Challenge yourself with Canvas Quizzes

Posted on: 27 April 2021 by Strategic Change Communications Team in Canvas at Liverpool

Quizzes are one way of involving students directly in the content that they are being taught, testing their understanding and flagging up any areas where they may need to improve. For those teaching, quizzes can point out knowledge gaps and areas to cover in revision sessions.

The quiz tool in Canvas can be used to create and administer online quizzes and surveys, supporting both formative and summative assessments.

Canvas Quizzes provides various question types and allows us to monitor the student ‘live’ as they progress through the exam, as well as providing us logs of student activity for after the exam. Creating these quizzes has been very easy and the feedback we have received from our students is that they find the interface intuitive and, in particular, they like the ability to flag a question for review.

- Matt Cripps, School of Dentistry

You can find out more about Canvas Quizzes by reading the rest of this blog, and by booking a place on a forthcoming Advanced Canvas webinar exploring quizzes in more detail during June and July. Sign up via Eventbrite here

Question types

The quiz tool in Canvas offers a wide range of question types so you should be able to develop a quiz to suit your needs:

Categorisation (New Quiz only)
Essay
Fill in the Blank
Fill in Multiple Blanks
File Upload
Formula
Multiple Answer
Multiple Choice
Multiple Dropdown
Matching
Numeric
Stimulus/Passage (New Quiz)
Text (No Question)
True/False
Ordering (New Quiz)
Hot Spot (New Quiz)

Features

The Quiz tool has a number of key features that make it easy to use:

Question banks can be set up to create a pool of questions that can be reused in multiple quizzes and transferred into other course spaces.
As an instructor, you can tweak the settings allocating a time or setting a password to access the quiz.
Completed quizzes are marked through the SpeedGrader tool, and you can edit and interact with them through the Canvas Teacher app.
Students can take the quiz 'on-the-go' using the Canvas Student app.

Top tip

We recommend enabling Quiz log auditing.

You can do this in a course by clicking on Settings>Feature Options and scrolling to Quiz log auditing.

This feature allows you to monitor a live quiz and view a student's progress as they attempt the questions. It’s useful for troubleshooting any issues that students may have and also for monitoring their progress. For further guidance on quiz log auditing, read this article.

Canvas quiz screen grab

Exporting quizzes from VITAL to Canvas

Good news! If you already have quizzes built in VITAL, these can be moved into Canvas in two ways:

Manually, by exporting your content from VITAL through ‘Export Course’ as a .zip folder
Downloading your quiz or question banks in VITAL as .QMS files.
Both export files can then be imported into Canvas. You can find out more about importing quizzes into Canvas here
Your quiz will, by default, transfer over as a classic quiz - make sure to change it if you need New Quizzes functionality.

Most question types transfer seamlessly into Canvas. The only types that pose a problem when transfering from VITAL to Canvas are ‘Formula’ and ‘Hot Spot’ questions. You will have to re-build these in the Canvas Quiz tool.

What’s the difference between a ‘Classic Quiz and a ‘New Quiz’?

When creating a new quiz, you will get the option to choose between a Classic Quiz or a New Quiz. Both are very similar but have slight differences in how they work.

Classic Quizzes is the fully established quiz tool that can use 3rd party tools or CSV files
New Quizzes have a few new question types and additional settings still in development

For more details on the differences between a Classic Quiz and a New Quiz check out this article.

Understanding the limitations of New Quizzes is important when setting up your quiz. New Quizzes currently lack important features that some instructors rely on in Classic Quizzes:

New Quizzes currently do NOT work with 3rd party tools such as proctoring tools (Proctorio or Respondus Lockdown Browser).
Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes keep separate question banks and do not share.
Question libraries from Classic Quizzes cannot be migrated to New Quizzes without a time-consuming workaround.
New Quizzes do NOT offer access to the Rich Text Editor (RCE) used in other areas of Canvas. As such, videos from Canvas Studio and other items from Canvas cannot be used in questions.
New Quizzes do NOT support partial credit for questions in some cases.
New Quizzes do NOT come with the functionality to build surveys.
Instructors can NOT revert from New Quizzes to Classic Quizzes.

Eventually, New Quizzes will replace Classic Quizzes, but rest assured, this will not happen all at once. There will be plenty of time to move from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes when Canvas is fully implemented.

Why move to New Quizzes?

While it is true New Quizzes have limitations, they are still under development by Canvas and many of these issues are being looked into. New Quizzes have a new and cleaner interface, as well as more question types to use - which will be continuously added to as Instructure develop them. New quizzes also allow more detailed quiz analytics, question categorisation and shuffled answers.

Keywords: Canvas at Liverpool, Quizzes, Formative and summative assessment.