Many of The Learning Rooms’ bespoke eLearning projects feature question banks as an integral element of the course assessment strategy. While the functionality of question banks is similar across these projects, structure and implementation varies depending on the needs of the course.
What are question banks?
Question banks are sets of questions that can be dynamically drawn and inserted into the course as required. Each draw from a question bank can include all or some of the questions. Other settings allow the course creator to further define how the draw is presented to the learner. It also allows creators to reuse bank questions throughout the course without the need to duplicate the actual questions. They remain hidden from the learner unless they are drawn.
Here is an example of a typical draw set up in Articulate Storyline 360:
Draw 10 questions out of 20, in random order. Two of the questions in the bank must be displayed to every learner. Question X must appear as every learner’s first question.
Aligning questions to learning outcomes
It can be challenging to write questions that are well structured and assess the learning outcomes. You may need to include more questions in a question bank way than an individual learner will ever see. It may not be possible in all circumstances to write a surplus of questions that are significantly different to each other but still assess the learning outcomes of the course. This may also add time to the course development process. Additionally, if you are using a question bank it is important that each learner receives questions aligned to each learning outcome. For example if you have four learning outcomes, learners could receive five questions to test their achievement against each learning outcome.
Improve exam integrity
Deploying a shuffled draw from a question bank can improve exam security and integrity by offering each learner a unique instance of an assessment. This discourages cheating and offers learners the opportunity to repeatedly take a variation of the assessment for revision purposes.
This also means learners can complete different versions of an assessment depending on their accessibility requirements or knowledge level.
Course creators can add questions to a question bank without altering the course content itself. A question bank can also help to assess the efficacy of certain questions at assessing the learning outcomes of the course fairly.
This blog is part of the Assessment for eLearning series. Read the previous posts on Getting started with questioning for eLearning and Providing learner feedback. The Learning Rooms Instructional Design course covers all aspects of writing your first eLearning course.
