Canvas Question Banks vs Item Banks: New Quizzes Migration

A question bank belongs to Classic Quizzes and an item bank belongs to New Quizzes, and the two do not share questions. A New Quizzes assessment cannot pull from a question bank, and Canvas ships no one click migration between them. Moving questions across means building a Classic quiz from the bank, migrating that quiz to New Quizzes, and reorganizing the single item bank that comes out the other side.

That is the whole problem in one paragraph, and it is why so many faculty who were told the New Quizzes move would be simple find themselves staring at fifteen years of accumulated questions with no obvious way forward.

What follows is the actual difference between the two systems, the migration route campus support teams document, what survives the trip, and the honest answer to whether you should migrate at all. Everything here reflects how Canvas behaves as of August 2026.

What is the difference between a question bank and an item bank in Canvas?

They do the same job for two different quiz engines. A question bank is the Classic Quizzes question store, reached through Quizzes and then Manage Question Banks. An item bank is the New Quizzes equivalent, reached through the Item Banks page. Both hold reusable questions that quizzes can draw from, including random draws from a larger pool.

The differences that matter in practice:

Behavior	Question bank (Classic)	Item bank (New Quizzes)
Where you find it	Quizzes, then Manage Question Banks	Item Banks in course navigation
Which quizzes can use it	Classic quizzes only	New Quizzes assessments only
Sharing with colleagues	Bookmark and share a bank URL	Share a bank with named users or a course
Imports QTI	Yes, through course import	Yes, into a new or empty bank
Random draw from the pool	Question groups linked to a bank	Item bank items added with a draw count
Reads the other kind of bank	No	No

The last row is the one that surprises people. It is not a permissions issue or a setting somebody forgot to switch on. Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes are separate products that happen to live in the same interface, and question storage was never made common between them.

Why can my New Quizzes assessment not see my question banks?

Because a New Quizzes assessment only queries item banks. When you open a New Quizzes assessment, go to the Build page and add content from a bank, Canvas lists item banks you own or that have been shared with you. Classic question banks are simply not in that list, however many questions they hold and however recently you used them.

This catches whole departments at once, usually in the first term after an institution flips New Quizzes on by default. An instructor builds a new assessment, expects the bank they have curated since 2018 to appear, and finds an empty picker. Nothing is broken and nothing was deleted. The questions are still under Quizzes, in Manage Question Banks, attached to the older engine.

How do I convert a question bank to an item bank?

There is no direct conversion. The route campus teaching and learning teams document goes through a quiz, because a quiz is the thing Canvas knows how to migrate:

1. Create a new Classic quiz in the course.
2. Add a question group to it and link the group to the question bank you want to move, setting the group to pick every question in the bank.
3. Save the quiz. It now contains the bank contents.
4. From the Quizzes list, use the options menu on that quiz and choose Migrate to New Quizzes. Canvas queues the migration and emails you when it finishes.
5. Open the migrated New Quiz. Its questions now exist in an item bank, which you can find and rename from the Item Banks page.

It works, and it is tedious enough that most people do it once per bank and then never again. Two things to expect. The item bank that comes out contains everything in a single flat bank, so any structure you had across several question banks has to be rebuilt by moving items afterwards. And the migration runs in a queue, so a large bank is not instant.

The alternative worth considering is skipping the Classic side entirely. A QTI package imports straight into a New Quizzes item bank, so any questions you can produce as QTI never touch a question bank at all. That is the route to take for anything you are writing fresh rather than salvaging, and it is what the import questions into Canvas walkthrough covers step by step.

What survives the migration and what does not

Question text, options and the correct answer come across reliably. So does per question feedback in most cases. Point values usually survive. Where migrations get lossy is at the edges: question types Classic supported that New Quizzes handles differently, questions with embedded media pointing at files in a course you are migrating away from, and anything relying on Classic specific behavior in question groups.

Canvas reports what it could not map rather than dropping it quietly, so read the migration result rather than counting questions by eye. If the count is short, the log tells you which items it stopped on.

One practical habit that saves a lot of grief: migrate into a sandbox or development course first, look at what arrived, then migrate for real into the course you actually teach. Nothing about the process is destructive to the original question bank, so there is no risk in doing it twice.

Where did my item banks go?

Almost always they are still there and you are looking from the wrong place. Item banks are owned by the person who created them, not by a course, so a bank you built in one course shows up wherever you look at the Item Banks page, but a colleague sees nothing unless the bank was explicitly shared with them. Banks that vanish after a course copy usually turn out to be banks that were never shared, viewed by somebody who did not create them.

The other common cause is the Item Banks link not appearing in course navigation at all, which is a course settings matter rather than a missing bank. Check Settings and the Navigation tab before assuming data loss.

How do I export a question bank from Canvas?

Through the course export. Open Settings, choose Export Course Content, select Quizzes, and Canvas builds a QTI package containing your quizzes and the banks behind them. The download is a zip you can import into another Canvas course, or into Blackboard Original, Brightspace, D2L or Sakai, since all of those read the same standard.

This is also the sane backup habit for anything you have spent real time on. A QTI export is a portable file that outlives whichever quiz engine your institution is currently standardizing on, and it does not depend on your account still existing. If you are curious what is actually inside one, what a QTI file is and how to import one walks through the package structure and the manifest importers look for.

Should I migrate my old banks at all?

Honest answer: often not. Migration is worth the tedium for a bank you draw from every term, one that represents genuine work you would not want to redo, or one tied to a course several colleagues teach from. It is not worth it for a bank of forty questions written for a syllabus you have since changed, or for questions that were never very good.

A useful test before you start: open the bank and read ten questions at random. If more than a couple make you wince, you are about to spend an afternoon carefully preserving material you would not write that way today. Regenerating questions from your current lecture recordings takes less time than migrating and reorganizing, and what you get back matches the course as it is now rather than as it was.

That is the case where starting from the source material rather than the old bank makes sense. A Canvas quiz generator reads a lecture capture or recorded session, drafts multiple choice questions with the answer marked and a short explanation on each, and exports the QTI package that goes straight into a New Quizzes item bank. No Classic quiz in the middle, no question group workaround, no flattened bank to reorganize.

If the audience is staff rather than students

Plenty of people hitting this problem are not teaching a credit course at all. They are in learning and development, they inherited a Canvas instance because someone in IT already had one, and the questions are compliance and onboarding checks rather than exam items. The bank migration mechanics are identical, but the destination question is worth asking, because assessment content for employees usually ends up in a system built to train and certify a workforce rather than in a course shell designed around semesters and gradebooks.

If you do stay on Canvas, everything above applies unchanged. If you move, export to QTI first while you still have access, because getting the questions out later is much harder than getting them out now.

The short version

Question banks feed Classic quizzes, item banks feed New Quizzes, and nothing crosses between them automatically. To move questions you build a Classic quiz from the bank and migrate that quiz, accepting that you will get one flat item bank at the end. To avoid the whole exercise, produce your questions as a QTI package and import it into an item bank directly, which also happens to be the only way Canvas accepts questions from outside in the first place.

If the destination is not Canvas, the same reasoning applies with a different file. The quiz converter page lists what Brightspace, D2L, Moodle, Blackboard and Google Forms each accept, and Moodle in particular reads neither QTI nor CSV, which catches people who assume the standard is universal.