Collaborative Test Bank Development: Multi-Institutional & Pandemic Style

During 2020-21 two business faculty from different institutions together with OER librarians, undergraduate students, and graduate assistants conspired to create a faculty-access-only test bank aligned to senior undergraduate-level open textbook, Strategic Management (2020) and AACSB Standards. Test bank development followed instructional and ethical practices for non-disposable assignments including faculty development of assignments, student ownership of student work, student “opt in” to go public, choice of no or some student attribution, financial incentives for various project participants, project MOUs, professional copyediting, and public release to vetted requestors. This presentation describes our respective motivations, process, how we found one another, why the collaboration worked so well, and practices we believe are worth emulating.

Our work is significant for underserved populations and institutions that serve them. In particular, our work is beneficial for students who attend colleges and universities that are not selective in their admissions (non-elite institutions) and faculty that teach at such institutions. While students struggle to afford course materials, institutions and faculty that care deeply about educating underserved students face ALSO significant financial burdens paying for standards-aligned, commercial assessments to prove their students’ learning. We will argue that students, faculty, and institutions are better served spending funds elsewhere. Providing standards-aligned, no-cost testbanks and slides with OER is an enormous benefit to such institutions and students. These ancillaries are valuable as well to faculty and students at other institution types.

The test bank request process is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/104179