Complete the Training
Whether it is a video, a document, an instructor-led course or some other format, fully satisfying the course expectations and absorbing all of the material is the first step towards creating great content based upon it.
Best Practice
Take notes early and often. The more material you have to work with once the training is complete, the easier it will be to create a list of questions in both great quality and great quantity.
Get the Template
The following Excel file provides a template for training material-based question creation.
Understand the Template Fields
General Fields
QID
The QID or Question ID is a unique value to identify the question within the spreadsheet.
Submitter
Course Fields
Site
Name
URL
Tag Fields
Discipline
Category
Subject
Difficulty
Applicability
Question Fields
Type
Question
Hint
Answers
Explanation
Example Question
The following illustrates an example question created with the template and defined utilizing the fields described above.
Italic text denotes a user input field constrained to a defined list of drop-down values
All remaining fields are freeform text supplied by the user.
| Course | Tags | Question | ||||||||||
| QID | Submitter | Site | Name | URL | Discipline | Category | Subject | Difficulty | Applicability | Type | ||
| 0 | Mark Chadbourne | www.practice.com | Awesome Questions in Five Easy Steps | www.practice.com/awesome | Professional | Communication | Questioning | Beginner | General | Multiple Select | Question | What qualities should an awesome question have? |
| Hint | Sometimes an optional hint might be a good thing to include… | |||||||||||
| Answer 1 | It should test concepts rather than memorization | |||||||||||
| Answer 2 | It should not be easily answered by a Google search | |||||||||||
| Answer 3 | It should be tagged with appropriate data to categorize it | |||||||||||
| Answer 4 | It should be based on the opinion of the person writing the question | |||||||||||
| Answer 5 | It should provide any necessary context to answer it properly | |||||||||||
| Correct Answer(s) | 1,2,3,5 | |||||||||||
| Explanation | An awesome question should have all of the qualities necessary to properly test a candidate's knowledge. It should NOT focus too narrowly on terminology or opinions specific to training source material. | |||||||||||
Follow Best Practices
A good question should be aligned with each of the following best practices.
Best Practices
- Be sure to completely fill out each field of the template for each question
- Test understanding/concepts over memorization (e.g. the difference between knowing how to multiply rather than simply knowing the times tables)
- Inject practical situations framing key concepts wherever possible; it should not be possible to answer a question with the first page of Google search results
- Provide proper context; if a question is best posed with an accompanying code snippet or other artifact, include one