A big part of being an e-learning developer is creating quizzes. Choosing question types, writing plausible choices, crafting meaningful feedback—these all go into building a great quiz. When putting together your quizzes, you might have encountered a situation where you’ve wanted or needed to randomize the questions in your quizzes. Why randomize questions? Perhaps your subject matter expert (SME) has provided you with more questions than you actually need to test learners on, or you might want to ensure that the order of the questions is different every time learners take the quiz, to minimize cheating and keep it interesting.
Whatever your reason for randomizing quiz questions, one simple and straightforward way to do so in Storyline 360 is to use question banks. Here are the steps you can follow to randomize questions in a bank:
Create a Question Bank
Your first step is to create the question bank. To do so, you’ll head to the slides tab on the Storyline 360 ribbon. There you’ll notice the Question Banks button with a small arrow pointing down, indicating there is a dropdown menu.
The Question Banks button is located under the slides tab on the ribbon.
Click the Question Banks dropdown and select Create Question Bank. Once you’re in the Question Bank view, you can either import existing questions you already have in your .STORY project, or you can create new questions from inside the question bank.
Once you’ve got all your questions inside the bank,you can also easily set all of your attempts and points in one fell swoop.
A question bank that has been populated with question slides.
Keep in mind you can have multiple question banks within one Storyline 360 project. You might create one bank of easy questions and one bank with more advanced questions. Or you might have one bank of questions for customer service reps and a different set of questions banked for sales reps. You can have as many question banks in your project as you need.
Insert a Slide Draw
Once you’ve set up your question bank, the next step is to insert a slide draw into your project. The slide draw is the slide in your project that displays the question bank to the learner. To insert a slide draw, head to the Question Bank dropdown button once more and click New Draw from Question Bank. The slide draw is inserted into your project and has a question mark on it, as indicated in the image below:
Slide draw appears as a slide.
Adjust Slide Draw Properties
You can now double-click on the slide draw slide you’ve just inserted to open up the Draw Questions from Bank window.
From here, you can control all the settings for how the question bank will appear for learners.
- Question Bank dropdown. If you have multiple question banks, use the Question Bank dropdown field to select the question bank you want to pull from on this slide draw.
- Edit Question Bank. Click this to open the selected question bank and make changes to the questions and slides contained within it.
- Draw Questions Randomly. Ding! Ding! Ding! This is the option you will select if you want to randomize the order of your questions.
- Include X Questions dropdown. From this dropdown you can select “All” or specify the number of questions you want included in the draw.
- Include in Shuffle dropdown. This can be set to “Randomly,” “Never,” or “Always,” depending on how often you want a question to appear.
Here’s an example of how I can customize my question bank settings: I want to create a question bank that randomly draws five of the seven questions included in my bank, but I always want Question A to be included.
I would simply set the Include X Questions dropdown at “5” instead of “All,” and I would change the Include in Shuffle option for Question A to “Always.”
These settings will randomly draw five questions from the bank. Question A will always be included in the shuffle.
Test Your Slide Draw
Once you’ve set up your slide draw with all the right options, you’ll want to preview the scene that your question bank is in to test it out and see how it all comes together. Run through your question bank a few times to ensure that the correct number of questions are drawn, and in a random, different order each time.
Hopefully these simple steps will help you create your own randomized quizzes. If you want to learn more about using question banks, here are a few additional helpful articles:
- 5 Things You Should Know About Storyline 360 Question Banks
- 3 More Tips for Using Question Banks Like a Pro
Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.
