Question bank - Moodle Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we'll take a look at how to use the question bank in Moodle. Throughout the year you have the ability to create assessment questions and store them in the question bank so you can easily integrate these questions into quizzes. Let's take a look at where to access the question bank and how to begin creating questions. So up here on the top left, I'm going to click the gear icon, and from there I'll select More at the very bottom. This brings us to a page that if I scroll down on, at the bottom we have Question bank. And here I can export or import questions, I can select categories, and I can select the actual questions. The first thing I'm going to do is select Categories. When I do that, you'll notice here that I actually have created one category already between videos, and that is Cycles. So I created a subcategory under my Biology 101 course. Now, what I could do as well is to create another category if I want. So in other words, here you can decide on the parent category. In this case, I'll make it the Default for Bio 101. And then I could name this something, for instance, such as Heredity if I wanted to keep heredity questions. It may be a good idea to have these categories so you can compartmentalize questions and be able to find them easier at a later time. Now, I could leave category info, but I'll just click Add category. As you can see, I now have that Heredity category, but there are zero questions inside of it. Notice here that I do have two questions in my Default for Bio category. So let's back up here by going to More. I'll go back to my question bank, but this time I'm going to click on Questions up at the top. When I click this, we get my question bank, and down below, you'll see here that we have the Photosynthesis Gas question and the Photosynthesis Sugar question. Those are two questions that I created in the previous video when we showed how to create a quiz. Any time you create a question inside of Moodle, it will automatically store that in the question bank if you select the category that you want it to be in. Remember, I selected mine as Default for Bio 101, so it did store those inside of that category in the question bank. Now, if I wanted to add questions, I can easily do that by clicking here on Create a new question. I'll click on it. We can select the question type. As an example, I'll just create another true/false question. I'll click Add. And we'd set this up in the same way that we would set up the other ones. Now, first of all, I can select a category, and here I will pick Cycles this time. For the question name, I'm going to type in Photosynthesis Organelles. And then down here I'll type in some text. Once I have that question in place, I'll scroll down. The correct answer here is true. I'm not going to leave any feedback. And I'll click on Save changes. So now it brings us back to our question bank. And you'll notice here that if I'm under the Cycles category, I get this photosynthesis question appears right here. If I go to the Default for Bio, I get two. And because I clicked here on show subcategories, it will also show that question I just created. So there it's gone, but if I click here on show subcategories, it will show me that other question. So I have three photosynthesis questions in here now. Now, if you wanted to, you could add tags. So one really neat thing that they added in Moodle 3.5 is the ability to tag questions in the question bank. If I do this, I could type in different tags that I wanted to include for it and then be able to search those easier. So maybe here I had a photosynthesis tag or I had a heredity tag. That would make it easier to find these questions. I can click on the gear icon and edit those, but let's take a quick look at why the question bank can be so powerful. The main use for it is to store questions that you create throughout the year so that you can go back and create quizzes using those questions. In order to do this, I'll go back up to the top to my Bio 101 course. So here inside of this course, let's say now that I scroll down into the Cycles section. And I'm going to click Add an activity or resource. I'll select Quiz, and then down here I'll click Add. Remember, this is how we created a quiz before. I'll just title this one Photosynthesis 2. Won't leave a description. I'm actually not going to include anything else here. I'll click Save and display. And remember when we do this, we have a foundation, but we have not yet created any questions. So in order to do that, I'll click on Edit quiz. And this is where when we created our first quiz, we added new questions. So over here on the right I'll click Add. But instead of adding new questions, this time I'm going to click from question bank. I'll click there. I'm going to then select these three questions. Up at the top I have this bb question which is just a sample question that I put in there to make sure this is working. Remember, here you have the ability then to add these to that quiz. So I selected the three photosynthesis questions, and then I'll click Add selected questions to this quiz. And just like that, those questions are added here. Now, over to the left I can change the points that I want them to be worth. Let's say I want this to be worth five. Enter. This one to be worth three. And this final one here to be worth three. Because of that, I'm going to go up here and change the total points to 11 and then I'll click on Save. And just like that, I've created this quiz, and I didn't have to go and manually create each of the questions. Because they were questions that were in the question bank, we were able to quickly add them to this quiz. Now, if I go up to Bio 101, scroll down, you'll see that that photosynthesis quiz two is right there. So the question bank is a powerful feature in Moodle that will save you a ton of time and help improve your tracking of student progress.