Is LTI the wrong platform for New Quizzes?

SomeHandyGuy
Community Explorer

Philosophically speaking, that is. LTI seems to have been a bad choice of platform for New Quizzes as most of the complaints and feedback seems to stem from the fact that they're LTI-based. This causes me to worry because it means a lot of problems will always remain unfixable. Worse, moving to a different technology platform would mean starting from scratch.

The problem with LTI is that it means NQ are actually third-party applications that are dressed up to look like they are integrated with Canvas. They will never have the first-party access or privileges that Classic quizzes have. Part of the reason NQ are slow and can't do things is because they constantly have to make server requests for permission/access to the data they need to run. This is also the reason NQ never seems to know which course it is embedded in. It's not, it's on a completely different system and your course only links to it.  LTI does not grant full-access to student/intuitional data. It's designed for third parties and only gives out data on a need-to-know basis. This just seems unnecessary for a product made for Canvas by Canvas devs.

What does this mean for users? I think it extremely unlikely that NQ will go back to the drawing board, even if a majority of customers are screaming at them to do so. That only leaves the option of creating a New Quiz 2 or fixing Classic. Honestly, I don't understand why they just can't fix Classic? Is it really that bad? (I guess it must be.) For me, there is only one reason I can't use Classic (randomise answers at the question level) and if they fixed that I could turn my back on NQ and, for the most part, be better for it. Classic still looks and operates well and in many cases, better than NQ. Don't even get me started on that fact that now that we've invested a lot of materials to NQ and there is STILL no way to get it out. We're stuck with it.

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