Building and reusing a question bank

The question bank holds questions that do not belong to any course. It is where a question you ask in six different courses gets written once, and where a good question survives the course it was written for being retired.

Where it lives

Choose Admin, then Learning in the left-hand menu and Question bank.

Writing a question

1. Choose New question.

2. Choose the type. There are seven, and the choice is made before anything else because it decides the rest of the form.

   Type	The learner
   Single choice	Picks one answer
   Multiple choice	Picks several
   Open text	Writes an answer
   True or false	Picks one of two
   Ordering	Puts items in the right order
   Drag to match	Pairs items up
   Practice scenario	Works through a scripted situation

3. Choose Next.

4. Enter an Internal title. It is required, and it is the only thing the bank’s search looks at.

5. Enter the Assessment title. This is the question as the learner reads it.

6. Fill in the answers. Each one carries its own score, and + Add answer gives you more than the four you start with.

7. Choose the correct answer, in the separate row below the options.

8. Add an Explanation if you want the learner told why.

9. Choose Save to bank.

Two of those steps are worth slowing down on.

The internal title is a filing name, not a question. The learner never sees it, the search box is labelled “Search by internal title”, and a bank of two hundred questions is exactly as findable as its internal titles are descriptive. “Q3 compliance check” is useful. “Question 4” is not.

Every option carries a mark of its own. A single-choice question is not simply right or wrong — you can give a nearly-right answer partial credit, and the default gives the first option 5 and the rest 0.

Using one in a course

You add banked questions from inside the course builder, and you can send a question the other way too: a question written in a course can be pushed up into the bank so other courses can use it.

A question you take from the bank becomes a copy. Editing it in the bank afterwards changes nothing in any course already using it, and editing it inside a course does not change the bank. Nothing links the two after the moment it is added.

That is worth knowing before you correct a mistake. Fixing a wrong answer in the bank fixes it for courses built from tomorrow, and for nobody already using it.

Archiving and deleting

Archive stops a question being added to anything new. It is refused the moment somebody tries to use it, and courses already holding a copy carry on untouched.

Delete takes it out of the bank, and is not blocked by courses using it — those courses keep their copies, because the copies were never really connected.

This is the opposite of how course categories behave, where a category with courses in it cannot be deleted at all. The difference is that a category is a live relationship and a banked question is not.

What the list tells you

Active and Archived are separate views. Filter narrows by type, and the sort is by the date you created the question.

Each question shows how many places have used it, which is the number to look at before archiving anything.