This was a difficult exercise for me. Not in terms of understanding, but in terms of time. I have been ill the past few days, so I have been going to sleep early. That limited the amount of time I had to work on the Moodle site, which meant that I had a difficult time pre-visualising the “quiz” without actually knowing what and how the course was going to be taught.
However, as I pondered the quiz I realized that I could work backwards and allow the questions to help form the course. I suppose this is what some people may call backwards design, because in many ways I began with some of the questions listed in the quiz, and decided to create the course around some of those questions. I say some, because not all of them were based on the questions. In many ways I suppose the quiz was the catalyst that pointed me in the correct direction the course would take.
Speaking of the quiz–it’s turned out to be more of a test than a quiz. Knowing that one mistake teachers can make is to give insufficient time I gave my students 45 minutes for 13 questions. That comes to about 3-1/2 minutes. While that may seem short, specially given the essay and short answer questions, it’s actually sufficient in light of the matching and multiple choice questions, all of which can be completed in under a minute.
One concern I had regarding an online quiz is it is always an open book quiz. A student could easily cut and paste material, copy another’s notes, read the module in a different browser, and manage to obtain a decent grade. In a real-life situation there is usually someone proctoring a quiz, and any open books are often frowned upon. Other than that concern I found creating a quiz on Moodle fun, and challenging. Fun because it allows more than just rehashing of facts (as in multiple choice questions), and it also allows teachers to get creative and ask open ended questions that require more thought and can’t be answered directly by material in the module (as in the case of the mini-essay with the picture of the girl riding her bike). That question require that students understand the principles of shutter speed and movement, as well as the reciprocal relationship between lens aperture and camera shutter.
Creating a quiz on Moodle was challenging because the time estimate to complete the quiz may be way off–it could be that most students will only need 20 minutes, rather than 45. I am unsure if Moodle includes an “average time” filter that records how long students spent on the quiz–that would be a handy tool to creating more quizzes and adjusting the time given to a more appropriate level. It was also challenging because there are still some questions I haven’t answered in terms of grading–I suppose now that it’s complete I’ll be able to play around and see how the combination of “automated” grading work in conjunction with something I have to manually grade (as in the essay). I know I’ve set a grade for everything, but I could not figure out how to weight each question appropriately.