Ohio State is currently in phase one of its transition to New Quizzes in CarmenCanvas. This means you can activate New Quizzes in a course if you choose.
The use of New Quizzes for assessments in academic courses should be considered carefully. If you elect to enable the feature at this time, note that New Quizzes will continue to undergo significant updates by the vendor over the next year that will impact the workflow of quiz creation and available features.
Instructure's New Quizzes Hub is the best source for up-to-date information on the development and release of features. They also maintain a list comparing the current functionality available in New Quizzes versus the functionality in Classic Quizzes. The following are just a few of the key innovations, differences, and issues to consider before adopting New Quizzes in your own courses.
Innovations in New Quizzes
Some of the additional features and options available in New Quizzes are described below.
- You can print your quizzes in New Quizzes. You can either print a quiz key with answers shown or print a blank quiz with no answers. Quizzes can be printed on paper or saved to your computer as a PDF file.
- Individual quiz questions can be aligned to program or course outcomes.
- There are several new question types available, including ordering, categorization, and stimulus questions.
- Multiple question types will have options for awarding partial credit or varying the amount of points by answer based on how students respond.
- Questions can be stored in Item Banks instead of the Question Banks used in Classic Quizzes. You can use Item Banks to manage quiz questions and share them with fellow instructors.
- You can more easily duplicate questions or entire quizzes in New Quizzes. A duplicated quiz question includes the question title, question stem, question data and answers, points possible, question options, and aligned outcomes. Entire quizzes can be duplicated under the Assignment or the Quizzes tabs.
- Accommodations that you enter for a student can apply to all quizzes in a course. There is no need to enter them before each quiz.
- Quizzes can be reopened to allow students to complete their most recent attempt with whatever time they have remaining. Additionally, there is an option that lets you allow students to build on their last attempt at a quiz by reattempting only the incorrectly answered questions on their first attempt.
Differences between New Quizzes and Classic Quizzes
Once New Quizzes is enabled, the Canvas Quizzes tool houses both Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes. When you create a quiz, you'll be asked which quiz type you want to work with, Classic or New Quizzes. When choosing between the two, keep in mind the differences between each quiz type, as explained below.
Creating New Quizzes
The most obvious difference between New Quizzes and Classic Quizzes is the interface for creating a quiz. Instead of toggling between the Details and Questions tabs to get started, as in Classic Quizzes, in New Quizzes you will click on the Build button after entering your quiz details. Doing so opens the New Quizzes interface where you will create your assessment. You can leave this interface at any point by clicking the Return button. Both the Build and Return buttons save your progress.
Icons
Classic Quizzes has an outlined icon of a rocket ship.
The icon for New Quizzes is a solid green rocket ship.
Keep in mind that while you see the different icons, your students will not. They will not know which tool the quiz will be administered in until they click into the quiz.
Grades and SpeedGrader
Grades are calculated differently in New Quizzes. A quiz of this type requires an assignment point value and question point values.
- Question point values are entered as you create questions; the quiz as a whole has a value worth the cumulative question point values.
- The assignment point value is entered on the quiz details page. Enter the anticipated value before you click the Build button; you can return to the details page to correct the value if needed. The point value entered in the quiz details determines the value in the Gradebook.
To avoid confusion, we recommend that the assignment value and the cumulative question point values match. If your quiz is worth 20 points, be sure that both the points within the quiz and the points going into the gradebook are set to 20 points.
SpeedGrader can be accessed through the quiz's three-dot menu, in the Moderate tab while in the build tool, or via the Gradebook. A quiz's three-dot menu can be accessed on the Assignments, Quizzes, or Modules (if added) pages of a course. Locate the quiz to be graded on any of those pages and click the three-dot menu. Then click the SpeedGrader link.
Questions and Quiz Types
The “Text (no question)” question type from Classic Quizzes is unavailable in New Quizzes. New question types including ordering, categorization, and stimulus questions are added to New Quizzes.
Question Banks in Classic Quizzes are being replaced by Item Banks in New Quizzes. Item Banks are associated with your account, instead of with the course in which they were created. This means you need to share an Item Bank before anyone else can use its content. You can share it with specific individuals, or with a course if you need everyone with TA or instructor-level access to be able to use it. You can select to share the Item Bank with other instructors or TAs in the course during the creation process.
New Quizzes has no Surveys or Practice Quizzes. Surveys migrated from Classic Quizzes will appear as quizzes instead, and practice quizzes will appear as zero-point quizzes. All quizzes are essentially the same as the “Graded Quiz” type in Classic Quizzes.
- You can still create practice quizzes by indicating that the quiz does not appear in your gradebook. Instead of selecting a Practice Quiz option as you would in Classic Quizzes, you will need to enter a zero for the assignment point value and select the Do not count this assignment towards the final grade checkbox on the quiz details page.
- You can get survey-type data from students by marking the quiz submissions as anonymous.
Honorlock and Respondus Lockdown Browser
Both Classic and New Quizzes can be used in conjunction with Honorlock and Respondus LockDown Browser. There is no difference between how students take Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes exams that are Honorlock-enabled.
However, when Respondus LockDown Browser is enabled, students will need to access the quiz differently depending on the quiz engine.
- For Classic Quizzes, students should start in Respondus LockDown Browser and access the exam from there. For New Quizzes, students start the exam through Carmen on their normal browser – this launches Respondus LockDown Browser.
Be aware that students cannot distinguish a Classic Quizzes exam from a New Quizzes exam. Prior to the exam, you will need to provide clear instructions about how to take LockDown Browser-enabled exams.
Current Issues with New Quizzes
While there are items on Instructure’s New Quizzes Product Roadmap to address some of the issues below, they do not have specific resolution dates, and many may not ever be addressed. Bookmark Instructure's New Quizzes Hub for the most accurate information on new features.
- The Designer role does not have the ability to create or edit assessments made in New Quizzes.
- The Graded and Ungraded Survey options are not available in New Quizzes, but you do have the ability to gather anonymous student feedback in quiz form.
- New Quizzes does log student activity for each quiz attempt, but it does not contain the same level of detail as the session information and action logs provided by Classic Quizzes.
- Question Banks cannot currently be converted into Item Banks, and Questions Banks are not useable in New Quizzes. While Instructure works on making conversion automatic, a workaround can be used in the meantime. Add all of the questions from one of your banks to a classic quiz and then migrate it to New Quizzes. Then you can add the content from the migrated quiz to an Item Bank.