Moodle Moot: Developments in the Quiz Module

Developments in the Quiz Module

Tuesday afternoon

Tim Hunt
Open University

New in 1.9

• New Question Types
• Identify part of an image
• Drag and drop matching
• Drag and drop ordering
• File upload
• Question bank
• have students create questions that teachers can then grade or use later in a test
• better sharing of questions between courses (like the Vista repository)
• Email when a quiz is submitted
• confirmation to students and/or teacher when a quiz is submitted
• Better question import and export
• improved error handling
• plug-in question types included in import/export

Current Developments in 2.0+ (none of these features are guaranteed to appear in 2.0)

• Improved Navigation
• Summary of quiz answers before you submit
• Improved  quiz reports
• New and improved question types
• calculated
• multi-answer
• regular expression
• JUnit (for doing unit testing for software assignments)
• algebra question type
• others
• More intuitive quiz editing interface
• Improve adaptive mode
• better feedback in adaptive mode
• Certainty based marking
• Students say how certain they are they got a particular answer correct, and there score is modified by their level of confidence.
• For example, a student picks a multiple choice answer, then they say how certain they think they are.  If they answer correctly and say they are very certain they got it correct they get 3 points, however, if they get it wrong they loose 6 points.  If they answer it correctly but say they are not certain they got it right, they get 1 point, however, if they are wrong, they get 0 points.
• The basic premise is that it's not important how well you can guess an answer but how confident you are that you know the answer.  (Just think about your surgeon having to take a test like this - a good guesser is not always desirable)

Greg

Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 10 2008, 06:15:32 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Moodle Moot: Keynote from Martin Dougiamas

Keynote from Martin Dougiamas

Tuesday morning

Martin Dougiamas is the creator of Moodle and delivered the keynote address to the conference this morning.  Two of the more interesting things I would like to share are his assessment of how well Moodle is being used pedagogically, and also what is new in version 2.0.

Pedagogy in Moodle

So how are pedagogical practices progressing in Moodle?  Martin doesn't think that it has progressed far enough.  Here is how he lays out the typical progression of how people teach in Moodle:

1. Put up the handouts (Resource, SCORM)
2. Have a passive forum - "OK, go talk now"
3. Using Quizzes and Assignments
4. Use wiki, glossary, database - here you are constructing things with your fellow students
5. Use the Forum seriously and actively - having more directed discussions
6. Combine the activities into sequences - you have to think about the student's learning journey
7. Think deeper about learning activities - i.e. have students create new discussions and respond to others
8. Use the Survey module to study/reflect
9. Use peer-review modules like Workshop - get students to be teachers with everyone grading each others, and the teacher can grade the grading
10. Sharing ideas, active research, self-study

According to Martin most courses stay in the first couple of steps.

Directions for Moodle

1.9

• Consolidation
• attention to detail throughout
• consistency throughout
• simplify the interface
• tidy up the code
• better help documentation
• fix known bugs
• Complete gradebook rewrite
• Outcomes (competencies) as part of grading
• Groupings
• Performance improvements (twice as fast as 1.8)
• Tags
• Notes
• Fancier themes
• Bug fixes

2.0

• Improved internal file handling
• import: support for external repositories (Merlot, Google Docs, Facebook, Flickr, and lots of others, plus you can roll your own)
• export: support for e-portfolios (Mahara, MyStuff)
• Moodle will not be a portfolio system - they will only push out to other systems
• also export to HTML, PDF, XML
• Community hubs - connect to other Moodle servers/repositories
• Conditional activities (think selective release from Vista)
• Progress tracking
• Web services API
• New Modules: Feedback, wiki (new wiki?) and probably others
• Secure feeds (RSS) and flows
• Blog comments, external blog support (grab blog postings with specific tags)
• Messaging improvements (redirect where messages are sent - third party services, popups)
• Improved security/performance
• Improved usability/interface

In Closing

Martin closed with a singe question:

Q. What is the single most powerful technique for online education?

A. getting students to ask questions

Ain't it the truth!

Greg


Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 10 2008, 01:41:37 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

Moodle Moot: Building Courses in Moodle

Building Courses in Moodle

Monday morning

This turned into more of a "here's what's new in 1.9" and lots of very specific questions about more advanced settings.  Here are the highlights...

Groupings

Moodle Docs on Groupings

In Moodle 1.9 onwards, groups may be organised into groupings. Activities and resources may then be assigned to particular groupings.

This is useful if you want to make different activities for different groups.  The traditional groups tool will create spaces for different groups that all contain the same activity.  For example, the groups tool will create separate groups all with the same assignment.  Groupings will let you create different assignments for each grouping.

Grading Discussions

There are new ways to calculate the grade from the ratings for each discussion - addative, average, maximum, minimum, counting.

Gradebook

* You can create custom columns (make your own column)
* Add feedback to the gradebook
* Outcomes reports (need to do some more research on this)
* Create custom calcuated columns
* There's a lot more to look at here, so there will be more to come...

Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 09 2008, 02:08:14 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Blogging from the Moodle Moot

I am attending the Moodle Moot this week in San Francisco, a gathering of people interested in using Moodle.  We are located in downtown SanFrancisco, with a view of the Transamerica building, and mere 3 blocks from where the great Steve will come down from the mountain and reveal the holy handset 2.0. 

I am going to blog about what I learn about Moodle, so stay tuned...


Greg
Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 09 2008, 11:31:14 AM EDT ) Permalink