The Open Ed 2021 session entitled “Collaborative Test Bank Development: Multi-Institutional & Pandemic Style” had several speakers. , an Assistant Professor of Management Practice at Virginia Tech, worked with a team of undergraduate assistants. Candice Vander Weerdt is an Assistant College Lecturer at the College of Business at Cleveland State University. Mandi Goodsett is the coordinator of the textbook affordability program at Cleveland State University. Anita Waltz is an Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Virginia Tech. They described the process they followed to develop the test bank. They started with OER adoption and after creation and several rounds of revision, released a question bank. They created an assignment to create “questions through the eyes of our students” with types of questions that included conceptual, analysis, and application. Students were explicitly asked for their consent to contribute to the bank. This generated a lot of questions. Thus, they developed a review system. Virginia Tech and Cleveland State University worked together to hire students and help set up a review system. The test bank is kept in the institutional system with 780 peer-reviewed questions. Both institutions described the benefits of this project and reductions in costs to students. The textbook is now available “always” and ready on the first day of classes. The presenters mentioned that the slides and supporting materials are available at http://hdl.handle.net/10919/105385 The libraries at both institutions enjoyed working with each other it seems and pooled resources that may not have been available at the individual institutions. Fourteen schools have already requested access to the bank, and this was in September 2021. I love how both institutions mentioned the benefits and opportunities of replicating this assignment at other institutions. Several mentioned how Waltz helped coordinate meetings with clear goals. The question bank was described as a series of multiple-choice questions importable to various Learning Management Systems. Every week, students submit three different forms of questions: conceptual and application. They are now trying to encourage new partnerships. I also enjoyed how they emphasize that a textbook is not a course. They have also created an OER Commons page for discussion of the resource.
