I really found this exercise to be quite interesting considering it was my first experience preparing a quiz, and my first time working with Moodle. I thought the process for developing, editing and reviewing the quiz was relatively straight-forward, although I ended up editing the majority of my questions after going through the preview.
I suppose the key variable for me in developing this quiz was that it needed to be designed for high school students with learning disabilities who are preparing to continue their educational careers at the college or university level. The idea is to provide students with an excellent opportunity to figure out their strengths and weaknesses by answering different types of questions. The post-quiz review would allow them to see how their learning disability impacted their ability to answer the quiz questions correctly within the allotted time.
The fact that this quiz was in digital format is very important for students with learning disabilities. For some of these students, they require a digital copy of any paper quiz so that they can use software such as Kurzweil to help them read the questions and options for answers when they are available. The digital format of the Moodle quiz allowed the majority of the questions to be copy and pasted easily into third-party software. The exception was the matching questions, because students would not be able to copy and paste the possible answers due to the fact that they options were only listed in a drop-down box.
Another challenge was preparing the short-answer questions. I ended up modifying my questions multiple times because I was concerned that I would not be able to prepare answer options for all of the word combinations that students could come up with. Since the answer needed to be exact, and more specifically sequential, the “wildcard” variable wasn’t really helpful. I decided to go with a simplified question to ensure that the students would be able to provide the correct answer. I did discover a method that would allow short-answer questions to be corrected manually like essay questions, but it required modification of a PHP page that was part of the Moodle installation, which we obviously didn’t have access to edit.
In addition to the above issue, I had hoped that I would be able to integrate third-party software Nanogong into my Moodle quiz, so that the students would be able to click a button and have the questions and answer options read to them through their headphones or speakers. The installation required access to the base directory of the Moodle installation, so it wasn’t possible for this exercise but in the future if I had direct server access I would ensure that this module was available.
I think Moodle is an excellent utility for teachers, and for students who have some type of a learning disability. With unlimited access, there is a lot of flexibility for modifications that allow a teacher to adjust the course materials and exercises to a specific group of students. Within the existing restrictions however, I was able to give the students additional time to write the exam easily. I was also pleased to see that the shuffle feature could be enabled or disabled. For students with learning disabilities, the majority require a private room when writing any quiz or test so this feature wasn’t as important. That being said, if I was able to add third-party modules that were integrated into the quiz, the ability to disable the shuffle feature would ensure that any audio/visual assistance would match up with the questions.