This information is accurate as of August 2026. Instructure, the company that builds Canvas, has a New Quizzes Feature Comparison chart to track missing functionality and plans for addressing those items.
New Quiz Item Banks
In New Quizzes, questions you want to reuse live in item banks. If you built question banks in Moodle, item banks are the closest equivalent — but they work differently enough that a few habits carried over from Moodle will trip you up. This guide covers how to set them up, how to get your Moodle questions in, and how to share them without losing work or breaking someone else’s course (entirely plausible).
Item banks and tags are two different things
These sound alike and get confused constantly, but they are separate features that don’t interact.
- An item bank is a pool of questions. It is the only way to build a randomized quiz: Canvas draws questions from a bank — either all of them, or a random number you set. Randomizing happens at the bank level.
- A tag is a label on a single question. Tags help you find and hand-pick specific questions when you are building a quiz yourself. They have nothing to do with randomizing — you cannot tell Canvas to randomly draw only the questions carrying a certain tag.
In practice: if you want a random pool, it has to be its own item bank. Tagging questions inside a bigger bank will not let you randomize from that subset.
The two surprises that cause the most trouble
Most of the New Quizzes horror stories come down to these two behaviors. Read them before you invest hours building.
1. Shared means shared — everyone edits the same bank
When you share an item bank, everyone you share it with is working on the same bank; there is no copy. If a colleague edits a question, it changes in your quiz too, and you may not find out until a student asks about a question you never wrote. Sharing is also limited to our institution — the “Share with…” option only reaches other LaneCC users. If you want to share a bank directly with someone at another college, we suggest using Canvas Commons — even if only published temporarily.
“Owner” also means more than “can edit.” Anyone with owner rights to a shared bank can permanently delete it. Instructors often assume owner just means editor; it also means they can destroy the shared resource for everyone.
2. Item banks are not portable, and they are not part of course exports
Item banks are not included in a Canvas course export, and Canvas has no “Export Item Bank” feature for new quizzes. If you move to another college that uses Canvas or wish to share with a colleague at a different institution, you cannot simply take your item banks with you.
- If you build large banks directly in Canvas, know there is no one-click way to download them later.
- Keep the original QTI files, or publisher files whenever possible.
- Export item bank questions by adding them to a quiz and then export the quiz. Save Word or text versions of questions you write yourself.
- Before leaving Lane, contact the ATC well in advance. Depending on how your quizzes are organized, there may be ways to preserve the questions — and it is far easier before your account is closed than after.
Other things that will bite you
- Deleting a bank is permanent. It deletes the only live copy of those questions — there is no undo, no recycle bin, and no course export to restore from. If the bank is shared, you also delete those questions from every other course that used it. The one exception: a published quiz that students have already taken keeps the copies it used.
- Editing one question rewrites it everywhere it’s used. Fix a typo in one course and you have changed that question in every other course and quiz drawing from the same bank. Quizzes already in progress or finished aren’t affected.
- There is no bulk anything. You import one file per bank, and you move or copy questions between banks one at a time. A publisher bank split into 30 chapters is 30 separate imports. For anything large, budget real time or hand it to the ATC.
- Check images after any import. Media in migrated Classic quizzes now comes through, but images in QTI files from other sources often import broken and need re-adding. Verify every question that had an image.
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Annoying Technical Limitations
- randomizing pulls from a whole bank (no random draw from a tagged subset)
- you can only import into an empty bank (add questions later by hand)
- reading-passage (stimulus) question can’t be pulled from a bank into a random draw — it has to live in the quiz.
One habit that saves grief: a bank isn’t tied to a course, so name it something you can find later — include the course and term, for example BI121·2026·Unit 3. Otherwise you’ll be scrolling a flat list of banks all named “Imported Quiz.”
