Experiences with very big question banks

Experiences with very big question banks

by José Luis Aguirre -
Number of replies: 4

Hi,

We (a French public digital university) are considering migrating large question banks from a proprietary training system to a Moodle platform. The questions can be organised in a question bank hierarchy with tags.

The only purpose of this Moodle platform is for students to self-train by solving quizzes.

We want to know if there is somebody with experience managing Moodle large question banks  (600 000 or more). For exemple, shall we take into account any hardware, OS consideration?

Any comments about your experience would be appreciated.

Best regards

José-Luis Aguirre


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In reply to José Luis Aguirre

Re: Experiences with very big question banks

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
It depends what you mean by question banks. So a single question bank on a course with with 600,000 questions might be problematic. But an installation of Moodle with a large number of courses and a total of 600, 000 questions should be fine.

600,000 sounds like a very large number of quiz questions, could you explain more about them?

"The only purpose of this Moodle platform is for students to self-train by solving quizzes."

If you had a budget getting this plugin updated and improved might be good for that

https://moodle.org/plugins/pluginversion.php?id=10677



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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Experiences with very big question banks

by José Luis Aguirre -
Indeed, the questions will be distributed among several question banks, maybe the largest will contain around 50 000 questions and the quizzes will be built choosing questions from a small number of banks (at most three). We can arrange also to distribute the banks among several courses.

I will take a look at your plugin and I will let you know.

Thanks a lot for your answer.
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In reply to José Luis Aguirre

Re: Experiences with very big question banks

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
50,000 is still a large number. I am not aware of any limitations or likely performance issues, it is just a large number.
That plugin has not been updated in quite a while, but the purpose was for student self-practice. The final goal was that they should pick topics and it would deliver randomly as many randomly chosen questions as they selected.  

Are you familiar with the Moodle quiz engine?
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