Question Banks Redundant Department of Random Randomness?

Sep 10, 2020

In the Storyline 360: Drawing Slides from a Question Bank documentation, under Adding a Question Draw, Step 3 states:

To display questions in a random order, mark the box to Draw questions randomly.

Step 5 states:

Use the Include in Shuffle column in the question grid to decide whether each question will be Randomly displayed (which is the default option), Never displayed, or Always displayed in this particular question draw.

If I have a quiz bank which contains 3 questions and I want to serve the 3 questions in a random order, which should I be looking at, Step 3 or Step 5 (with the default Randomly displayed, selected)?

Beyond that, is it at all possible that the same question could be displayed twice?

How are these two steps fundamentally different from each other?

2 Replies

Judy Nollet
Hero

over 3 years ago09/10/20 at 2:35 pm (UTC)

Hi, Joseph,

That is a bit confusing. I hope this helps clear it up a bit:

Step 3 determines if the questions included in the draw will be presented randomly or not.

Step 5 determines how each question will be handled in the draw. The non-default options are really only needed if you set the question bank to include fewer than the total number of questions (e.g., if you want each instance of the quiz to include only 6 out of 8 questions). In such a case, this is what happens:

If you select "Always," the program will include that question every time the user takes the quiz.
If you select "Randomly," the program may or may not include that question when a user takes the quiz.
If you select "Never," the program will never include that question. (Yeah, then why bother inserting the question at all!? I suppose this helps if one has been told to delete a question, but isn't sure that decision will be final.)

Joseph Francis
Author

3 years ago02/10/21 at 9:53 pm (UTC)

I just completed testing of 2 courses, based on feedback from 2 colleagues who were positive the questions inside of a Question Bank had not, in fact, been displayed in random order. I verified that the questions within the Question Bank, despite having the Draw questions randomly checkbox checked (Step 3), did not display the questions in random order; they were presented in top-down order. Twice in a row.

For giggles, I then changed the values for the questions in the Include in Shuffle column (Step 5) from Always to Randomly, and tested the courses again. And just like that, the questions in the Question Bank are now being displayed in random order. Again, twice in a row.

From a UI standpoint, the assumption would be that the Draw questions randomly checkbox is the sole determinant of the order questions within a Question Bank are being displayed, either randomly or in the numerical order they are listed in. Now I wonder if the checkbox is an active element in Storyline or if it is a dunsel.