Basics of Using the Brightspace Question Library

Let’s take a tour of the Brightspace question library so you can be familiar with what settings and options there are.

In the left sidebar you’ll see a branching tree of any sections you’ve created, so if you click on question library, it shows you your whole question library, or if you’ve created a section, you can click on that folder and see just the questions within that folder.

The New button will give you a drop down to create a new section or question type. The Import button. You can Upload a file of questions or browse existing questions. We’ll learn how to do both of those. The last piece is to Import from a Learning Repository.

You can also Publish to a Learning Repository. This is just a bank of questions. We have a learning repository if you wanted to publish to a learning repository, you can see they have an instructor repository or the D2L training which is the Brightspace parent company. You probably won’t use this option very often, but it’s there.

We have the Move button. If I want to take these two questions right here that are selected and move them into the Chapter One section, I select those and press Move.

And then I can select the destination I want to move to – the main file or what section. So I can click Chapter 1 and now they’re moved into this Chapter 1 questions. These two questions will appear at the bottom of the questions in the Chapter 1 list.

If you’d like to delete any questions, you can just select them and delete.

Order allows you to rearrange your questions. Just select a question and use the arrows on the right to move it up or down in the list.

You can also bulk edit questions, so if I want to edit these two questions I can select them and click Edit Values and then I can change how many points there worth and the difficulty and make them mandatory or not in a quiz. And save those.

And anytime you want to get back to the main question library you can just click Question Library in that branching menu on the left. And if you’re done editing, you can click Done Editing Questions and it will take you back to the quiz, the main quiz page.

We’re going to talk about how to import quiz questions that you’ve already created into your question library.

I’m at the quiz page. From Activities, pick Quizzes and this is the page will be at in Brightspace. You can see I have this quiz that I created, my cat quiz. It has three questions but when I created it, I just created it from the quiz section and so now I want to add those questions to my question library Brightspace.

So go on to your Question Library from the tab on this same page.

Click Import and then Browse Existing Questions.

So now it gives me this little slide in pop up here that shows my 3 cat questions from my cat quiz. I can tell it’s from my cat quiz because it’s giving me the source as Cat Quiz #1.

I only have one quiz right now in my sandbox. So if you have more than one quiz, you can choose a different one for questions. You can filter it by the type, like if I only wanted to look at true false questions, I could look at those, or sort it by points or title.

You can also just click in the search bar and search for something specific.

I want to add all three of these items, so I’ll just click the checkbox for all and Import. And now they’re going to show up in my question library at the bottom.

Now we’re going to talk about organizing your question library by using sections. This way you don’t just have a massive list of questions, but you can divvy them out into little folders.

And you can see on the left hand menu, Chapter 1. It’s got the little folder icon by it, which shows it’s a section. Or down in my question library list, it also shows my section. And then if you click on the name of the section, you can see what questions are inside and it’ll give even give you a question count.

To make a new section you go to New and then click Section. You can give it a title. I’m going to have a Chapter 2 since Chapter 1 is my other section.

You can hide this from learners which makes a difference when you’re importing it into a quiz. **This only hides the section title, not the question in the section.** So I’m going to hide it from learners so we can have an example of that. My Chapter 1 section is not hidden from learners. You can give it some text and choose to hide that from learners or not. And you can also choose whether to shuffle questions within this section. This helps if you’re trying to make your assessments more random so the students aren’t getting the same questions in the same order. Then you can click Save.

When you add a new section, it actually shows up way at the bottom of your list of in the question library, and I like to see all my sections at the top. I click on the Order button and then click on the section and move it back up to the top here. Now it’s right under Chapter 1, the first section. Organization wise I just like to see it like that. See the Tour of the Question Library section of this post for more detail on ordering your library.

Now we have this Chapter 2, but there’s nothing in it. So if I go back to my question library, you can just select any of the questions you want to move into Chapter 2 and then click Move. Choose Chapter 2 and they just head right into there. Now we have all of these questions in the Chapter 2 section. See the Tour of the Question Library section of this post for more detail on moving things in your library

For these sections you can name them anything you want. You kind of need to think about what is going to work best for your course and for your workflow. So I named these sections in my example Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, but you could have them based on the subject, based on questions for Quiz 1 Quiz 2, Final Test, etc.

When you go to make a quiz, you can actually import these sections altogether. So if my first quiz is about chapters 1 and 2, I can import the section Chapter 1 and the section Chapter 2, and so all of those questions get moved over. Then it’s easy for me to navigate that way because I’ve named them Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 and I know that we’re covering Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 on this quiz. You can just of think about that a little bit in your strategy for naming your sections.

Now that we’ve set up our question library, we’re going to talk about how to add these questions to our assessments. I’m going to use my Cat Quiz as an example.

I just went in to edit the quiz. You can do the same thing when creating a new quiz. You can add your name etc, but what we’re looking at is where you can add and edit questions. I already have some questions in, if you’re just making a quiz you won’t see any questions here, but you’ll still see the same button Add or Edit Questions.

From here I go to Import and then browse question library.

Similar to in the question library, I can search for questions, change the question source, filter them. And sort them.

I can see my sections here and if I click on this little arrow it’ll show me the questions within this section. And it also gives me these little check marks on questions I already have in my quiz, so I know that I don’t have to duplicate them.

For this I’m going to add Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. And you can just Import or if you click on this little menu option, you can tell it to import them to the top of the quiz. The bottom of the quiz or put them into a section of your quiz. I’m just going to Import.

Now I have Chapter 1 with questions and Chapter 2 with questions. If you want to remove questions from your quiz, you can just select it and then delete it or move it to somewhere else in your quiz.

There’s some more actions to take on that about toggling bonus, mandatory, set points, etc.

One thing to note is if you’ve imported a whole section. If you want to delete this section, it’ll select the whole thing, or you can delete them one at a time within the section.

Let’s preview this.

I’ve got on my quiz details. Start the Quiz. From here I can see my quiz and if I scroll down, you can see the Chapter 1 title. When we did our lesson on setting up sections in the question library – when I set up this section, this Chapter 1 section, I did not check the box that said to hide it from students. So this is visible to students for Chapter 1.

If I scroll down, I just had a few questions in Chapter 1 but we don’t see a Chapter 2 section heading because when I set up Chapter 2 for that section, I ticked the box that said to hide it. Then when I imported it in here, the students do not see that section heading, so that’s a setting that you can decide if you want or not, and always go back into your question library and change it.