Forum: support

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ]
By: Achim Zeileis on 2023-05-31 00:32

Thanks. We have reverse-engineered quite a few files already, mostly those generated in Canvas directly. However, it seems that the QTI reader is quite sensitive to little details which are not always easy to discover.

At the moment this is especially true for the meta-information for the quiz as a whole. Even when making the correct declarations for the quiz, these are sometimes ignored if individual items are configured differently.

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ] By: Wayne Smith on 2023-05-31 00:20	[forum:49680]
Achim, It works. Thanks. Also, if you would like to see the QTI file/zip file (including feedback/responses) that is generated from the Respondus (commercial software) software package, just let me know. It might be possible to use, say, xml2, to do a "diff" to help with the reverse engineering process. Again, much thanks.

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ]
By: Achim Zeileis on 2023-05-29 22:23

[forum:49679]

I did some more digging and I have to confess that in this case, the problem is my fault...not Instructure's. I was probably too biased since my futile attempts to reverse-engineer what is going on in New Quizzes.

In any case, here the problem was apparently caused by the way potential partial credits in choice exercises are handled. I have just committed a change on R-Forge that should fix the issue. The package should hopefully be rebuilt in an hour or so.

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ] By: Achim Zeileis on 2023-05-28 15:54	[forum:49678]
Thanks for trying! Possibly others might be affected by this as well because some universities use QTI to migrate exercises from other learning management systems to Canvas.

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ] By: Wayne Smith on 2023-05-27 22:25	[forum:49677]
Achim, Thank you for your verification of the (slipstream?/silent?) QTI Importer back-end change (at least on Instructure-hosted Canvas instances). As you suggest, I'll work on it some more although I am not holding out for much help either from my campus or Instructure.

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ]
By: Achim Zeileis on 2023-05-27 03:08

[forum:49674]

Wayne, I have checked this now and can confirm the issue. I have used exams2canvas() which worked fine on the test server canvas.instructure.com last month and now it has the problem that for schoice exercises the answer alternatives are not correctly recognized.

Thus, Instructure must have changed something about their QTI importer. I search their blog and documentation at https://community.canvaslms.com/ but couldn't find any announcements regarding this change. This is quite annoying and unfortunately not unprecedented, see for example https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75903427/missing-quiz-description-in-canvas. For this we also had a discussion in the Canvas Community which subsequently apparently was deleted.

Do you have any IT support for Canvas at your institution? If so, you could try to explain to them that you are using a system that generates QTI 1.2 .zip files which you want to import into Canvas. And it works fine apart from single-choice questions and then include for them the output of exams2canvas("swisscapital.Rmd"). Maybe they can tell what causes the problem and I could modify exams2canvas() correspondingly.

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ]
By: Wayne Smith on 2023-05-26 21:23

[forum:49673]

Achim,

One more thing. Just for testing purposes, I created a "Free for Teachers" Canvas (Instructure) account unrelated to my institution. Upon import, swisscapital.rmd (schoice) still gives the same error ("1 Issues") about not knowing which answer is correct. I doubled-checked--both "Default to New Quizzes" is disabled and "New Quizzes" is disabled in this Free for Teachers Canvas account. And again, "num" and "mchoice" work fine (both .Rmd and ".Rnw"...at the least the few I checked). Also, I checked with the CRAN (older) version too. Same result.

Best,

Wayne

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ] By: Achim Zeileis on 2023-05-26 20:52	[forum:49672]
OK, good. I'm surprised that exams2canvas() does not work...but great if exams2qti21() works.

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ] By: Wayne Smith on 2023-05-26 17:38	[forum:49671]
Ok. exams2qti21() works. All "New Quizzes" settings that I can see in Canvas show "disabled" to me, however, perhaps my institution has changed some kind of backend setting/default to enable "New Quizzes" (or similar). Thanks again for your hard work and the hard work of the extended R/Exams team.

RE: schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ]
By: Achim Zeileis on 2023-05-26 05:56

[forum:49670]

My guess would be that you imported the .zip under "New Quizzes" rather than "Classic Quizzes".

Unfortunately, the New Quizzes are poorly documented and not part of the open-source components in Canvas and we haven't been able to find out which modifications in the QTI XML are needed for making them work properly.

Luckily, the Classic Quizzes keep on being supported for now (at least in the Canvas Systems I have seen).

schoice not working in Canvas? [ Reply ]
By: Wayne Smith on 2023-05-26 00:00

[forum:49669]

The last time I tried using R/exams (schoice, in particular) in Canvas things worked (pre-pandemic). Now, I can get "num" and "mchoice" to work fine, but "schoice gives me a "The importer couldn't determine the correct answers for this question." error. This is a new error for me. The question still runs as a quiz but no points can be allocated because Canvas doesn't know the correct answer. This happens for both .rmd and .rnw versions. And for even something simple such as the "swisscapital" minimalist example. I'm using R 4.3.0 and the latest exams package from the R/forge page.