My colleague, John Koetsier, recently described setting up a quiz in Moodle as “trained monkey work”…very apt, except that the trained monkeys would probably want to pawn it off to a bunch of macaques.
Setting up my quiz in Moodle has been the most tedious task I’ve undertaken for ETEC 565 thus far, and one I don’t relish doing again (although I’ve got one to set up in WebCT CE 4.1 at work next week). It was probably a mistake on my part to start off with the embedded question (Cloze) style assessment. My first thought was that a fill-in-the blanks kind of question would be useful, but the fact that such questions require special coding in Moodle and that the related Moodle Help documentation is rather skimpy made this question very frustrating to set up.
One of our requirements was to embed an image in at least one question. My inclination was to do this in a matching-type question – provide an image and match terminology or a description. This would add variety to the quiz and take into account different learning styles, although accessibility to visually-impaired students becomes an issue. Well, first of all, I couldn’t embed the images into the question fields – I had to put them into the question description area. Alignment wasn’t working, so I set up a table and labelled things to coordinate with the question fields. Then, in preview mode, the table showed up, but without the images. As it turned out, I had to fiddle with the html created by Moodle, linking in the resources stored by Moodle. I shouldn’t have to do this. Many instructors won’t know how to fix the html and will end up complaining to the trained monkeys about outsourcing to the macaques.
Probably the biggest part of the learning curve for me was having to detail everything, anticipating how I would respond to student answers, how students might answer correctly and how they might answer incorrectly. When I’m grading a paper-based test, I’ve got all those correct/incorrect algorithms stored in my subconscious, ready to interpret and assess a student’s answer. On occasion, I’ll get a correct answer that I hadn’t anticipated – an online, automated quiz isn’t necessarily prepared for this. Fortunately, there is the opportunity in Moodle (not in WebCT CE 4.1) to review and override automated grades. In my view, though, reviewing and overriding marks is probably more work than manual grading (on paper OR online).
David
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