Completing the assessment piece within Moodle wasn’t a technically difficult task; however, a lot of thought still had to go in it. My initial reflection of the task, while completing it, was that it is time intensive. From the lengthy list of option for each question to the unreliable server, it took a lot more time to create this assessment than it would have in other modalities.
Copyright was something that I struggled over in the quiz. For the splash page of the site, I used an image that I was confident had a Creative Commons license, but within the quiz I used scanned images from the text. In my previous experience (teaching distributed learning online), I found that most publishers seemed satisfied to use their printed materials that were legally purchased, on an online site so long as it was password protected and limited to those who have legal access to the paper version. It’s not necessarily the case here and I haven’t had that discussion with the publisher, so in a strict sense, there might be an issue with my use of the textbook image. At the same time, the changed (changing?) rules to Canadian copyright law might make this okay. At the moment, I’m not certain.
A brief challenge that I encountered early with the quiz was that one of my colleagues attempted it, which locked it from further editing. It took a moment of frustration to figure out how to erase that attempt and unlock the quiz again, but I did and moved on.
I chose to group all my matching questions together in one “question” in this quiz for stylistic reasons, but upon reviewing the quiz I noticed that the feedback was rather convoluted and left me wondering which would be better: cleaner style and more difficult feedback or vice versa. In the future, that decision might come down to the intention of the quiz being formative or summative.
Something else I struggled with in writing this quiz was the necessity for matching and multiple choice questions. In general, I don’t believe that these types of questions are terribly useful and it was a struggle to find a way to write the questions in a way that I felt matched my teaching style. I don’t think I necessarily did with matching. What might have improved the usefulness of these questions though, would have been to use use the certainty based feedback that would necessitate deeper reflection on the questions. This is more-or-less what I did with the MC questions anyway, making all the questions plausible, but one best answer.
Somewhat related to the writing of this assessment piece is a reflection on the process of creating the entire course (modules) online and keeping them inline with a social constructivist approach to teaching and learning, but at a grade 6/7 level using common content. As a result I designed the quiz for a module that I have not yet developed. The other modules that I have begun are less likely to use an assessment tool of this type.