Creating your Question Library in Brightspace from Sakai Question Pools

Your Question Pools have changed in the migration from Sakai to Brightspace. These steps will help you in rebuilding your pools in Brightspace’s Question Library.

The Question Library

Like Sakai’s Question Pools, using the Question Library will allow you to reuse questions within a course, and also transfer them to new courses using the Copy Course Components feature (video walk through available here: Import / Export / Copy Components from Site to Site). You can create sections within the Question Library to organize your question content, and build the parts of particular quizzes as you may have done in Sakai.

You may find that creating all your questions first in the Question Library is ideal for storage and sharing. You can also consolidate questions created within Quizzes (and Surveys and Self Assessments) by importing them back into the Question Library.

Recreating your Sakai Question Pools in Brightspace Quizzes

To move forward, you can tidy up the existing quizzes, or create new versions (still using the migrated questions, of course). It is easy to move questions into the Question Library and then assign them to functioning Question Pools once you know where to look.

Move questions into the Question Library

1. Go to the Quizzes tool in the navbar and choose a single imported quiz to rebuild. You can edit any quiz with the dropdown arrow beside its name.

2. Return to the main Quizzes page and click the tab for Question Library.

   1. You could create new questions here with the New button. You can also create whole quiz Sections here‒a Section in this case can be part of a quiz (with the option to shuffle question order) or simply what you use to organize items in your Question Library.

3. Click Import and then Browse Existing Questions. Yes, you are “importing” your imported questions.

4. Find where the existing questions reside (the name of the quiz from Sakai you chose) in the Source drop-down. 

5. Select the questions you want and then click Import. To keep things simple this time, select all questions from a single quiz and import them in one go. You will want to complete this process for a single quiz at a time as there will be overlap with the automatically-numbered imported questions (in the future, you can select any specific parts you need).

6. Click the New button and create a Section. Use the automatically-numbered names to break things down into their sections (e.g. “Quiz 1, Section 1”).

7. You’ll now have a filing system on the left. In the main question area, select your “Quiz 1, Section 1” questions and then click Move (just above). Choose the destination section. Repeat for each section of the quiz.

Create a new quiz using questions from the Question Library

1. Return to the main Quizzes page (or the Manage Quizzes tab).

   1. While you can edit the quiz you chose to rebuild, you will have to remove the questions that are already in it, as you can’t pull in questions from the Question Library if they are already part of the quiz, so starting fresh is the best way to avoid this obstacle.

2. Click Create New and then Question Pool.

3. Browse Question Library will let you pick from all of the questions you’ve ever had (including everything that moved over from Sakai). In this case, select for your source the Section that you set up previously (in Part 1 above), and select any or all questions within that.

   1. Note that it is possible to have done this without backing everything up to the Question Library ‒ you’ll see the original imported quizzes listed as sources, although that could lead to future complications.

4. Give the Question Pool a name and decide on the Number of Questions to Select.

5. The section from the Question Library (or whatever questions you chose) has been added as a Question Pool and will appear below any other questions in the quiz. It is possible to drag-and-drop to change the order.

A Video Demonstration