Coming from Moodle: what maps and what doesn’t
| In Moodle | In New Quizzes |
|---|---|
| Question banks can be exported and moved to another Moodle site. | Item banks cannot be directly exported. Keep your original QTI or source files if you may need your questions later. |
| Drew random questions filtered by tag or category. | Not available. Randomizing uses a whole bank, so make one bank per pool. |
| Organized questions into nested categories. | Item banks are a flat list. Use clear names and per-question tags; there is no nesting. |
| Kept one bank per course, shared among that course’s quizzes. | Banks belong to a person, not a course, and can be used in any course where you teach. |
| Bulk-moved questions between categories. | Not available between item banks — one question at a time. |
| Gave different questions on each quiz attempt. | Works — a random draw pulls a fresh set each attempt, as long as “Build on last attempt” is off. |
| Printing a blank copy of a quiz was messy | Use Print Blank Quiz to generate a clean printable copy of the quiz. |
| Maintained question versions so changes to a question did not overwrite the original or affect existing quizzes. | Not available. Canvas does not keep question versions. Editing a question changes the current question everywhere it is used; keep your own copies if you need a history of changes. |
1. How should I organize my questions?
The question that decides everything: do you pick the questions, or does Canvas pick them at random? If Canvas draws them, you need one bank per pool, because a random draw always uses the whole bank.
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Question: Do you want Canvas to choose the quiz questions at random?
- No — you pick them: Use one item bank, and tag questions by topic so you can filter and hand-pick them quickly while building a quiz.
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Yes — draw at random: Make one item bank per pool you want to draw from — randomizing always uses the whole bank, so each pool needs its own. Add the bank to the quiz and choose “Randomly select N.”
- Multiple attempts draw a fresh set automatically — leave “Build on last attempt” off.
- Keep the pool bigger than N so questions rarely repeat.
- Every question in one draw must be worth the same points.
Doing both across your course? Combine them: one tagged bank for the quizzes you hand-pick, plus a separate bank for each pool you randomize from.
Building a random quiz: click + All / Random once, then close the panel. Clicking it again adds a duplicate copy of the same set.
2. How do I get my questions into a bank?
How you load questions depends on where they are now. There is no way to import many files into many banks at once — each import fills one empty bank.
- In a QTI file (a Moodle or publisher export, or a converted Word doc): Create an empty bank, open it, use the three-dot menu → Import Content, and upload the file. One file per bank; for many chapters, repeat once per file.
- Imported from Moodle as “Classic Quizzes” (Canvas’s older quiz type): Getting those questions into reusable item banks is slow to do by hand — contact the ATC.
- Already inside a New Quiz you built: Open each question, expand “Item Banking,” and choose Add to Bank — one question at a time.
- Only in a Word or text document: Convert it to a QTI file first with a converter tool, then follow the QTI-file steps.
- After importing, check images. Media in migrated Classic quizzes now comes through, but images in QTI files from other sources sometimes import broken and need re-adding. If questions are missing or the wrong type, the file’s formatting is usually why.
3. How do I reuse or share questions?
Reusing your own questions in your own future courses is fine — you own them. Sharing with someone else is where you have to choose carefully, because a shared bank is the same bank they’ll be editing, not a copy.
- My own future courses: Nothing to set up — you own the bank, so you keep full edit access when you copy the course. Just never delete the old bank; it’s the same bank, and deleting removes it from every course.
- A co-teacher, then our own sections: Sort out ownership up front. After you copy the course, you can edit only the banks you made; your co-teacher’s arrive view-only. Add each other as owners, or accept view-only.
- A new instructor taking over my course: Add them as an owner of each bank before you hand off — they arrive with view-only access, and there is no one-click ownership transfer.
- A colleague in a separate course: Give them a copy — duplicate the bank or publish it to Commons, so each of you changes your own freely. Sharing one master is quicker, but their edits change your quizzes and a delete hits everyone, with no undo. (Commons makes a copy; the “Share with…” option only reaches other LaneCC users.)
When you copy a course that uses a bank, Canvas shares the bank with the new course automatically — but only as view-only, no matter what access it had before. Edit rights follow whoever owns the bank, not the course. That is on purpose for master and template courses (a copy shouldn’t rewrite the original), and it is the reason a co-teacher can’t edit the other’s questions after copying.
Getting help
For large imports, publisher test banks, moving a lot of questions over from Moodle, preserving questions before you leave LaneCC, or anything that looks like it needs bulk work the interface won’t do, contact the Academic Technology Center before you start — some of it can be handled centrally, and some is far easier to do early.
Contact Academic Technology Center
ATC Support & Hours of Operation
Weekday Support, Monday - Friday
- Phone (voicemail only): 541-463-3377 (8am-5pm)
- Email: atc@lanecc.edu (8am-5pm)
- Find our updated hours and support options on the ATC Website
The ATC is open to in-person assistance. Support is available through the above remote options and on campus at CEN 208