Corralling Question Bank Chaos!
Has your question bank grown large, messy, and you wonder how long those questions have been there? This can happen to any of us - when you inherit a course from a previous instructor, change to a textbook with a new quiz bank, or if you continue to add questions but don’t clean out the old ones. Last semester and this semester, there are instructors who were unable to import course content to a new term because of questions in an older (now unsupported) format from around 2011/2012. Don’t let these old questions stand in your way! Organizing and cleaning out your question bank will prevent this issue and it will save us some much needed storage space in Moodle. See details below on how to get started.
Getting Organized: Create and Delete Categories
To begin, organize your question bank so that you can easily see which categories you have. This way you can organize them by the categories you currently use and older ones you may not need anymore in a separate category or subcategory for further investigation.
Every course is automatically assigned a category called Default for [Course Name]. If all your questions appear in this category and you have no others, this would be a great time to organize them by creating the categories like "Chapter 1" for all of those questions. To start, navigate to you Question Bank in the Course Administration menu. When you click on Categories and scroll down you can create new category.
See the video below or Moodle help article on Question Categories for more information.
Delete Unused Questions: How old is that question?
Unsure when you edited a question last? To make sure that you are only deleting old/unused questions from your question bank, click Edit beside the question. On the bottom of the question details screen you can expand the area called Created / last saved to see how old the question is and the last time it has been updated. Any questions that are more than a decade old are likely to cause issues if they remain in your quiz bank!
If you are confident that the question can be deleted, expand the area above it called Tags, in the box under tags give it a tag by typing in a word like “Delete” or “Old” and press enter on your keyboard and then Save Changes at the bottom of the screen. Now when you return to your quiz bank you can Filter by tags to find those questions, click the box beside them, and click Delete to remove them all at one time.
If you have any questions or concerns please let me know. You can submit a ticket directly to me by emailing edtech@davidsondavie.edu