When you first start to design, develop and implement objective / MCQ style tests you naturally think in terms of the test as being the basic unit of your activity and the questions all being subsidiary to that test. However, as you go along and start developing more of these kinds of assessments you are involved building up a ‘question bank’ this means moving your perspective of your e-assessments from exams / tests to that of individual questions. VLE platform suppliers recognise this and allow you to see and manage your entire collection of objective / MCQ style tests questions in the system, regardless of where the individual questions are embedded. This is an extremely useful function and allows you to reuse, edit and combine questions in different ways – greatly speeding up the design and development process.

As the number of questions in your VLE question bank expands you have a very valuable set of resources that can be used in different scenarios (e.g. diagnostic, formative, summative etc.) and with the all the benefits of providing instant marking and feedback. You can see why some lecturers come to see these resources as ‘gold dust’, this is why in the previous section we described the importance of being able to export / import your questions in different technical formats and manage them in an offline space. Although all your questions might be lodged in your college VLE, with some very useful management and editing tools, you should regard this as a temporary situation – prone to change due to technical and employment factors. So, it is sensible to take steps to manage and update these valuable resources in a space that you can control.