Welcome to the first Hidden Gem of 2025! This time, we’re focusing on streamlined assessment creation: Collaboration. Cirrus offers powerful tools that go beyond basic item and collection management, allowing your team to work together seamlessly to build high-quality assessments.
Why Collaboration is Key
Creating effective assessments often requires a diverse set of skills and perspectives. Cirrus facilitates this teamwork with features that:
- Promote shared ownership: Build item collections collaboratively with colleagues, allowing subject matter experts to contribute to a shared item bank.
- Streamline workflows: Assign roles and permissions to control access and maintain a structured process, from item creation to review and approval. You can use this to ensure a rigorous quality assurance process with clearly defined roles for item writers, reviewers, and approvers.
- Enable efficient communication: Use built-in commenting features to provide feedback and engage in discussions directly within the platform. This allows for direct and transparent communication throughout the review process, whether it’s flagging potentially ambiguous wording in an item or discussing the difficulty level of a question.
- Increase consistency: Establish clear workflows and approval processes to ensure all items meet your quality standards. By implementing standardized review processes, you can ensure all assessment items are fair, accurate, and aligned with the curriculum.
How it works in Cirrus
Collaboration on items
Collaboration on items in Cirrus is a structured process that revolves around roles and permissions, ensuring a clear workflow for creating, reviewing, and approving assessment questions. Collection Roles define actions users can perform within a collection, such as adding, editing, deleting, reviewing, and approving items. Read more about roles and permissions in our earlier Hidden Gem here.
Typical workflow:
- The owner of the collection creates a new item and changes its status to “Ready for Review”.
- The item then becomes visible to collaborators with the role of “Reviewer”. They access the item and provide comments or feedback.
- The owner reviews the feedback and updates the item. It is either approved as “Live” or sent back for further revisions.
Collaboration on collections
Working collaboratively on collections extends the collaboration process to the entire item bank, offering flexibility in sharing and controlling access.
- Sharing Collections: Owners can share collections with roles like “Co-Author” or “Reviewer,” granting varying levels of access to the content.
- Permissions: Collection owners control what shared users can do – whether adding, editing, or archiving items.
- Access for Assessment Creation: Owners can specify who can use items from the shared collection when building assessments, allowing clear separation between item creators and exam authors.
This combination of sharing, roles, and permissions ensures an efficient collaboration process, whether on individual items or entire collections.
Best practices for item & collection collaboration in Cirrus
To maximise collaboration in Cirrus, follow these practices:
- Define clear roles and responsibilities: Assign roles (e.g., Author, Reviewer, Subject Matter Expert) with specific permissions to maintain a structured workflow. Ensure all team members understand their responsibilities to avoid confusion and duplication of efforts.
- Establish a robust workflow: Implement a clear process for item development and quality assurance. Start with drafting items, assign reviewers for feedback, make revisions, and approve items to mark them “Live” for use in assessments.
- Leverage collaboration features: Use Comments to facilitate discussions and feedback directly within the platform. Take full advantage of Revision History to track changes, compare versions, and revert when necessary.
Need Help?
Find out more in our Knowledge Base on Item, Collections, and Collection Roles.
If you’d like support or guidance on using Cirrus’ collaborative features, our Customer Success team is here to help. Contact us today to optimise your workflows and make the most of your assessments.
