Tuesday, February 9, 2010

ANGEL Tip: Using Question Banks

Building a Question Bank is a great tool for creating better assessments for your courses. Think of a Question Bank as a place to store all of your questions from semester to semester. You can create your own questions, or you can upload test banks from your publisher. When creating assessments, you can then pick and choose which questions from your Question Bank you want to include on each assessment.

When creating a Question Bank that you are going to use from semester to semester, you will want to create this Question Bank in your Personal LOR. Every course you are teaching will have access to your LOR, so you will be able to use those questions in any course for any semester.

If you already have an extensive Question Bank in one of your production courses or your Source Course, you can copy the questions into your Question Bank in your LOR.

Note: Sometimes access to your LOR becomes disconnected for some or all of your courses. If this happens, you can reestablish communication between your courses and your LOR by going to the Manage tab in your LOR, clicking on Course and Group Access, clicking on My Courses, then checking the box for all of your courses and choosing the Add Selected button.

Thanks to Tracy Newman for the tip.

8 comments:

Andy said...

I am trying to help an instructor load a question bank into their LOR as mentioned in this blog entry. I don't see a question bank area in the personal LOR. Are you referring to the creation of a large assessment that will act as a test bank?

Cindy Renander said...

Do you know how to import questions from exams without having the questions disappear from the LOR when I go to delete the old exam, or delete the old class that originally provided the questions?
I imported a set of questions, unchecked the "automatically accept changes made to these questions when the master sources change", went to delete the old exam, and the questions plus the entire folder I created for them vanished in the LOR.

Unknown said...

Once the questions are in the Question Bank in the LOR, you should be able to delete the exam they originally came from and they will stay in the LOR. I just tried it and it works.

It’s unclear whether your user is talking about the Question Bank, or if they are trying to use some other method. Importing an exam does not necessarily put the questions in the Question Bank, so you need to make sure that they are actually in the Question Bank inside the LOR, or copy them there yourself.

Unknown said...

Andy, the Question Bank is under the Manage tab in the LOR. LOR > Manage > Question Bank Manager. Once there, you can create subfolders and add questions to the subfolders.

Cindy Renander said...

Since we originally posted these, it turns out we uncovered a huge bug in the recent Angel software update. Questions in the LOR question bank that were entered in by hand, and not imported, were even being deleted if I deleted an exam that happened to have the same questions. Even the brand new questions housed in the folders would disappear. Angel replicated the problem and is working on it.

Unknown said...

What version and patch level are you on? 7.3 or 7.4? Which patches installed?

Cindy Renander said...

Version 7.4, and the email from Angel refers to "SP6", which I assume means service pack 6.

Unknown said...

Cindy, we're running 7.3 and about to upgrade to SP12, so 7.4 may be the problem.

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