ANS instructions

Instructional video on how to upload a sharestats question to ANS
Author

Sharon Klinkenberg

Published

June 7, 2025

Video instructions

Upload to ANS

ANS packages are already available as download from the ShareStats search table. Follow the instructions below on how to upload the zip file to ANS.

Create ANS package

It is also possible to download the ZIP Folder with all the raw files from the itembank search page. When you unpack the zip you will have a folder containing the item .Rmd file, and data or image files.

We recommend to create a folder your items set this to your working directory and save the extracted ZIP folders in there. In this folder you can ad an R file with the code below to compile the items for uploading.

For compiling the items to a ANS ZIP you can use the exams2ans funcion from the exams package. Make sure to first install the exams package to R if you do not have it installed already.

install.packages("exams")

You can use the script below to compile a question. Note that you can also download multiple questions and combine them to upload multiple questions at once to ANS.

library("exams")

# Add file path to list. Multiple paths can be added here list("path1.rmd", "path2.rmd")
file.paths <- list("itemFolder1/itemFile1.rmd")

# Create preview
exams2html(file.paths)

# Set directory where you want to store the .zip package that will be created
directory <- getwd()

# Create ANS package
exams2ans(file.paths, 
                 dir  = directory, 
                 name = "exam_name")
library("exams")

# Add file path to list. Multiple paths can be added here list("path1/file1.rmd", "path2/file2.rmd")
file.paths <- list("itemFolder1/itemFile1.rmd",
                   "itemFolder2/itemFile2.rmd",
                   "itemFolder3/itemFile3.rmd")

# Create preview
exams2html(file.paths)

# Set directory where you want to store the .zip package that will be created
directory <- getwd()

# Create TvO package
exams2ans(file.paths, 
                 dir  = directory, 
                 name = "exam_name")

The newly created .zip file can be uploaded to ANS as described in the video above.