New Quizzes is the default quiz engine in Canvas and are the recommended with our Canvas instance. Below are a list of common action an instructor might need when creating and managing quizzes and item banks, and importing from external sources into a Canvas course.
Please review the article New Quizzes Item Banks Guide to understand how Canvas sharing and management of New Quizzes and Item Banks works for making decisions on how you decide to store, organize and share content for the preserve the optimal longevity of your question banks.
Terminology
New Quizzes
This is the default quiz type that is created in our Canvas Instance when creating a quiz from scratch within a course.
Classic Quizzes
These are the previous version of quizzes that will eventually be depreciated by Instructure Canvas as a whole. There is no timeline currently for this. When you import Moodle courses manually, publisher quizzes (occasionally), or from other Canvas Instances, you may end up importing classic quizzes and question banks (classic quiz version of Item Banks). Classic quizzes as of August 2026 can be migrated with a button but question banks of classic quizzes require a multi step process to transfer to Item Banks. Majority if not all Quizzes in Canvas will be in new Quizzes and Item Banks and are not backwards compatible to Classic quizzes when sharing within our instance. Contact the ATC if you suspect you might have classic quizzes in your course at any point and ATC will support transitioning to New Quizzes and Item Banks.
QTI File
QTI files must remain zipped. Sometimes a publisher may zip multiple QTI files in a zipped folder. QTI files can be imported directly in a New Quiz or directly into an Item Bank for later use.
What do you want to do?
Create Item Banks and New Quizzes from Scratch
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Create a new item bank
- Always check the share with course checkbox or lose your questions!
- Note! Not seeing your newly created item bank? Follow this article on finding item banks.
- Add content to item banks from a New Quiz
Put Questions from Outside of Lane's Canvas into Your Courses Item Banks
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Migrate a Classic Quiz imported via Moodle/Publisher/or other Canvas course to a New Quiz
- Note! Not seeing an item bank you created or imported? Follow this article on finding item banks.
- For importing Classic Quiz Question banks to be moved to Item banks, contact the ATC.
- Import a publisher or other source's QTI file into your Item Banks
Put Questions from Outside of Lane's Canvas into a New Quiz Directly
Share an Item Bank or New Quiz With Another Instructor at Lane
Review this article on how Item Banks in Canvas work before continuing to decide the best method for your purpose.
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Sharing an active Item Bank with another instructor
- Note: The questions shared with this method will be shared live questions when you edit the question(s) shared, their quizzes using those same questions receive those edits. If you delete the item bank shared, their item bank is deleted because it is the same bank and the same questions.
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Sharing an Item Bank privately to another instructor using New Quizzes
- Note: The questions shared with this method will make a copy of the item bank for the other instructor. They will not be linked.
- Ensure all questions in the item bank you are intending to share are inserted into an actual quiz. When the quiz is sent or shared to Commons, the other instructor will receive a copy of the item banks that were used within the New Quiz.
- Receiving Shared Quizzes
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Copy New Quizzes to other courses you are enrolled as a Teacher in
- Note: The questions shared with this method will be shared live questions when you edit the question(s) shared, their quizzes using those same questions receive those edits. If you delete the item bank shared, their item bank is deleted because it is the same bank and the same questions.
Organizing Item Banks
Adding and Editing Questions to Quizzes from Item Banks
Import Word or Text Document into Canvas
Canvas does not have a user-friendly import file. All imports must be in a QTI file type. These steps utilize AI to format question files to be able to quickly prepare QTI files for import form a text document.
Follow the steps below to format, create the QTI file, and import, or contact the ATC for text document question import support:
- Ensure your text document includes a marker like an asterisk (not highlighting or color-based identifiers) and is displayed for each question in the document. If there is a missing right answer, you may have errors.
- Each group of questions should be in a separate text file.
- Use this Gemini Gem (AI Agent) to upload one file of questions. (This Gem was given specific instructions not to alter question or answer text, but doing your own final check is always best.)
- Provide it with a name you would like to call the item bank once it is in Canvas.
- Adding the course abbreviation in the item bank name will help with organization and searching later after they are in Canvas.
- Adding the course abbreviation in the item bank name will help with organization and searching later after they are in Canvas.
- It will process the formatting and provide a new response with corrected formatting.
- Please note AI is not perfect; if you get any errors after this point, please let ATC know.
- Select the Download button at the top right of the black box.
- The file will always start with “gemini-code-” and be placed in your downloads folder generally.
- The file will always start with “gemini-code-” and be placed in your downloads folder generally.
- Open the Cardinal Universities tool to now create the QTI file. If you receive a Private Connection Error, you may need to select Advanced and the blue Proceed link. If you do not feel comfortable, contact the ATC to have them complete the process for you.
- Upload the file, that Gemini Gem gave you, to the tool.
- Select Check File.
- If errors occur, additional checks on the formatting is necessary.
- If no errors occur, select Convert to QTI. If an error occurs during this step, there may still be a formatting issue.
- Download the QTI file.
- Follow these steps to import the zipped QTI file directly into Canvas Item Banks.The name given to the file will override the newly created item bank you import into.