Developing a national item bank

The COLA project has been developing a large bank of assessment items for units across the Scottish further education curriculum since May 2003. These will be made available to learners mainly via colleges’ virtual learning environments. Many people have been involved in the development of the COLA item bank. Processes have included deciding on appropriate item types and subject areas, training authors, peer-reviewing and quality assuring the items and assessments, and ensuring they are interoperable and tagged with appropriate metadata.