Advice on naming conventions for Topics and Questions

Advice on naming topics, folders and questions within QMP

Because all the questions held within QuestionMark Perception are held in a single question database (shared across the whole University) it is worth thinking about how you structure and name your topics, questions and assessments. It is important that these naming conventions are coherent and make sense to both you and your colleagues.

When you author questions within QuestionMark Perception you will see the topic(s), questions and assessments that you are authorised to access. 

Topics and Assessments are found within the Authoring section of Questionmark.

Naming Topics

The topic folder structure. You may have access to only one folder or to many.  The top level topic folder is intended to indicate the broad discipline area and will often directly correspond to your school. One common structure within this that is used is:

• Top level topic folders = broad discipline area. 
• Second level folders = year of study. 
• You can now create new topics at deeper levels within this structure as appropriate for your discipline. 

Remember that all this material is shared with colleagues in your school, so the folder structure should make sense to others, not just yourself. It is worth discussing this with colleagues when you start to create new questions and assessments.

It is suggested that at the next level and beyond you may wish to use a folder structure that makes sense for your discipline. You may have a whole series of nested folders. You can use the same subfolder name in different parts of the tree.

To add a new subtopic to an existing topic:

1. Expand your topic structure to find the topic to which you would like to add a subtopic
2. Select the topic you would like to add a subtopic to by clicking on the topic name
3. There are two ways to add a new topic:
   1. Right click on the topic name and select New from the pop-up menu
   2. Click on Topics at the top of the topic list and select New
4. Enter the name for the new subtopic and press the Enter key to accept.

Naming Questions

Having defined an appropriate topic-subtopic structure, you can now proceed to create questions.

You are strongly recommended to give your questions a meaningful, descriptive name.    Please remember to use _ rather than a blank space to separate words, e.g. name your question “gradient_of_straight_line” rather than “gradient of straight line”.

The user logged in at the time of creating the questions will automatically be described as the question author.  It may be helpful to add the UUN of the question author to the question name. This would be especially true in cases where a member of admin staff or support staff is doing the online creation of questions which may have been originally written by a member of academic staff.  In that case we would suggested a question name such as “mbrown_gradient_straight_line” .

This structure will enable identification of questions by content, by rough academic level, or by author.

Authoring in Questionmark allows you to author a full range of questions and to apply detailed information such as feedback and metadata to those questions.

Getting help

For help and advice with using this service, please contact: