There are some scenarios where clients really need a pool of questions and then a bunch of "mini" assessments created from them. Often times each of these "mini" assessments reuse questions from the assessment that have already been used. For this reason we created the sub-assessment feature a little over a year ago, way back in Sprint 45.
The sub-assessments have worked great for their original purpose - allow an admin to hand select questions from the main assessment. But as we've grown, this requirement has grown too, and today we need the ability to also randomize and even choose questions that may exist in other assessments.
We've been very hard at work looking at ways to improve and extend the existing sub-assessment model to fit these new requirements. After taking a step back, we learned that what we really needed to do was to improve the overall assessment authoring tool to such that sub-assessments were no longer required. We were able to accomplish that goal without the loss of any existing sub-assessment features by:
- Allow questions to be shared across any assessment.
- When adding a question to an assessment, you can either create a new question (like it is today) or you can choose a question from another assessment.
- NOTE: The main question remains intact and is not copied, allowing ease of maintenance and better reporting options in the future.
- Move all existing sub-assessments to become a true assessment.
- All of the hand selected questions are now shared from the original main assessment.
- Sub-assessment question ordering is still maintained.
- End user experience remains the same.
- All existing reporting options remain the same.
Sprint 64 which is due out early next week will introduce these enhancements to Learner Community. There are only a handful of clients that are currently using sub-assessments today, and for them each of the sub assessments will be automatically converted as described above. If you have any concerns, please call or email me directly.