How to Create a Question Bank in a Course with ActivePresenter 9
In eLearning course design, a question bank comes in handy when you want to reuse questions or create several different versions of the same quiz. ActivePresenter will help get your work done with just a single feature: Slide Pools.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to create and manage question banks. Also, you can import banks from other projects to the current one with ease.
Overview of Question Banks
Basically, a question bank contains a list of question slides that are stored in a bank or a pool. They are not directly shown in the output and are used to randomize the order of questions in a quiz. That is, you put questions into a bank, and then draw them out when you need to create a randomized quiz. Besides, using question banks is a good way to organize and manage related questions in one place.
In ActivePresenter, you can add not only question slides but any other types of slides to banks. For this reason, question banks are also called slide banks or slide pools. All slide pools are kept and managed in the Slide Pools pane.
By default, ActivePresenter gives you “Pool 1” without slides, you can move slides in the Slides pane to a pool or create a new slide from this pane.
Suppose that you want to create 3 question banks corresponding to 3 different levels of difficulty of the same quiz. Just do the following procedure:
Create New Question Banks
To add a new bank, do as follows:
Step 1: In the View tab > Slide Pools. Then, the Slide Pools pane appears.
Step 2: Click Add (1) to open the Add Pool dialog. Name your pool and click OK.
(2) Rename a question bank
(3) Delete a question bank if you no longer use it
(4) Change the color to a question bank. This color will be shown in the random slides added later to create a randomized quiz
Manage Questions in Question Bank
Add Questions to Question Bank
There are two ways to add (question) slides to a question bank. First, add existing slides in the Slides pane to the Slide Pool pane. Second, create new slides right inside the pool.
Add Slides in Slides pane to a Slide Pool
To add slides to a pool, in the Slides pane, right-click one or more slides > Move Slide To > select a pool. As these slides are moved to the Slide Pools pane, they no longer appear in the Slides pane.
Tip: You can also cut and paste slides from the Slides pane to the Slide Pools pane.
Create New Slides Inside a Slide Pool
To do this, in a pool, right-click anywhere in the Slide Pools pane > New Slide. In case you right-click a slide early on, the new slide will have the same theme and layout properties as the selected slide. Otherwise, the new slide inherits theme properties from the first theme of the current project. In the latter case, the new slide will appear with the layout like this:
You can also create question slides right inside the pool. ActivePresenter currently supports you to create 13 types of interactive questions with a few clicks.
| (1) True/False (2) Multiple Choice (3) Multiple Response (4) Fill in Text Entry | (5) Fill in Text Entries (6) Fill in Blanks (7) Sequence (8) Drag-n-Drop | (9) Hotspot (10) Essay (11) Select in Dropdown (12) Select in Dropdowns (13) Rating Scale (Likert) |
After having questions in a bank, you can freely edit them as normal. For example, cut/copy/delete slides, change slides’ layout, add objects to them, etc.
Move Slides from a Pool to Another
The app allows you to move any slide in a pool to another pool or the current project as well. To do this, perform these steps:
Step 1: Select a pool from the Pool drop-down list.
Step 2: Right-click one or more slides in that pool > Move Slide To > select another pool or the Slides pane in the current project to which you want to move that slide.
Note: Apart from this, you can also copy slides in a pool and paste them into another pool or into the Slides pane.
Import Slide Pools from Other Projects
You can reuse slide pools across projects. Do as follow:
Step 1: In the Slide Pools pane > Import Pool.
Step 2: Browse your file system and select a project file (*.approj) that contains slide pools you want to reuse. Then, the Import Slide Pools window appears like this.
This window has two boxes:
- The Pools box is where to show pools in the selected project.
- The Slides box displays all slides in each pool. To change the view mode, click the Small or Large button.
Step 3: Select a pool to import. By default, all pools are selected. But if you don’t want to import any pool, just deselect the corresponding check box.
Step 4: Select import options.
- Append Pools: Import a pool as a new pool and keep all previously created pools in the current project.
- Replace All Existing Pools: Import a pool as a new pool and replace all previously created pools in the current project.
Step 5: Click OK to apply changes.
That’s how to create question banks in ActivePresenter 9. To show these questions in a bank in the output, you need random slides which help make questions appear randomly. The next tutorial will guide you on how to draw questions from a question bank to create a random quiz. So don’t miss it out!
Download ActivePresenter 9 and make your first question banks
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