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Canvas Update: What’s New About “New Quizzes”

Canvas Update: What’s New About “New Quizzes”

  • Post author: duotl
  • Post published: November 24, 2021
  • Post category: Uncategorized

By Jeff Schwartz, Instructional Designer

Canvas recently released an update on their current quiz functionality called “New Quizzes.” While you’ll still be able to use Canvas’s existing quiz function, now dubbed “Classic Quizzes,” to create quizzes through July of 2022, it’s a good idea to get familiar with New Quizzes now. This blog walks you through some of the most important features of New Quizzes from a pedagogical perspective. Learn more about the timeline for this update below:

New Quizzes (Canvas) Timeline by Office of Teaching and Learning

Accommodations

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of New Quizzes is how it streamlines the accommodations process. Right now, instructors are required to provide accommodations to students with documented disabilities so that these students have equal opportunities to participate in DU’s programs, courses, and activities; in practical terms, this often means allowing students with disabilities extra time to complete a quiz – something that New Quizzes makes much easier to facilitate.

When faculty navigate to the “Moderate” function of a quiz, they will see a column labeled “Accommodations” and a button labeled “Moderate.” Selecting “Accommodations” allows instructors to give a student additional time to complete a quiz, remove the time limit entirely, or multiply the time limit. These accommodations stay with the student for every quiz in the course up until you make any changes. On the other hand, selecting the “Moderate” button gives faculty the option to provide one-time accommodations to students by allowing them to have additional attempts or time for a quiz.

Needless to say, both of these features significantly streamline the process of providing accommodations to students, allowing faculty to focus more energy on their course content and less time constantly adjusting quiz settings for each student with an accommodation.

To learn more about the accommodations features of New Quizzes, you can read this OTL Knowledge Base article .

Item and Question Types

In addition to providing all the item and question types that are currently a part of Classic Quizzes (including multiple choice, fill in the blank, and essay), New Quizzes offers new options that provide opportunities for more varied, engaging, and user-friendly assessment.

Hotspot questions allow instructors to upload images, such as jpegs, pngs, or even gifs, and ask students to click on a specific area within the image.

This type of assessment could be useful across disciplines. Science courses could use hotspot questions to ask students to pinpoint the parts of a cell, while art history courses could use hotspots to identify artistic techniques within a painting. Moreover, hotspots can also be used for informal activities, such as icebreaker or bell-ringer questions.

The one caveat to hotspot question is their lack of compatibility with screenreaders. If you have questions or concerns about accessibility and hotspot questions, please reach out to Ellen Hogan , the OTL’s Accessibility Technologist for Learning and Instruction.

Stimulus questions give students a prompt containing media and/or text and link this prompt, or “stimulus,” to associated questions. A language course could, for example, include a text passage as a stimulus, and then ask students a variety of questions (all question types are available within stimulus questions) about the meaning of the passage.

From the student perspective, stimulus questions are beneficial because they aren’t required to continually scroll back and forth between the stimulus and the questions; the stimulus is stationary on the left of the screen while the questions scroll on the right as needed.

Ordering questions ask students to place answers in a specific sequence. Instructors create a label or category, followed by a series of answers. Students then use their mouse to grab and order the answers.

Ordering questions could be used in everything from a history course where students need to sequence the order of events in the French Revolution, to a business course that asks students to differentiate between the principles of macroeconomics and microeconomics.

New Quizzes also improves some of the features of already-existing question types. Instructors can now specify multiple correct answers for a fill-in-the-blank question. Essay questions have the option to set a word limit and display the word count. And you no longer have to create an “all of the above” answer in a multiple choice question; you can now designate multiple answers as correct.

One more advantage to all these question types (aside from essay) is that they are auto-graded, which helps alleviate faculty workload.

Upcoming Enhancements

In the coming months, Canvas plans to roll out a number of enhancements to New Quizzes aimed at making them even more user-friendly and accessible. These planned enhancements include enabling the use Canvas’s rich content editor (RCE) for creating and answering questions, as well as the ability to migrate quiz banks (more on that below), print out quizzes, and automatically assign partial credit.

Like any software update, nothing is perfect, and there are a few aspects to New Quizzes that Canvas is touting as features which are more properly understood as bugs.

For example, the ability to use quizzes to create an ungraded, anonymous survey is no longer available in New Quizzes. While faculty at other institutions have experimented with various workarounds , we recommend simply using Qualtrics , a free program available to all DU faculty and staff, for any surveys (especially anonymous surveys) you would like your students to complete.

While converting a Classic Quiz to a New Quiz is relatively straightforward, perhaps the biggest gap in New Quizzes so far is the inability to easily transfer over Question Banks. This issue is apparently on Canvas’s radar and may be addressed in future updates. For now the best solution seems to be creating Classic Quizzes for each question bank, migrating those Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes, and then adding the questions from these quizzes to “item banks,” which are the New Quizzes version of a question bank. Hopefully a future update to New Quizzes will render this cumbersome process obsolete.

Learning More

To reiterate, you will still be able to create Classic Quizzes through the end of June 2022, and previously created Classic Quizzes will be available to import into courses for another year after that – all of which means you are under no obligation to start using New Quizzes during Winter Quarter 2022.

However, if you have the time this quarter, you might think about getting some practice with New Quizzes by migrating a Classic Quiz to a New Quiz. You could also investigate some of the new question and item types to see if they will enhance or complement your course’s learning objectives.

