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All About Quizzes in Canvas

Creating quizzes for a course in an LMS can be very labor intensive, and improperly set up quizzes can very quickly lead to student confusion and disengagement. Save time and headaches for both yourself and your students by understanding how long it may take to build quizzes properly and import, reformat, and review the questions for relevance. Reviewing each question in a quiz is the instructor's responsibility and is critical to an effective quiz.

The eLearning Department has a lot of experience with quizzes in Canvas and can help guide you down the right path: Email us at elearning@champlain.edu before you embark on this project.

Generally there are three ways quizzes get implemented in an LMS:

The instructor writes the quiz questions.
The course utilizes a website run by the textbook publisher.
The quiz questions are imported into Canvas from materials provided by the textbook publisher.

Option 1: Instructor writes the quiz

The documentation in this course or Instructure's Guide to Quizzes should provide the information you need for setting up a quiz.

Try it out! Click here to view an example quiz.

Option 2: The course utilizes a website run by the textbook publisher

If the course is going to rely on imported question banks as a major component of the class, then we strongly recommend that you consider online course sites that publishers make available. Pearson MyLabs and McGraw-Hill Connect are two examples, and they can supply a richer quiz experience for students that is much easier for instructors to maintain. Consider the eBook textbook option that is frequently bundled with these sites: often this is significantly cheaper than the hard copy version of the textbook. Typically you will still need to select relevant questions and quizzes in the publisher's testing system. Expect to spend time setting up the online environment to match your curriculum and assessment needs.

Consult with eLearning to determine if Canvas can be integrated with the online assessment site that you are using.

Option 3: The quiz questions are imported into Canvas from materials provided by the textbook publisher

Of the three options, this one is most challenging to implement well. When questions are imported to a Canvas course, they are stored in question banks. The quizzes are then built by choosing questions from these banks, which makes it easier to rearrange quizzes, and also allows for quiz questions to be selected at random.

We have found that importing large question banks and managing them in Canvas is very labor intensive for instructors. Many textbook publishers offer downloadable banks containing 1000 questions or more, and this quantity makes it difficult for an instructor to inspect every question for relevance. These large question banks often import with mistakes as well. It is important for instructors to quickly narrow this number down to the essential questions that are relevant in the course.

As a rough guide, we estimate that setting up a semester of quizzes with 300 total questions may take up to 40 hours to complete, and includes time invested by faculty and eLearning staff. This roughly corresponds to 15 quizzes that use 20 questions each. Many instructors opt for fewer questions which can take proportionally less time.

We always advise utilizing .qti files when they are available in preference to Word documents or Respondus files.

(Jargon Definition: In Canvas, quizzes are a "defined assignment type" consisting of multiple questions. A Test may be implemented as a quiz in Canvas)