Towards a properly web 2.0 way of creating and sharing questions

The promise held by ideas like item banking and question repositories do not seem to have borne spectacular fruit in UK Higher Education. Projects have come and gone but a real culture of sharing of question content does not seem to have been established. This is in spite of the very real benefits such an approach ought to bring. This paper argues that the major hindrances to this are the complexity of existing xml standards, the difficulty of browsing of questions and the inability to embrace web 2.0 ideas. It offers some results from the JISC funded MCQFM project as pointing in the direction this activity needs to go in order to facilitate greater collaboration among the community. It also believes that the actions of question and test sharing are so different from that of test deployment that potentially we need two standards not one: one for the exchange of questions, and one for their deployment.