Collection use cases
Guide for how to use collections for question banks and flexible courses
Collections are best suited to content you want your users to work through at their own pace, since updates and new items show up immediately rather than requiring a fresh assignment. The two most common use cases are:
Large question banks
Flexible learning courses
For question banks, you group a large pool of tagged quizzes into one collection and turn on generated attempts, letting users pull personalised practice quizzes from the whole pool or specific quizzes, and optionally feed everything into the Study for spaced learning and self-practice. For flexible learning courses, you use the Player layout to lay materials out in a suggested order with tracked progress, giving users a course-like experience without locking them into strict linear progression the way Assignments do.
Question banks
If your use case involves giving users a large pool of questions to answer repeatedly, Collections, Tags & facets and the Study are the features that turn that pool into personalised, bitesize learning rather than one long static test. Have a look at our guide below on collections and the study for how the platform allows users to breakdown large banks of questions. If you want to try out one of these collections for yourself head over to our universe platform via this link: https://universe.synap.ac/join/NSDl5MMUDRF to get access.
Before building anything on platform, it's worth splitting your questions up. Rather than one giant quiz of, say, 2000 questions, break the bank down into smaller quizzes by topic or subtopic. Smaller quizzes are easier to manage, tag and reuse elsewhere (in an exam, or a different collection). Synap's bulk importer/exporter and external ids make managing content at this scale much easier - handy if you want to keep your own reference id system alongside Synap's.
This isn't a suggestion to duplicate questions across multiple quizzes so they show up more than once - each question should only live in one quiz. Questions with the same Synap ID cannot exist in multiple quizzes, so tags and facets are what make one question findable across all the groupings your students need. There is an External ID option in place if you do want to have the same question in multiple quizzes but still have a way to match it up when reporting.
The steps to managing your question bank via collections are:
Create, name and save your collection
Add your quiz items - existing ones from your library, or create new quizzes directly into the collection. Use the CSV importer to bulk create or update questions
Not ready to release something yet? Use the 'Prevent access' option on that item's drop down menu rather than adding it later
Go to the User groups tab and add the groups who should have access - anyone already in those groups gets in straight away
We'd recommend sticking with the default Card layout for a bank, Player suits more linear content
How students actually practice from the bank
Generated attempts - straight from the collection itself, no Study needed. Students build a quiz from every quiz in the collection, or specific ones, filtered by whichever tag facets you turned on above
Self-practice - once the Study is enabled and a student's added quizzes from the bank into their study, they can generate quizzes on demand, filtered by mastery level and tag, to target exactly what they're weak on
Spaced learning - fully automatic, no input needed from the student. Once bank quizzes are in their study, questions resurface every few days weighted towards whatever they're weakest on, using spaced repetition to boost retention
Self-practice and Spaced learning both need the Study enabled for your students to work.
Flexible learning courses
Collections can also be used to deliver a course of learning materials. Unlike Assignments, users aren't locked into a linear path through a Collection, so they can move through the content at their own pace and come back to it later for revision.
Create your collection, give it a name and add a description - this displays as an 'Overview' above the list of items
On the 'Configure' tab, select the Player layout. This lays materials out in a list view, softly implying the order they should be worked through
Enable tracked progress so users can see how many items they've viewed and how many they've got left
On the User groups tab, add the groups you want to have access - anyone already in those groups can get straight in
If you want to try out one of these collections for yourself head over to our universe platform via this link: https://universe.synap.ac/join/NSDl5MMUDRF to get access.
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