Table of contents
Overview
There are two types of quiz authoring tools available within ELMS-Canvas: Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes. Classic Quizzes is the original Canvas quiz tool, while New Quizzes offers a new look and feel to their original quizzing tool. Instructure postponed the retirement of Classic Quizzes indefinitely and is allowing institutions to set their own transition schedule while they make improvements to New Quizzes.
UMD will not announce a timeline for retiring Classic Quizzes until there is movement on the development work described in the New Quizzes Roadmap is complete and the tools for migrating quizzes and question banks are ready. For now, Classic Quizzes is the default quiz authoring tool in all ELMS-Canvas courses, and the New Quizzes tool is a course-level feature option that instructors can enable.
Important Note: New Quizzes does not work with Quiz Extensions, Design Tools, and does not provide a survey option like in Classic Quizzes. Review New Quizzes vs. Classic Quizzes for more information.
Who should consider using New Quizzes
New Quizzes has helpful new features, but it is also missing some features that many faculty depend on. Review the New Quizzes vs. Classic Quizzes section carefully to ensure the quizzing and grading features you need are available in New Quizzes. Consider the following when choosing a quizzing tool:
- The tools for migrating Classic Quizzes and question banks to New Quizzes and items banks are still under development. Before migrating existing quizzes to New Quizzes, UMD recommends waiting until these tools are complete and fully tested, especially if you extensively use item banks, embedded images or videos, or links to files stored in the Files tool.
- If you will be building quizzes for a new course from scratch, and if the tool's current limitations won't hamper you, consider using New Quizzes. By building quizzes in the newer tool, you won't have to worry about migrating them later.
- Even if you don't plan to use New Quizzes regularly, UMD encourages you to explore the tool in a practice site and perhaps use it for low- or no-stakes activities in regular courses. Getting familiar with the tool now will prepare you for the transition to New Quizzes. This can be done by Creating an Organization Using the ELMS-Canvas Management Tool.
- Surveys are not available in New Quizzes. We recommend using Classic Quizzes for this purpose; however, we also recommend preparing for migrating to New Quizzes when Canvas decides to retire Classic Quizzes. Another tool you can consider for surveys is Qualtrics.
New quizzes vs. classic quizzes
It's important to understand the differences between Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes, particularly if you are already a regular user of Classic Quizzes. For high-level comparison of the two tools, review Canvas | New Quizzes Feature Comparison. Currently, Design Tools does not work with New Quizzes. In addition, the Quiz Extensions tool does not work in New Quizzes, however, there is a built-in feature in New Quizzes that allows instructors to extend time and give additional attempts, as explained in this article. More information about new features and known issues in New Quizzes is provided below:
New features in New Quizzes
- Duplication:
- Grading and moderation:
- Item/question banks features:
- Import/export:
- Outcomes:
- Printing options:
- Question authoring:
- For essay questions, enable or disable the rich content editor, word count, enable/disable word limit, spell check, and notes for grading
- For file upload questions, restrict file types and a number of files
- For fill-in-the-blank questions, choose from a variety of matching options, including contains, close enough, regular expression match, exact match, and specify correct answers
- For formula questions, when generating possible solutions, display answers in scientific notation.
- For matching and multiple-answer questions, choose partial credit or exact match (all-or-nothing) grading
- For multiple choice questions with shuffled answers, lock the location of specific answers (for example, all of the above, none of the above) and vary points by answer
- For numeric questions, specify the margin of error as a percent of absolute; specify precision by decimal places or significant digits
- Question types:
- Categorization: Requires students to assign a list of items to a predefined list of categories
- Hot spot: Requires students to point to a designated region in an uploaded image
- Ordering: Requires students to arrange a list of items according to your instructions (for example, chronological order, simple to complex, etc.)
- Stimulus: Requires students to answer multiple questions related to a single block of content consisting of rich text and/or media.
- Word bank: This FITB variant requires students to draw words from a pre-existing bank of possible answers to fill in the blanks
- To learn more, see how to add content to a quiz.
- Report data:
- Settings:
- Extend time:
Known issues in Canvas Quizzes
To track the status of known issues in both Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes, see Canvas | Known Issues page. This page has been filtered to show known issues of all Canvas Quizzes and their statuses. For other feature gaps and issues, there are links corresponding feature requests in the Canvas Community site.
Getting started
Even though New Quizzes is part of the Canvas LMS, it behaves a little differently than other core Canvas tools because it's an external LTI tool. Here are some pointers to help you get oriented; see the Resources section for detailed instructions.
- Enable New Quizzes in your course: New Quizzes and Classic Quizzes are available in ELMS-Canvas. Every user can change their selected default within a course. Review How do I create a quiz using New Quizzes? to see how to save your quiz engine selection for a course.
- Start in Canvas Quizzes: The Canvas Quizzes tool houses both Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes. Once you enable New Quizzes, you'll be asked which type of quiz you want to create. On the quiz listing page, icon styles differentiate classic from new quizzes. Classic quizzes have an outline icon of a rocket ship (
), whereas the icon for new quizzes is a solid (filled in) rocket ship (
).
- Quiz Settings: The settings "new" quizzes are stored in two different places. When you create a new quiz, you;ll see a typical assignment settings screen where you can enter the title, points, assignment group, and availability/due date, as well as to add an optional rubric (these are the "assignment settings" for the quiz). To view the remaining quiz settings, select Build to enter the quiz edit mode, and then select Settings in the menu at the top.
- Edit a new quiz: To edit an existing quiz, open the Quizzes tool, select the quiz title to open the assignment setting for the quiz, and select Build at the bottom. Alternatively, from the quiz listing page, open the options drop-down menu for the desired quiz and select Build.
- Start grading from the gradebook: To grade a new quiz, to the Canvas Gradebook. Select any student cell in the column for the quiz, open the Grade Detail Tray, and select SpeedGrader. Once you're in SpeedGrader, use the student list and the next/previous links to move from one student to the next. For more, see How do I grade an assessment in New Quizzes?
- Return to your course: When you are working in a new quiz, the navigation menu for your course will be hidden. To leave the quiz and return to your course at any time, select Return at the upper right.
- Migrate a Classic Quiz to New Quizzes: If you plan to migrate a Classic Quiz to a New Quiz, please refer to How do I migrate a Canvas Quiz to New Quizzes.
- Provide Extended Time Accommodations: If students have extended time accommodations, please note that the Quiz Extensions tool will not work with quizzes created in New Quizzes. To extend time or add attempts for students in New Quizzes, please refer to our Give Extra Time or Attempts in New Quizzes in ELMS-Canvas for Instructors article.
Resources
- Instructor guides
- Student guides
- Give Extra Time or Attempts in New Quizzes in ELMS-Canvas for Instructors
- New Quizzes Hub: The Canvas Community hub for New Quizzes product updates, discussions, questions, roadmap, and feedback.
Get help
- Teaching & Learning Transformation Center (TLTC) - For pedagogy and instructional support, Instructors can attend workshops and webinars by going to tltc.umd.edu to request a one-on-one consultation please email itsupport@umd.edu and in the subject line, notate New Quizzes Consultation.
- ELMS-Canvas New Quizzes support - For technical support send an email to itsupport@umd.edu and in the subject line, notate New Quizzes Technical Issue.
Content for this resource was drawn from the Indiana University Knowledge base article About New Quizzes in Canvas, Copyright © 2023 The Trustees of Indiana University.