Hi everyone,
Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time working inside Canvas - designing assessments, revising them, re-using them across courses, and trying to keep everything coherent as programs evolve. One thing became increasingly clear: the challenge isn’t writing good questions. It’s managing them.
Between Classic Quizzes, New Quizzes, item banks, and external tools, questions tend to scatter. A single assessment might live partly in Canvas, partly in a spreadsheet, and partly in someone’s memory. Reuse becomes manual, version control gets messy, and small changes turn into large time sinks.
That friction is what pushed me to rethink the workflow.
A “Create Once, Use Everywhere” Approach
Rather than treating Canvas as the starting point, I began thinking of it as one of several destinations. The idea was simple: build questions once, organize them meaningfully, and reuse them wherever they’re needed—without recreating or reformatting them every time.
That thinking eventually grew into a small side project that functions as a central workspace for assessment content. It’s not meant to replace Canvas, but to sit alongside it, handling the parts that Canvas isn’t really designed to manage at scale.
How Questions Get Into the System
There are a few flexible ways to work, depending on preference:
- Excel upload, using a structured template for bulk creation
- Direct import from Canvas, pulling in classic and new quizzes
- Manual entry, with a rich text editor for individual questions
- JSON import, for pulling classic question banks and new quiz item banks via a Chrome / Edge extension
Once inside, questions can be edited, tagged, reorganized, and reused without being tied to a specific course shell.
Supported Question Types
The goal has been to support the kinds of questions teachers actually use:
- Multiple Choice
- Multiple Response (select all that apply)
- True/False
- Numerical (with tolerance ranges)
- Short Answer / Fill-in-the-Blank
- Essay
- File Upload
- Text blocks for instructions or context
Rich media - images, audio, video, and linked documents - can be embedded directly into questions as well.
Where the Questions Can Go
From a single source, questions can be exported to multiple destinations:
Canvas LMS
- Export as QTI packages for manual upload
- Or connect directly to Canvas for pushing content into Classic Quizzes, New Quizzes, or Item Banks
Other Learning Platforms
- Kahoot, Blooket, Gimkit
- Quizlet and similar study tools
- Platforms like Socrative, AhaSlides, and others
Offline Use
- Printable worksheets with optional answer keys
The goal is simple: write once, reuse everywhere.
A Work in Progress - and a Labor of Love
It’s worth saying openly that this project is very much a work in progress. It’s something I’ve been building in the margins of full-time teaching, department leadership, and family life. New features - such as expanded New Quizzes question types (matching, ordering, etc.) and AI-assisted tagging for standards and Bloom’s taxonomy - are very much on the roadmap, but they’re developed incrementally as time allows.
This isn’t a commercial product in the traditional sense. It started as a tool I built to support my own teaching team, and it gradually grew as others found it useful. I’m sharing it in that same spirit - as a practical, evolving solution to problems many of us quietly wrestle with each term.
That said, there are paid tiers, and I want to be transparent about why. Running the platform comes with real, ongoing costs: hosting, storage, security, and the backend services that make features like file processing, syncing, and AI-assisted tools possible. Those fees aren’t about profit so much as sustainability - keeping the lights on and ensuring the tool remains reliable and accessible. The goal is simply to balance affordability for educators with the very real infrastructure costs behind the scenes.
For anyone who’s curious, the tool I’ve been referring to is called Canvas Question Bank Platform, and you can find it here:
https://canvas-quiz-import.com/
. I’m always open to feedback or ideas from fellow educators. For clarity, this is a personal project I maintain alongside my teaching work, not an official Canvas product.
- Jeremy
English Department Lead and lifelong tinkerer
