Beginning in December of 2021, Educational Technology will begin biannually reviewing and cleaning up Moodle courses’ question banks. This new policy will improve Moodle functionality and ensure that course imports run smoothly without negatively impacting instructors, their Moodle quizzes, or their students. 

The reasoning behind this new policy is solely to improve Moodle functionality and assist instructors with course management. We want to help! As you can imagine, 4,000+ questions is a lot of content to manage, and while adding questions is easy, deleting questions is time-consuming and difficult. The current “add only” practice has led to overstuffed question banks and poor functioning courses with no formal remedy to fix the problem. This new policy should be that remedy. 

Here are the steps we will be taking in December of 2021 and then revisiting every 6 months thereafter:

STEP 1: Our team will run a “Question Instance” administrative report in Moodle and flag all courses that contain more than 4,000 questions in their question bank. 

NOTE: Only courses with more than 4,000 quiz questions will be impacted.

STEP 2: We will then notify instructors of flagged courses of the impending question bank clean-up. 

NOTE: No action is needed on the part of the instructor unless they decide to manually back-up old questions (we can, of course, help with that!).

STEP 3: Finally, we will review each flagged course’s question bank and delete all questions and categories that haven’t been used or updated in 3 years. If even one question from any question category is still in use, NO questions from that category will be deleted.

NOTE: The 4,000-questions and 3-years thresholds were decided to guarantee no relevant content is removed from any instructor’s course.

If you have any questions or concerns about this policy change and how it will be enacted starting this December, please email Ben Post at bpost@nmc.edu.