Mindful Migration and other New Quizzes Tips

Whether you plan to migrate older quizzes or "start fresh" by creating all new assessments in Canvas, we've compiled a list of tips and other "good-to-knows" that will add additional quality assurance for setup and delivery of New Quizzes in your Canvas courses. Select each tip below to view more information.

Proofread your New Quizzes before publishing and making them available to students.

We've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: some quiz content may get lost in the migration process. This can include:

Before publishing a quiz and making it available to students, be sure to preview each of your assessments and make any necessary edits or adjustments to your questions and quiz instructions. This will ensure the assessment delivers for students as it was designed.

The Import/Migration process can take 1-2 hours during peak traffic times in Canvas, so be patient. ⏳

Do not select "Remember my choice for this course" unless you're ready to commit to one quiz engine.

As you start planning which courses you want to migrate first, you may find a need to create a new assessment for a course.

Before the New Quizzes enforcement date, you will have the option to create new assessments in a course with either the "Classic" or "New" quiz engine. (Note: New Quizzes must be enabled in the course in order to see this option.)

Selecting Remember my choice for this course in the quiz creation process will remove the other quiz engine option from the course, so until you are fully prepared to use only one quiz type, it is recommend you leave that box unchecked.

Once New Quizzes is enforced for the Alamo Colleges' Canvas account on Aug. 11, 2023, the option to create a new assessment using the Classic quiz engine will be removed from the Canvas interface.

Be aware of "all or nothing" question types for grading.

Partial credit grading functionality is supported for Fill in the Blank, Matching, and Multiple Answer question types in New Quizzes. Similar functionality resides in the Multiple Choice question type, which allows points to be varied for individual answers.

Other item types that do not offer partial credit will require students to answer the question 100% correctly in order to receive the point(s) allotted:

- Categorization
- Ordering

If you want to award partial credit for the various question types in New Quizzes, you can regrade individual assessment questions.

Development for the Ordering item types to be included for partial points grading is under discussion and may be included in a future Canvas release.

Name Item Banks and Questions with a course identifier and topic.

Because every item bank you create (or is shared with you by another user) is linked to your Canvas account, all item banks—regardless of which course it was created for—will appear for you when you access the collection in New Quizzes. This could make it hard to distinguish which of the banks were created for a specific course if more than one has been titled "Chapter 01 Quiz" or "Final Exam."

When you go to create an item bank, a best practice is to name them with a course identifier and topic such as "SPAN 1412 Conversational Terms." Using this naming convention will make it easier for you to locate item banks related to a learning outcome or unit of study for a specific course.

Question titles are optional, but a similar naming convention can be used for items within the bank. For instance: using "1412 chapter 6 vocabulary" or "1412 passive verbs" instead of Question 01, Question 02, etc., will make it easy for you to search for specific questions associated with a course topic.

Select "Restrict student result view" for all New Quizzes.

Until you have decided when (or if) you would like students to view their quiz results, it's recommended you select the "Restrict student result view" for all assessments created in New Quizzes. This setting can always be adjusted later once the assessment has been completed by students.

When a new assessment is created in New Quizzes, the default setting is to allow students to view all results for their assessment attempt(s). This includes their answers, the correct answers, and the number of points possible/awarded, and feedback. To hide assessment results from students, click the "Restrict student result view" button.

Note: Unless the instructor has enabled a manual posting policy in the Gradebook, students will see their assessment grades when the "Restrict student result view" option is enabled.

Migrated quizzes will mostly retain the quiz settings that had been set in Classic Quizzes with the exception of showing/hiding correct answers for a specified window of time. If you've used this feature in the past, you can manually select/deselect the applicable student result view options under "Show items and questions."

Place New Quizzes in their respective weighted assignment groups and modules.

New assessments can be created from either the Module or Quizzes index page in a course and will be added to the "Assignment" group within the Assignments index page.

When a Classic Quiz is migrated to New Quizzes, the newly imported assessment will appear in a "Migrated Quizzes" assignment group. Be sure to move the migrated quiz to its appropriate assignment group, and place it in the module where it will be replacing the Classic Quiz.

Verify the number of points awarded for the assignment.

One of the benefits of New Quizzes is you can choose the total number of points you want awarded for the assignment without worrying about the points awarded for each quiz question totaling up to that number.

With New Quizzes, the points possible set on the assignment details page is the total points possible for the quiz, and points set per question determine points earned for correct answers. Points earned for correct answers are then totaled and divided by the sum of the total question points for the quiz. That percentage is then used to calculate the final score based on the total points set on the assignment details page.

For example, if you set the total points on the assignment details page to 50 and create an quiz with 10 questions each worth 1 point, the quiz has a total of 10 points but is worth 50 points when graded. If a student answers 9 questions correctly, their quiz score is 90% (9/10). However, their final score in the Gradebook will be 45/50 (90%).

Use this URL hack to view the New Quizzes LTI within the course framework.

Note: Currently this hack only works for assessments that do not have questions linked to an Item Bank.

While you become familiar with the New Quizzes LTI, it's easy to become disoriented trying to navigate back and forth to the tool from a course. One hack you can use to associate an Assessment to the course you are accessing it from is to delete ?display=full_width from the URL that appears when you are in the Build area of the New Quizzes assignment:

Assessment URL in the "Build" state

View of a New Quiz within the LTI framework before the URL hack has been applied

Once the display information has been removed from the URL, you will be able to see the LTI displayed within the course framework, providing instructors easy access to their course navigation menu, the quiz's assignment settings, and SpeedGrader:

View of a New Quiz within the course framework after the URL hack has been applied

Consider migrating your assessments in a Staging Shell.

The migration process creates a copy of each Classic Quiz by importing the new assessment into the same course, so you will have two versions of each quiz: a "classic" version and the "new" version.

Ask your Canvas Campus Admin to set you up with a staging shell to act as a "migration launch pad" for all your courses' assessments. This will prevent any confusion as to which assignment is the right one to publish, and you will have a copy of the previous version you can always go back to reference.

Sharing a New Quiz to a course or with an other instructor is simple once the assessment has been migrated and proofed for accuracy.