One of the things that I get excited about is Moodle’s ability to host and grade quizzes.   Readers, you must bear with me:  my music history course was hosted on a free website that was NOT designed to function as an LMS.  Consequently, I had to spend valuable class time administering these quizzes, and it would be a week (or longer, much longer) before students received feedback.

Jenkins (2005) point out that assessments are useful learning tools, although they are not necessarily confined to quizzes and essays (Jenkins, p. 69).  In fact, he points out that over-reliance on examinations can result in surface learning where students develop strategies for “ace-ing” their exams without actually learning (Jenkins, p. 67).

When used correctly, formative assessments “carried out during a learning event” (Jenkins, 2005, p. 69) can be most helpful in supporting students as they master materials.  Formative exams can be done each week and tend to be narrowly focused on one or two topics.  One of the major features of computer-assisted assessments is that they provide immediate feedback to students.  Studies show that the immediacy of such feedback is vital if the assessments are to support student learning (Jenkins, 2005, p. 67)

I have designed a formative quiz for Module 4, Music in the Classical Era.  I have narrowed the topics for this particular quiz to just two topics—instrumental music and opera.  I have not included sacred vocal music or lieder/song or any other topic from the era.  One of my essay questions, however, requires students to make connections between the era at hand and characteristics from a previous one.

Setting up a quiz in Moodle is quite intuitive:  it’s a matter of filling in the fields accurately.  There’s documentation in Moodle docs that’s very helpful especially in filling out the feedback fields.  I made the mistake of filling in the general feedback field with “Yup, you got it.”  When I took the test myself and got the question wrong (okay, I did that on purpose).  The computer marked the question as incorrect, but the feedback, “Yup, you got it” came up!  That was not the correct field to stick that bit of feedback in!

It takes a bit of time to create the quiz, at least for the novice.  I suppose I’ll develop facility as I do it more often.   Half-way through designing the quiz, I decided to see if it would really work.  It did.  However, when I went back to finish adding questions, I found that I could not.  Once there are attempts I can neither add nor subtract questions.  I panicked for a bit, then I thought about creating another quiz with a different name and seeing if I could import the questions I’d already made up.  It worked!  Paranoia set in, however, and I kept the old quiz.  I’m scared of deleting it and deleting the entire bank of questions.

The short answer and essay questions are a bit different in Moodle that what I envisioned in a face-to-face setting.  In music history, short answers are usually defining a term with the who, what, when, why format, which usually takes up a paragraph.  Essays require 4-6 paragraphs, depending upon the question.  In Moodle the “short answers” are more like “fill-in-the-blank” and the essays are like short answers.  Unfortunately, the computer will not grade the essays; maybe that’s the reason why a paragraph-length response is recommended!

One of the things that I never did figure out how to do in the multiple choice questions is to have students chose several answers from a list.  For instance if there are four choices for answers, students could pick “a and d” “b and c” etc.  I found it helpful that I could program several variations of spellings for correct single answers, and choose the grade that I wanted to give for each.  That way if a student wasn’t sure of the spelling of a word, they would still get credit.  Moodle has its limitations, though.  There may be other variations of spellings that the student would supply which the computer would mark wrong, but I would probably give partial credit for, if I were manually grading.

I liked the opportunity to combine images and sound to my questions, and managed to combine the two for one of the essays.  I was disappointed, though, that the limitation in disc space on the server prevented me from uploading sound files directly to my site.  That will limit the types of online quizzes that I can design.  For instance I cannot create a quiz where I ask students to name the composition, composer and era in which it was written.  If I provide links to the music on youtube, students would be able to find the answers with very little digging.  If I used sound files, however, there would be nothing available to give away the answers.

This self-assessment opportunity is very helpful for students.  It will help prepare students for the constructivist learning that my course requires (Gibbs and Simpson,  2005, p.  8).   This assessment and others will also allow students to “monitor their own progress as and when they wish” (Jenkins, p. 76).

References:

Gibbs,G. & Simpson, C. (2005).  Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.  Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1),  3-31.  Retrieved from
http:// www2.glos.ac.uk/offload/tli/lets/lathe/issue1/articles/simpson.pdf

Jenkins, M.  (2005).  Unfulfilled promise:  Formative assessment using computer-aided assessment.  Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 67-80.  Retrieved from http://www2.glos.ac.uk/offload/tli/lets/lathe/issue1/articles/jenkins.pdf