4 ways question banks and randomization can supercharge your eLearning assessments

Quizzes, exams, or assessments are an essential part of any good eLearning course. Whether to invigorate your content with some much-needed variety or to ensure your people have retained key information, assessments have always been an integral piece of the learning content puzzle.

In some industries and contexts, however, assessments play an even more vital role. The completion of assessments can be a mandatory aspect of regulatory compliance, and failing to ensure they’re completed with integrity can lead to serious consequences.

That’s why your assessments should be underpinned by question banks capable of supporting features like randomization. Not only will your learners benefit from a sophisticated testing system, but you’ll benefit from avoiding any regulatory wrath! Read on to find out how.

What are question banks?

In its simplest form, a question bank is a repository of questions you can use as part of your eLearning assessments. With Gomo, you can maintain multiple question banks that each cover a different topic.

This kind of feature is handy in a range of testing scenarios. When onboarding new employees, for example, plenty of organizations will want to address a variety of topics as part of their onboarding process, with eLearning courses on subjects that range from company history to processes to policies.

In that scenario, you can test your new starters’ knowledge with assessments that draw from a ‘Company History’ question bank and a separate ‘Policies and Procedures’ question bank, mixing and matching as you see fit.

The many advantages of question banks

1) Maintain a wide range of questions

By maintaining a robust bank of questions within your eLearning authoring tool, you’ll be able to supply your learners with a healthy range of engaging questions.

In fact, Gomo goes one further by providing an entire content bank system. Not limited to questions, your content bank can contain media like videos that can be deployed and randomized (more on that later!) just as easily as assessment questions.

2) Import questions between courses

Question banks aren’t just about providing a solid learning experience—they also make it easy to structure and maintain your course library without undue hassle.

If you’ve got a question bank filled with content about company history, for example, you’ll be able to import those questions from one course into another, sidestepping the time-consuming process of starting from scratch with every new course. In turn, this allows you to use your resources efficiently and plan out which courses will benefit from assessments built on your various question banks.

3) Enhance your learners’ experience

It goes without saying that a stimulating variety of assessment options can have a fantastic effect on learning. Taking tests, reviewing incorrect answers, and drawing from a wealth of possible questions are all excellent opportunities to improve retention by rehearsing and recalling information, keeping the right knowledge at your learners’ fingertips.

Gomo’s question banks allow you to capitalize on this element of learning. For example, you can set your question banks to present learners with questions they got wrong on the previous attempt, bolstering any gaps in their knowledge and reinforcing any weak points that need further attention.

4) Stay ahead of the regulators with question randomization

If your assessments are easy to cheat—perhaps because users are able to memorize the order of your questions and share it with their peers—you could face regulatory consequences. The UK’s Financial Reporting Council has pointed out that cheating is on the rise around the world in professional exams and internal assessments alike, which can result in fines to the tune of millions.

Luckily, question banks can help solve this problem. By preparing pools of questions within your question bank, it’s a simple process to set up assessments that pull a set number of questions from your various pools. You can, for example, ensure that your learners encounter a different set of random questions each time they take their assessment, each retrieved from the appropriate pool within your question bank.

More importantly (from an integrity perspective), you can randomize the possible answers to your multiple-choice questions, preventing them from appearing in the same order every time. This vital step deters cheating by preventing learners from memorizing the positions of correct answers and sharing this information with their peers, providing a strong layer of protection against any regulatory sanctions.