Purpose:
Assessment in moodle leaves plenty of options and opportunities. There are numerous external tools, which can be used, but for this assignment I used the quiz activity already built into moodle to create a quiz with a variety of different questions. This norm-based assessment is intended to provide students with feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, as they are able to have more than one attempt on the quiz. It is also intended to provide a portion of the grade for the Evolution module.
Process Review:
One of the biggest challenges with creating the quiz was the time consumption factor; the same quiz in a traditional f2f environment would have take significantly less time to create. I suspect that the process grows a bit shorter with an increased familiarity with the design process as one builds experience. Like all assessments, once the ideas are present they can be modified and re-used. Some of the time expenditure is recouped via auto-assessment/feedback, which can be built in to the assessment tools. I designed the quiz such that students could have more than one attempt, which provides them opportunities to review and re-try the quiz in a formative manner.
I also thought it was positive and useful that feedback could be provided immediately to the students about both erroneous and correct solutions, as well as, areas to review. It doesn’t happen very often in my classroom that I will identify what students did wrong on a quiz (though I will often give them the opportunity to go back and correct for a few extra marks).
Another challenge I had with creating the on-line quiz was that for certain questions the student had to have a very exact written answer and minor changes or even a simple spelling error would result in loss of marks. As teachers in our classroom we are able to make those calls (I will often ignore minor spelling errors if I can tell what the word is supposed to be). Since the online rules are rigid and moodle appears not to come with an A.I. program, it limits some of the questions that could be asked or the ways in which they are to be asked. I also suspect that with more assessment design practice I become more proficient at creating appropriate questions, but that was definitely a challenge.
Overall, I think that the quality of feedback, the immediacy of the feedback, and opportunities for a variety of different assessments makes the time spent designing moodle-assessments worthwhile.