're much much smaller. Anyway, I wish you good luck. 

You mentioned the timeline changed again. Where are you seeing that? I'm looking at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/The-Product-Blog/Classic-Quiz-Sunset-Timeline-Subscribe/ba-p/4709... and it seems like the only change so far is that they're extending the ability to edit a quiz through Phase 3 (currently until June 2023). Is there someplace that's been updated more recently?

[mmyers3]

@SuSorensen  Thank you for the adjustments that you are making. Now that question banks are migrating when faculty transition to NQ, what is the expected behavior for Outcomes linked to question banks?  Should we expect that they will migrate as well?  

there was a level of administrative control that we had for institutional assessment with question banks at the tool or sub account level. Are there plans to restore more assurance of consistency for key institutional assessment or will all control go to the course level?

thank you for listening to the feedback and adapting. 

[SuSorensen]

Hello @mmyers3  - we're still collecting feedback  about how outcomes migration should behave. Please add any of your thoughts for the PM here Input Opportunity: Classic to New Quiz Outcome Alignment Migration

They plan to begin that work soon.

[byoung86]

Quizes.next is still missing some essential functionality - like not automatically marking everything as zero when a student completes things like an essay question or notifying the teacher that a quiz is completed. 

[BenJam1n]

I tested out a whole course migration to New Quizzes in Beta this morning, and none of the Item Banks came over, nor did the Classic Question Banks. Both repositories were empty. 

Over half my courses use banks; when will this work in migration? 

Cheers,

Ben

[SuSorensen]

@BenJam1n , If you've followed along with info here and are still seeing issues, please make sure you submit the steps you took to support. They'll work with the team to make sure any issues are addressed. 

[BenJam1n]

<Update: Filing a support ticket with documentation>

Thank you!  It looks like I followed the steps, but I will do it again and document it in case I need to file a support ticket.

Cheers,

Ben

[bdye]

@BenJam1n I'm getting the same issue as your reporting. In the process of submitting the ticket but wanted to check to see if others are having the same issue.

It was a very small question bank with simple multiple choice answers.

[BenJam1n]

@bdye @SuSorensen 

I submitted a ticket, and then during the troubleshooting process with support, I decided to try the migration again, and it worked.  

Until now I thought it was just me, and I made a mistake.  Either way, when I have time, I will try the migration process across a larger sample of courses in hopes that this was a one-off type of thing.  I'd rather it be me than something larger. 

Thank you again @SuSorensen and thanks to your support team at Instructure.  

Cheers,

Ben

[sharris]

@SuSorensen - Is this feature supposed to be in our beta instances ? When we go to import course content the checkbox to migrate New Quizzes doesn’t appear. Do we need to enable something ?

[SuSorensen]

Yes, there are some flags you will need to enable. The release notes here walk thru set up

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Releases/Beta-Release-Notes-New-Quizzes-Migration-2021-12-...

[SuSorensen]

Please add any new feedback here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Quizzes-Transition/Releases-Q-amp-A-BETA-2021-12-22-New-Quizzes-M...