The Mighty LAMS Question Bank
One of the key new features in LAMS version 4 is the Question Bank: a versatile and centralised question repository for all assessment activities.
All your questions in one place
Before the Question Bank, all questions were stored in each LAMS tool (Assessment, Scratchie, Q&A, etc). This meant that if you needed to change a question, you would need to repeat the same change in all activities in which the same question was used.
As the questions are centralised now, changes to a question automatically propagate to all activities that it.
Shared Question Collections
In the Question Bank, all questions are stored in “collections”. And you get to decide how you order your collections.
Question collections can be shared. This means that you can you can create and work collaborative in questions for your exams with other colleagues.
Track questions throughout their whole life-cycle
As you might choose to reuse questions in several lessons (or throughout semesters), you get a full item analysis of a question for each lesson it has been used.
The analysis can show the effectiveness of a question in an exam and lesson.
If you need to improve questions, you don’t need to rewrite your questions completely, you can create a adjusted or improved version of the question to use in other lessons in the future
Question Versioning
This is by far one of my best features of the Question Bank.
Depending on the question analytics, you might want to improve the question but instead of creating one from complete scratch and loose all previous history, you can create a better version of it and include it in your next exam/lesson.
This way you can reassess the effectiveness of your questions and continue to improve your assessments.
As questions are centralised, you can choose to add these new question version to your LAMS assessment activities or continue using previous version leaving your with room to innovate or experiment with new versions.
Import and export question in various formats
In LAMS we always support open standards, therefore we use IMS QTI for import and export questions. However, IMS QTI requires special software to create questions in QTI (ie: Respondus).
Nevertheless, the Question Bank now supports imports from Microsoft Word. Following a simple template format, you can import question including images, all formatting, tables, etc.
The MS Word templates also allows you to add learning outcomes to your questions as well as feedback.
Map learning outcomes to questions
In LAMS, you can map learning outcomes and customisable scales/rubrics for assessing learning activities.
But with the Question Bank, you can map your learning outcomes to your questions.
This is very powerful because it allow you to easily track back where a learning outcome was taught, how it was assessed and which was the students’ results.
Just the beginning
We are very excited about the upcoming analytics for the Mighty Question Bank. LAMS v5 will bring new visualisation and assessment reports and finer tracking of students responses!
