The Principal’s Office

The Moodle Quiz assessment tool can be found at http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/course/view.php?id=62&topic=3

Reflection

I tried with no success initially at importing some previously created multiple choice questions that I’ve used from my past physics classes. I was thinking (incorrectly) that I needed to pull in my whole course worth of quiz questions so that I could use some. The entire course backup with only the quizzes selected amounted to 120Mb! For some reason I couldn’t turn off the course files as I’m sure my 700+ quiz questions that I’ve created or obtained through CoolSchool did not occupy that much space. This is not usually a problem except when the Moodle upload limit is set below your backup file size which it is in this case at 8Mb. Without FTP to my course files available I figured I would just create five new Multiple Choice questions. Not a big problem!

What I had forgotten that in the actual quiz module you can export questions and/or categories of questions. So I took a few and exported them. So as I went in to create new questions I noticed the import/export tabs and that queued my memory. This pulled in questions that I created but interestingly it does not download the images from questions you uploaded. Only the text, answers and an absolute reference to the image (ie. http://www.npss.prn.bc.ca/moodle/index.php?file…). Since my images were stored in a currently hidden course, they were broken on the UBC Moodle. Fortunately I caught this and simply saved them from the old server to my desktop and loaded them back to the UBC Moodle.

One thing that I love in Moodle is with images. I supported two visually impaired twin sisters through the last couple of years in high school with their technology. One of the sisters had the opportunity to take part in a blended classroom that utilized face-to-face and online components with Moodle as the LMS. She was able to complete the entire course with her laptop and very limited assistance as the Moodle LMS is designed to be accessible to people with disabilities. As a designer you are forced to provide alternate text for images. This was a helpful feature for this student. In my quizzes the images dealt with electrical diagrams and I keep them sparse on description to try not and distract the student. Although I would certainly put in more detail if one of my students could benefit from it.

One feature of all the Moodle versions I have noticed is that it has fairly poor support of Greek characters. If you enter one in a text field it must be entered using the ampersand character semicolon technique in the coding. Once you have added it, don’t go back and edit as it will forget! Then you must go back and add it to the code. And example would be ε is needed to properly show a ε. This is a frustrating little catch that if you are unaware you will spend some time with the spot on the wall where you bang your head especially if you are a math or science teacher. In many cases where I’m using complex formulas I will do them in Microsoft Word using the Equation Editor, screen capture, crop the equations I need, save as jpgs or pngs and add the images into Moodle.

The quiz timer I have found in the past to be annoying as that it physically obstructs part of the page. It would be much better designed to stay in a corner where the div layers are not showing any text or images. This is likely both due to the quiz component as well as to the cascading style sheet for text placement in the Moodle Cornflower theme that is used in this course. Informal polling of students in a face-to-face class was always 100% against using a timer as they felt intimidated by the ever present clock. This of course was in a face-to-face class where students had the bookends of the schedule already known to them as well as the clock on the wall and the bell schedule. My students also knew that if they needed extra time that it was there for them before or after school and at lunch hour. The timer only allows for the time the designer gave to write the quiz. This does not take into account the indivdual needs of the learner. One of the most frequent requirements on Individual Education Plans from my experience has always been “Extra Time” for students. The timer does not understand this. So it is there in the quiz as required but I’ve set it with much more than what would be needed.

One of the great strengths of an automated assessment tool in Moodle is the fact that you can go beyond right and wrong in the automated marking. Being able to put in general feedback to a question and detailed feedback to possible responses takes a quiz from an assessment of learning to an assessment for learning. I recently have volunteered myself to create a Moodle quiz for a large 100+ question multiple choice test provided to the BC Business Educators group that was passing it around as a Word document. I of course have a key, but more importantly I’ve asked for a feedback key that explains why something is right or why it is wrong. Many distractors in questions are chose as they have some way to come by that answer. It is best for us to let our students know why this is wrong and how to come about the correct answer instead of just giving non-descriptive feedback. The descriptive feedback takes by far the most amount of time in creating quiz assessments, I guess this is why I have not received one from anyone in the province!

I’ve used quizzes before in Moodle just for the multiple choice types of questions. This was simply because the Provincial exams consisted of multiple choice, short answer (calculations), and essay answers only. I would usually do the essay answers on paper with my classes as it was easier to draw a diagram if needed. I enjoyed adding in the short text answer and matching questions as I never had an opportunity or a need to do them before. I think I will add a few into my Wireless Writing community to get my teachers thinking about Moodling.