Bryan Funk E-folio

Moodle Assessment Tools

I had never had an opportunity to work with the Moodle Assessment tools before having this chance to create an assessment for ETEC 565. I had heard from others that it would likely be best to get some PD on how to do it as the process was not easy to follow.  To my surprise I found building the quiz and creating question bank to be fairly straight forward and if I had questions or needed some guidance there are an abundance of resources available on the internet and through other Moodle users.   In completing my first assessment in Moodle it is evident to me that although it is still easy enough to produce a poor assessment using Moodle’s assessment tools, the accompanying tools that are provided encouraged me to really reflect about the type of questions I was asking, why I was asking them, what feedback I would offer and how all of this would influence student learning.  The ability to provide immediate, targeted feedback in a variety of forms to the students supports the review of the literature by Gibbs & Simpson(2005) on assessment and feedback .  Using the assessment tools, I could provide students with a rationale for the answer or could use the feature to direct them to a resource to help find the information.  Gibbs & Simpson (2005) identify several functions of feedback including, but not limited to:

• error correction
• encouraging more learning by providing direction for specific remediation
• providing motivation for further studying  (p.19-20)

The full array of options  for providing general feedback, specific feedback, allowing more attempts, shuffling question and response orders, setting dates and times for the exam to be written as well as time limits for the exam allow for the assessments to be tailored to fit student and instructor needs.  The only difficulty I experienced initially was that creating each question was a time consuming, even though I had prepared the questions in advance.  It would be a much faster process if Moodle could recognize numbered or bulleted items copied and pasted from existing documents (i.e. a word document) and place them into the response boxes intuitively.  In retrospect this process does encourage a very carefully designed assessment as provides ample flexibility for making adjustments as needed.  As Gibbs & Simpson (2005) so aptly put, “The trick when designing assessment regimes is to generate engagement with  learning tasks without generating piles of marking”(p.8).  The assessment feature for quizzes in Moodle allows for students to receive feedback in the form of comments, correction, redirection and/or receiving a grade.   “Standards will be raised by improving student learning rather than by better measurement of limited learning “(Gibbs & Simpson, 2005, p.3-4).  Creating assessments that incorporate what we know about formative assessment and timely feedback can improve student learning.

If anyone is interested in having a look at the assessment that I created in Moodle let me know in a comment to this posting and I can provide you access to previewing it.

Reference

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005).  “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 11 March 2010 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf