Why does the Moodle Question Bank matter?
Before you set up your course(s) for a new term, take a quick moment to reflect. Think about the last time you imported your course. Did it load very slowly, get stuck, or show you a warning message? Courses should import in just a few minutes. If it is taking your course much longer than about 15 minutes to import/load there may be a problem. In many cases, these issues are caused by a question bank overloaded with old, unused, duplicated, or glitched questions. Left unaddressed, the issue will get worse over time and eventually your course may not import at all. However, you can check the health of your question bank and implement some solutions now to solve this issue!
Question bank issues are very common. In most cases, you did not cause this issue, but we do need to work together to fix it. Sometimes you may inherit materials/question bank issues over time from other old publishers or instructors you work with if you import their course materials, some instructors never look at the question bank, or you are the victim of one of many Moodle question bank glitches that have happened over the years (or any combination of these!).
I have worked with several faculty now on strategies to clean up question banks with around 30,000-16,000 unneeded questions. I have seen it all and have solid strategies to help you efficiently clean out many issues: duplicated questions, questions that are a decade or more old, old textbook publisher banks, questions from other instructors, and even questions from other courses that aren’t even yours! No matter why/how your question bank is clogged up, I am happy to work with you to get it back on track. I want your question bank to work for you rather than against you!
Please see each section below and reach out to edtech@davidsondavie.edu, we are happy to help you through this process.
Check how old your questions are and if your questions are being used
In the course you are importing content FROM, click More and then click Question Bank.
On this page you can change the Category in the drop down menu and click Filter to view each category to see how old your questions are, who wrote them, and if they are being used in a quiz. Unused questions from around 10+ years ago can be cleared out!
If your drop down list has a lot of categories, too many to go through each manually, proceed to the next section to check how extensive the issue is or reach out to edtech@davidsondavie.edu for support.
See how many categories you have in your Question Bank
See how many categories you have by changing the little drop down menu on this page from Questions to Categories.
This page shows about 20-25 parent categories per page and can have various numbers of questions in them. You can click the category title to see more details about each. The number in parenthesis shows many questions are are in each category.
If you have 10+ pages of categories and see the same category titles (and number of questions) that are identical repeated multiple times or several categories you don’t recognize or need, you will need to clean these out of your question bank for better performance.
Import without your Question Bank
If you have many categories/questions to clean out, it can far more efficient to leave your old question bank behind and only bring over the individual categories that you need. To do this you will need to Import your course WITHOUT your question bank option checked (this means Moodle quizzes will also not import) and then rebuild your quizzes in your new course. This sounds like a lot of work, but depending on the extent of your question bank issue, this can save you hours of time deleting old questions. You also will not have to retype each question if you proceed to our Moving just one Quiz to Another Course after you finish your import.
Steps:
- In the course you are importing content FROM, click More and then click Course Reuse.
- Click Import
- Choose your course
- Deselect Question Bank
- Proceed with your import.