Although the transition schedule for New Quizzes is still under construction at Canvas, it has been a while since we have provided a comparison of the two tools or highlighted the New Quizzes features. Canvas continues to develop features prioritized by the community, and there have been plenty of changes since our last post, Classic Quizzes v. New Quizzes, Part 2.
Who should consider using New Quizzes? New Quizzes has helpful new features, but it is also missing some features on which many faculty depend. The following features are available in New Quizzes, but not in Classic Quizzes.
- 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
- Question settings and features:
- For essay questions, enable or disable the rich content error, word count, enable/disable word limit, and spell check, and add notes for grading
- For file upload questions, restrict file types and 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 grading
- For multiple choice questions vary points by answer
- For numeric questions, specify margin of error as a percent or absolute; specify precision by decimal places or significant digits
- Duplication:
- Duplicate a quiz
- Duplicate a question in a quiz
- Duplicate a question in an item bank
- Printing options:
- Print a blank quiz for students to take with pencil and paper
- Print an answer key
- Print an autograded student attempt
- Grading, moderation, and feedback:
- Filter student attempts by status (show all, no attempts left, attempts in progress, submitted, autograding failed)
- Give students accommodations (for example, extra time, remove time limit) that apply to all quizzes, not just the current quiz
- When regrading a question, award points for any submitted answer
- More granular control over what information students can see when grades and feedback are released (for example, points possible, points awarded, items and questions, student response, correct/incorrect indicator, correct answer with incorrect response, item feedback)
- Settings:
- Shuffle questions globally (for the entire quiz)
- For quizzes with multiple attempts, require a waiting period between attempts
- Assign a different point value for the associated gradebook item than the total possible points in the quiz; points earned on quiz are converted to a percentage value which is multiplied by the points possible in the assignment/gradebook item
- Allow or disallow calculator and choose from basic or scientific calculator when allowed
- Build on last attempt; for quizzes with multiple attempts, students are only asked to answer questions that answered incorrectly in previous attempt
- Require a waiting period between attempts
- Item/question banks features:
- Share banks with specific users or courses and control the level of access when sharing (edit or view only)
- Sort, filter, and search all banks owned by and/or shared with you
- Add tags to questions in item banks
- Add any quiz question to one or more item banks
- View the last date a bank was used
Two important features of Classic Quizzes not available in New Quizzes include the ability to modify available time for an in-progress quiz and to export statistics as a csv file. Continue to use Classic Quizzes if you depend on either of these capabilities.
Even if you are not comfortable transitioning to New Quizzes at this time, please explore the tool in a practice site or perhaps use it for low- or no-stakes activities in regular courses. Getting familiar with the tool now will prepare you for the eventual transition to New Quizzes.
Canvas regularly updates two resources to inform users about the status of the transition and to keep you up to date on available features and recent changes, Canvas | New Quizzes Feature Comparison and the New Quizzes Roadmap available on the main page of the New Quizzes Hub. For more information about how to create New Quizzes, visit the New Quizzes Instructor Guide. If you have any questions about how to use Canvas effectively, IT-Academic Technology Services staff is always available at the IT-ATS Welcome Bar or you can send your questions to canvas-info@udel.edu.