If you are interested in meeting with an Instructional Designer about using New Quizzes, please feel free to schedule a 1:1 consultation .

You can also go to the OTL Knowledge Base and search for “ new quizzes .”

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Canvas Best Practices Guide

  • Create your Canvas Class
  • Update Home Page
  • Adding your Syllabus
  • Turn on Zoom Integration
  • Create/Import Zoom Class
  • Using the Gradebook
  • Uploading to Echo360
  • Echo360 Analytics
  • Creating Your Zoom Class
  • Canvas Gradebook
  • Canvas Quizzes

  • Go to your Canvas class
  • Go to the Quizzes tab
  • New Quizzes can be created by pressing the "+Quiz" button
  • Clicking the Edit button will allow you to make changes
  • Clicking Preview will allow you to take an example of the quiz like a student would

New Quizzes

canvas essay question word limit

Quiz Settings

  • Practice Quiz :  An ungraded quiz useful for studying or allowing students to get used to the system
  • Graded Quiz:  A quiz that will receive a grade that counts towards the students final grade.
  • Graded Survey:  Useful for obtaining feedback or other student based data. Grade is solely based off participation in the survey
  • Ungraded Survey:  Same as the Graded Survey without the grade
  • If you have Assignment Groups set up to help organize your assignments you can then select which group this quiz belongs too
  • Shuffle Answers: You can select to have the answers for multiple choice questions to be shuffled so the order will change from attempt to attempt and student to student
  • Time Limit: Set a time limit in minutes for how long an attempt may last. The attempt is automatically submitted once the time limit expires during an attempt
  • Quiz Score to Keep: Choose whether to keep the Highest, Lastest, or Average score of the attempts taken
  • Allowed Attempts: Set how many attempts are allowed. Leave blank to allow unlimited attempts.
  • Only Once After Each Attempt:  Students will only be able to see their responses for an attempt once right after submission
  • Show Correct Answers At: Set the date and time to start allowing students to see the correct answers
  • Hide Correct Answers At: Set the date and time to hide the correct answers again.
  • Leaving these blank will leave the correct answers to always be viewable
  • Lock question after answering: Once a student answers a question they will be unable to change it.
  • Assign To: Set which students in the class need to take the quiz. Select everyone to assign to all students
  • Due: Set the date and time the quiz will be due. Any attempts will be automatically submitted at the due date.
  • Available From: Set the date and time the quiz will become available to take.
  • Until: Set the date and time the quiz will become no longer available.
  • To prevent confusion the best practice is to set a Due date and an Available From date and leave Until date blank.
  • If you need to set different dates for certain students you can click Add at the bottom of the Assign box and set different dates for different students.

canvas essay question word limit

Question Editing

canvas essay question word limit

  • Name the question if desired
  • Select the type of question

canvas essay question word limit

  • If you require more answers you can click "+ Add Another Answer" at the bottom of the answer section
  • The colored boxes below the individual answers and the answer section as a whole, can be used to provide feedback based on what the student answers. This is mainly for practice quizzes, or quizzes where you allow students to know the correct answer afterward.

canvas essay question word limit

  • Once you are satisfied with the questions click "Save" at the bottom of the quiz

Question Groups

  • Question groups are question banks that the quiz will  Randomly  select from to create a quiz.
  • These can be used to change which questions are asked from attempt to attempt and/or shuffle the order of questions.

canvas essay question word limit

  • You can follow the instructions in the  Question Editing  section for question editing guidance.

canvas essay question word limit

  • It should be noted that question groups and single questions can both be used in the same quiz. Single questions will always appear in the same spot in a quiz, and question groups questions will appear (in a random order) based on where they are placed in relation to single questions and other question groups.

Remember to Save your Quiz!!!!

Question types.

  • Multiple Choice:  Students are presented with multiple potential answers. Only one answer is allowed to be selected as correct.
  • True/False:  Students are presented with options  True  and  False . Only one answer may be selected as correct.
  • Fill in the Blank:  Students are presented with a box to type an answer into. You must type the blank into your question text. You can set several correct answers.
  • Fill in Multiple Blanks:  Students are presented with a box for each blank. Blanks must be typed with a variable name in brackets (Ex. [Variable 1]). You can set several correct answers for each blank.
  • Multiple Answers:  Students are presented with multiple potential answers. Any number of these may be selected as correct.
  • Multiple Dropdowns: A  Fill in Multiple Blanks  question using a dropdown menu instead of a type field. One answer must be selected as correct for each dropdown menu. Students are presented with a dropdown menu for each blank.
  • Matching:  Students are presented with a list of items each with a dropdown menu. You must give each left side item a matching right side item. Additional items may be added as 'distractors'. The dropdown menus include every right side item and distrators.
  • Numerical Answer:  Students are presented with a text box to type a numerical answer. You must select whether the answer is an exact number or range, and if there is any margin of error.
  • Formula Question:  You can define variables by placing them in brackets [] and then create a formula to generate potential answers.
  • Essay Question:  Students are presented with a large text box to type their response. 
  • File Upload Question:  Students are presented with a file submission button to upload and submit a file for grading.
  • Text (no question):  Students are simply presented with the text you've typed. There are no answers provided as this should not be used for a question.
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