Question banks are one of the really useful, but seldom utilized, quizzing features in Storyline 360. The main reason to use a question bank is to randomize the order of questions in a quiz. Instructional designers do this so learners are less likely to encounter the same quiz twice, which can help avoid cheating. Another reason to use question banks: you can manage and organize related questions in one easy place.
With that in mind, here are five things you should know about working with the question bank feature in Storyline 360.
Insert Question Banks From The Slides Tab
To create and manage existing question banks, you can head on over to the Slides tab on the Storyline ribbon. There you'll see the Questions Banks button, with a small dropdown arrow. From the dropdown, you can create a new question bank or make changes to an existing question bank.
Create Questions from Inside a Bank
When you create a new question bank, Storyline 360 opens a new tab for that bank. You then have the option of creating new question slides from within the question bank, or importing existing question slides that already exist in your .STORY project.
It's important to note that if you create a new question slide from inside the question bank, the question slide won’t exist as an individual slide in your .STORY file. The question slide will only exist within the question bank. In the future if you want to make edits to the slide, you’ll first need to navigate to the question bank and open it in order to access the question slide you want to edit.
Copying vs. Moving Questions into a Bank
If you created your question slides outside of the bank, you can import existing slides into a question bank. When the Import Questions window opens, a drop-down menu at the top provides the option to either copy or move selected slides into the bank.
If you choose to copy, the slides will remain in their original location in the .STORY file, and Storyline 360 will create a duplicate copy of it in the question bank. This means if you copy, you will have two versions of the same slide. If you need to update your slide, you’ll need to do so in both places. If you don’t want duplicate slides, use the Move option to move the slide from its original location into the question bank.
Slide Draws Are Used to Display the Bank Questions
Once you’ve got a great question bank, the next step is to give learners access. This is done using a slide draw to extract question slides from a bank. To create a slide draw, head to the Slides tab on the Storyline ribbon and click the Question Banks dropdown button. From here you can click New Draw From Question Bank. This will insert a new slide into your project. You can double-click on this slide and then select your question bank, as well as the specific number of questions you want in this quiz, and the order in which you want them displayed.
Slide Draws Can Be Fixed or Random
Question banks make it really easy to randomize questions. Simply select the Draw questions randomly option in the slide draw window. You can even choose whether each individual question is “Always,” “Never,” or “Randomly” included in your slide draw.
If you want the questions to appear in a fixed order, rather than randomly, simply deselect the Draw questions randomly option.
These five important points will help you set up and manage your next randomized quiz in a jiffy. Do you have any experience using banks of questions in your own projects? If you do, we’d love to hear your experiences, so please leave a comment.
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