Item Banks
A supplementary app to store and share Quizzes.Next content.
Writing questions takes effort. This is something I learned firsthand while working on Quizzes.Next and something instructors have known forever. Hence, item banks as a solution to store questions as reusable content thereby reducing effort needed to create assessments.
During Item Banks discovery, two main task modes were identified :
content management - tasks such as content creation, editing, and sharing
content consumption - inserting banked content into assessments, making minor content edits
To accommodate both modes Item Banks would need to be flexible. For content management Item Banks would operate independently, spanning the full screen. Item Banks would display in an overlaid side tray within Quizzes.Next to make banked content quickly accessible while remaining in the quiz build context.
For simplicity, banked content can only be edited within Item Banks. Once inserted into Quizzes.Next, banked content could be edited in the side tray.
The second phase of Item Banks introduced bank sharing and bank searching capabilities. Search patterns existed elsewhere in Canvas but typically placed search filters in a side column next to the search results. For Item Banks I adapted a vertically stacked expand/collapse filtering pattern to work within the constraint of a tray.
Content can be shared at the bank level (ie. all content within a single bank). Content sharing between instructors and administrators reduces duplication of effort and provides consistency in curriculum.