Open LMS with Moodle™️ 5.1 introduces a new way to manage quiz questions through Course Question Banks. Instead of keeping questions locked inside a single course, you can now create multiple question banks per course, share them with colleagues, and reuse questions across any quiz on your site — all while keeping a full version history of every question.
If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Open LMS, your existing questions are automatically migrated into the new structure with no content loss. This article explains what has changed, where to find your questions, and how to make the most of the new capabilities.
For Teachers — What You Can Do Now
Access your question banks
To view all question banks in a course, go to:
Course navigation → More → Question banks
Each course can now have more than one question bank, giving you flexibility to organise questions by topic, assessment type, or sharing audience.
Reuse questions across courses
Questions in any of your course question banks are available to use in any quiz in any of your courses on the site. You no longer need to duplicate questions or export and import them between courses.
To add a question from a question bank to a quiz, open the quiz, go to the Questions tab, and browse your available question banks. Questions are available from all courses where you are a teacher.
Keep questions up to date automatically
When you edit a question in a question bank, the change is reflected in every quiz that uses it — automatically. This means you can fix a typo, update an answer, or improve wording once and have it apply everywhere.
If you want to freeze a specific version of a question in one quiz — for example, to preserve the exact wording used in a past assessment — you can set the version to a specific number instead of “Always latest” on the quiz question page.
Share questions with teachers in other courses
You can give a teacher from another course access to your question bank without making them a full teacher in your course. Here is how:
- Enrol the person in your course as a student, non-editing teacher, or a custom role.
- Go to Course navigation → More → Question banks.
- Click the edit icon (three dots) next to the question bank you want to share and select “Assign roles”.
- Choose the “Non-editing teacher” role and select the person.
Once assigned, that teacher can add questions from your question bank to quizzes in their own courses, but cannot edit the questions themselves.
| TIP | You can create more than one question bank in a course to share specific sets of questions with specific colleagues. If a user already has the 'Use all questions' or 'Use your own questions' capabilities through their system role, steps 1–5 above are not necessary. |
Question status: Ready vs Draft
Only questions with a status of “Ready” can be added to quizzes. Questions with a status of “Draft” are works in progress and are not available for use in assessments. You can set the status when creating or editing a question, or directly from the Status column in the question bank view.
Finding questions with filters
If your question bank contains many questions, you can filter them to find what you need quickly. Available filters include:
- Category
- Question type (e.g. multiple choice, true/false)
- Status (Ready or Draft)
- Time modified (before, after, or between specific dates)
- Keyword search across question name, ID number, question text, and general feedback
You can also customise your question bank view by rearranging, resizing, hiding, or resetting columns to suit your workflow.
For Administrators — What Changes After Upgrading
Your existing questions are automatically migrated
If your site is upgrading from Moodle 4.5 or earlier, all existing questions are automatically reorganised into the new question bank structure during the upgrade. No question content is lost.
Where questions were before | Where they are after upgrading |
| Course context | A shared question bank named ‘[Course name] shared question bank’, created automatically in the course. |
| Activity context (e.g. inside a quiz) | A question bank associated with that specific quiz. |
| Course category context | A shared question bank in a new course named ‘Shared teaching resources for category: [Category name]’. |
| System context | A shared question bank on the site home page. |
All existing question bank categories and subcategories are preserved within the new structure.
How teachers can identify which bank a question is from
Inside any quiz, teachers can go to Quiz navigation → Questions. Each question is labelled with the question bank it belongs to, making it easy to trace the source of any question.