IBIS: Item Banks Infrastructure Study

Report now available for download
(designed to be printed out double-sided):

The Item Banks Infrastructure Study (IBIS) brought together individuals and institutions in the UK with key expertise in areas relating to item banks.

The resulting report presents a comprehensive vision of a distributed item bank system for UK education. Item banks are first defined and existing item banks reviewed. Communications between the many agencies with interests in online assessment are analysed. The legal, service delivery, security, access and authentication issues are discussed. How to analyse items is explained - and how to ensure they are tagged with appropriate metadata. Finally a system requirements specification for a distributed item bank system is presented.

The study was funded by JISC under the Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme with financial contributions from three of the exam boards involved - Edexcel, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate (UCLES).