Today marks a milestone in a long-term project to simplify the authoring experience in Yacapaca. Bits of the new system have been in place for quite some time, but the whole thing is now there, sitting in parallel with the old Author Group system.
The old system imposed a strict hierarchy that looked like this:
Author group -> Course -> Quiz -> Question
Questions could be re-used within an author group, but otherwise each element must be contained within the one before. The theoretical advantage of this system was that an Author Group could become a vibrant authoring community, but this was rarely achieved in practice.
The new system gets rid of author groups altogether, and provides far more flexibility for the other elements.
- The Question Bank: There is only one, and it contains all 288,000 questions. It has great search and filtering to enable you to quickly find the questions you need.
- Quizzes no longer need to be contained within courses; they can stand alone. This makes building a quiz quicker and more intuitive, especially for new users.
- Courses may now contain quizzes from any author, and from anywhere in the system. They are now curated groups of quizzes, rather than ownership containers.
If you are currently a member of an Author Group, it’s still there, and there is no action you need to take. We will shortly restrict author groups to just their existing members, and I shall be working with those people to make sure we meet their needs as we complete the transition to the new system.
Here are the access points to new authoring:
- Under the More Tab, look for My Quizzes and My Courses.
- In any Course you own, look for the Add a Quiz button. Remember you can now add quizzes compiled by anybody.
- In the Course List for each Syllabus, look for the button Build a new Course at the bottom of the list.
- In the Quiz List for each Topic, look for the button Build a new quiz for this topic at the bottom of the list.
I have covered elsewhere how the individual components work. I recommend you read
Yacapaca 
2 responses to “Simpler authoring”
I have just set up some new questions via my author group and I cannot see how I can use them to build a new quiz. Please advise. I have followed the instructions but it does not show the questions I have just created.
Hi Tina, quiz creation has now migrated to the Quiz Builder, which is a lot more flexible and powerful. Here is a quick primer on how to use Quiz Builder.