Question banks

What is a question bank?

A question bank allows a teacher to create, preview and edit questions in a dedicated space. The questions may be used in a Quiz activity.

Within a question bank, questions may be organized into categories and subcategories.

Question banks in Moodle 5.0

Note: If you are upgrading to Moodle 5.0, for changes to question banks on your site see Question banks in upgraded sites.

Question bank types

There are two types of question banks:

Course shared question bank, in Course navigation > More > Question banks, where questions can be reused and shared across courses. These quesion banks are accessible from other courses via Quiz > Add questions from questionbank > Switch bank. In each course, you may have several of these question banks. If you keep your question banks in a separate question banks course, you may also have courses without any question bank.
A quiz question bank, in Quiz navigation > Question bank, where questions can only be used in the quiz, and can't be used elsewhere. The purpose of this question bank is, that you may create a quiz and simply add questions to it via Quiz > Add a new question without thinking about where to store them. You cannot access the questions in this question bank from elsewhere or use them in a different quiz.

A quiz can use questions from any course shared question bank you have acces to or questions from its own quiz question bank. You may use questions from both kinds of question banks in the same quiz.

Question sharing across courses

New feature
in Moodle 5.0! Course question banks, in Course navigation > More > Question banks, enable teachers to reuse and share questions across courses.

Course question banks are available in all courses where you are a teacher, enabling you to add questions from your course question banks to any quiz in any of your courses on the site. Changes to a question in a course question bank are reflected in all places where the question is used. If you question has several versions, you may decide to keep an exact version of one question in one specific quiz by setting the version to n instead of "Always latest" on the quiz question page. In this case, changes in the question bank are NOT reflected in this specific quiz.

All teachers in a course can access the course questions banks and can also add questions to any quiz in any of their courses on the site. If you do not find a question in one of your banks when trying to add it to a quiz, check the status of your question. You only may add questions with status "Ready" to a quiz. Questions with status "Draft" cannot be added to quizzes.

Question sharing with teachers in other courses

To spedifically share questions with a person who is not a teacher in the course:

Enrol the person in the course, as a student, non-editing teacher or a custom role.
Go to Course navigation > More > Question banks.
To share questions in a selected course question bank, click the edit icon (3 dots) and select Assign roles.
Choose the Non-editing teacher role to assign.
Select the person and add them as non-editing teachers.

Note: Steps 2-5 are not necessary if the user has a role with the capabilities 'Use all questions' (moodle/question:useall) and 'Use your own questions' (moodle/question:usemine).

The teacher will then be able to add questions from the shared course question bank to any quiz in any of their courses, but will not be able to edit the questions.

You can create more than one course question bank to share certain questions with some teachers and other questions with other teachers.

Note that the Non-editing teacher role should have the capabilities 'Use all questions' (moodle/question:useall) and 'Use your own questions' (moodle/question:usemine) set to allow. These capabilities are allowed for the non-editing teacher role for new installs of Moodle 5.0, but need to be allowed for sites upgrading to 5.0.

Question bank filters

If your question bank contains many questions, you can apply filters to help you find the questions you are looking for. Available filters are:

Category
Hidden questions
Type (such as multiple choice)
Time modified (before, after or between specified times)
Status (ready or draft)
Keyword searches of question name, ID number, question text and general feedback

New feature
in Moodle 5.0! Type, time modified, status and keyword searches of question name, ID number, and question text and general feedback are new filters in Moodle 5.0.

Question bank columns

Teachers can rearrange, remove, resize and reset columns in a question bank to customise their own view.

Available question bank columns are set by an administrator in Site administration > Question bank plugins > Manage Question bank plugins. The order that columns appear is set in Site administration > Plugins > Question bank plugins > Column sort order.

Question - The question title, allowing for in-line editing, this is how the question is retrieved. Students never do see this, so it can be named to your proper needs.
Actions - Editing, duplicating or previewing questions, also view the history of a particular question and see its versions.
Status - Which questions are ready to be used in quizzes and which need checking by colleagues. Whether a question is draft or read can be specified when creating the question as well as in this column.
Version - Refers to the various edits of that question - see History from the Actions menu for specific details.
Created by - Indicates the author who originally created the question.
Comments - Allows colleagues to comment on a question, as part of the peer review/quality assurance process.
Usage - The number of quizzes a question is used in, with a link to more specific details.
Last used - When a student last attempted a question.
Needs checking - Highlights a question with results suggesting a problem with it, and it should be reviewed.
Modified by – Shows the name of the last person who edited the question, useful for tracking recent changes.
Facility index and Discriminative efficiency - See Quiz statistics report.

You can edit question titles inline along with new Last used and Last modified columns.

Documentation