Item Banks in Inspera

Item Banks enable institutions to organise their assessment content and maintain full control of who have access to the content at all times. Think of Item Banks as spaces where access is controlled centrally and the content with an Item Bank is automatically shared with all users who are members. We are releasing the Item Bank capabilities across four releases. To begin with, we enable you to start organising content into Item Banks. The upcoming releases will enable both structuring and organising the content further with metadata tailored to your institution and improved filtering to better enable using this metadata. Additionally the degree of control on Item Bank access will become more granular in the later phases. 

Phase 1: 

Objective: Enable institutions to start creating Item Banks to organise questions and question sets

With the May release, Item Banks can be activated on the tenant. Before enabling this, we encourage you to think through how Item Banks should be structured for your institution. What level do you want to group content around? For example School, Programme, Course Cluster, Course/Module? This will vary from institution to institution, but we recommend keeping the following in mind when deciding:

• Questions reside in one Item Bank and are not reused across banks. If different courses share the same questions, consider having Item Banks covering all related courses. From September you can create metadata fields and tag the content according to eg. Course and Topic, so you can still find course specific content in your bank
• Permissions to the content will be set at the Item Bank level. If everyone should strictly be able to access content in their own Course, this might be the right level to set up Item Banks. If collaboration can happen across courses, consider creating Item Banks based on Course Clusters or higher levels. Item Bank access will be defined by Org. Unit membership. With Phase 3, it will be possible to have multiple Org. Units per Item Bank with different access levels per Org. Unit. Think about how it makes sense for your institution to structure Org. Units, bearing in mind that each Org. Unit should group members that should have the same access.  
• Stability of selected level. Although Item Banks can be changed and updated, you should consider how stable the structure you land on is. Do your courses typically change every couple of years? Consider clustering related courses together to maintain a stable structure.  

When you have decided how to structure the Item Banks for your institutions, you need to consider who should be responsible for creating and managing the Item Banks. This work can be delegated using the Item Bank Manager role. Read more about the new role here. Should the individuals managing the Item Banks have full control of who have access? Consider also giving these individuals the Org. Unit Admin role. 

When Item Bank is enabled on the tenant, all existing content can be found in 'Unbanked space'. For now this is still accessed from 'Author', but from June you will see 'Unbanked space' instead of 'Author' the dropdown. This space works in the same way you are used to, and content is private unless it has been shared with another user or Org. Unit. 

In May you can still access 'Author' from the dropdown	From June release 'Author' will be replaced by 'Unbanked Space'

Item Banks can be created by users with the Item Bank Manager role, or Authors with Extended Access. This is done via the '+ Create Item Bank' option in the dropdown. Read more about how to create Item Banks here. 

With Item Banks created, Authors can populate the Item Banks by creating content directly into the Item Bank or move existing content from the 'Unbanked Space' into Item Banks. Read more about how to move content into Item Banks here. 

Permissions to the content change once it is located in an Item Bank. In the first release (May), each Item Bank is associated with one Org. Unit. All Authors who are members of this Org. Unit have full author access (incl. edit) to all content in the Item Bank.
From the 20th May all Planners who are members of the Org. Unit have access to add the Item Bank content to tests, and manually sharing with Planner is no longer required. Until then, question sets to be used in tests must reside in ‘Unbanked Space’. With the October release, permissions will be set more granularly on the Item Bank.

In May, Rubric templates still exist at tenant level. Questions moved to or created in Item Banks can still use the tenant level Rubric templates. In June, Rubric templates become Item Bank specific and you can differentiate your templates to each bank. If a Rubric template is added to a question before it is moved to another bank, the Rubrics works as before on this question and there is no need to update the template. 

Phase 1a: 

Objective: Enable institutions to organise further content types

We are referring to the June release as 'Phase 1a' as this contains several improvements rather than larger new functionality:

• In Phase 1, the content types Essay Toolbars, Essay Special Characters and Math Symbol Palettes resides in the Unbanked Space, or can be created directly in an Item Bank. With Phase 1a, you will get the option to create a copy and move the copy, meaning you can reuse your favourites in other banks
• Rubric templates become Item Bank specific. When selecting to add a Rubric from a template, the Author can choose between the templates in that Item Bank. If you have a Rubric you want to reuse in different banks, you get the option to create a copy and move the copy also for Rubric templates
• If you have reused Questions across multiple Question Sets, and you now want to move the content into Item Banks, you need to move all Question Sets that have common Questions together. To be able to do this you need to know which Question Sets are using the common Questions. With Phase 1a, we are improving the information you get when you are prevented from moving content due to the content being shared with other content. 

Phase 2: 

Objective: Enable structuring to the content by creating and applying metadata

Currently, Inspera offers a 'labels' feature, which allows for unstructured, free-text tagging of questions. The new metadata functionality within Item Banks introduces a more structured and controlled system for categorising and describing questions. This structured approach is designed to improve the quality and consistency of the information recorded about each question. A new "Metadata Manager" role will be introduced. Individuals with this role will be able to define custom metadata fields specific to your institution. It will be possible to create up to 20 custom metadata fields. The available input types for these metadata fields will include:

• Single select lists
• Multiple select lists
• Numbers
• Dates

Before deciding what metadata fields to create and starting them up, we recommend that you consider these points: 

• Identify Essential Information: Determine what specific metadata your institution needs to effectively filter questions and generate reports (e.g., learning outcomes, difficulty levels, subject classifications, relevant dates).
• Choose Appropriate Input Types: For each piece of metadata, select the most suitable input type. While free-text offers flexibility, list-based options (single/multiple select) promote consistency. Numerical and date fields ensure standardized data entry.
• Relationship with Existing Labels: Evaluate how the new, structured metadata system will be used in conjunction with, or potentially as a replacement for, the existing "labels" feature in Inspera.

Phase 3: 

Objective: Give institutions more granular control of access to the Item Bank content. Also; improved filtering to better enable retrieving content.

With this Phase you can manage the access to the Item Banks much more granularly. Multiple Org. units can be associated with each Item Bank, and specific privileges can be enabled per Org. Unit in the Item Bank. Think of Org. Units as permission groups; one group can have a set of permissions in one Item Bank, and a different set of permissions in another Item Bank. This is important to keep in mind when structuring or restructuring your Org. Units. 

We recommend starting already now to consider how it will be natural to group the users at your institution, keeping in mind that each Org. Unit should share the same access level. Remember that Org. Unit membership is inherited, so if you use an hierarchical structure then users who are member of a higer node in the hierarchy are also automatically members of the lower nodes. 

Phase 3 will also enable you to create a new type of metadata field: text entry. While this will allow full flexibility, we recommend you first consider the metadata field types that enforce choosing from a list to preserve data quality. 

The ability to filter on content in the Question and Question Set list views will also be improved in Phase 3. Simple and complex queries can be built with filtering on 'any'/'all' and 'is'/'is not' across multiple metadata values.