Reflection upon my experience completing a Moodle quiz
My plan of the course on digital storytelling for teachers that I intend to create includes formative assessment focused on the project that students will be completing during the course and instructor’s feedback. I haven’t planned automated tests but after this assignment experience I’m almost positive I’ll include quizzes.
My first step in completing the quiz assignment was to create text of questions, answers and feedback in word format. To get started, I needed to decide on the topics for my Moodle modules since the quiz was supposed to assess students’ knowledge in these areas. I decided to create modules on digital storytelling – introductory module, definition and application in education. Also, I had to find resources for my modules since the quiz will refer to these resources.
Additionally, I had to read Gibbs and Simpson (2005) article in order to learn how to make sure that assessment supported students learning. The article showed me that first I had to decide on the purpose of my assessment because the assessment is not just about assessing knowledge or results as I more or less believed at the beginning. I decided that my assessment would be about empowering teachers who would complete online course on digital storytelling to bring about changes in their classrooms. It should show teachers how much they learned, to motivate them to learn further and to implement digital stories in their teaching. These reasons can be defined as motivating students and consolidating learning according to Brown and Glasner (1999, in Jenkins, 2004).
I also had to implement in my quiz the other important conditions supportive for students learning as claimed by Gibbs and Simpson (2005). The quiz has to focus on the most important aspects of the course and in effective learning approaches. In my case, students do not need to memorize all details in learning materials; they need to understand what matters and to be able to apply new knowledge in their work.
I had already known that timely enough detailed feedback focused on students’ performance was very efficient in supporting students learning but I was not aware that many students do not pay attention to it at all. That is way I decided to include a question for students reflection on quiz and their plans on future learning to be sure that students will read it carefully. That also meant that my quiz got another purpose – to support students’ metacognition.
The biggest challenge for me was to create meaningful questions that would go beyond rote memorization. I find it easily to create such short essay type question but not multiple answers type questions. Since the types of questions were predetermined I could hardly create 10 meaningful questions. I’m still not sure all of them are meaningful. If I had a choice I probably would distribute types of questions differently.
Creating questions in Moodle was the easier part of the assignment. I have never done questions and quiz in Moodle before but I had some theoretical previous knowledge on how questions and quizzes were set in Moodle and some others LMS-es. I had also explored the types of questions and other features of questions and quizzes in Moodle for the purpose of this assignment which helped me to implement a quiz in Moodle.
Nevertheless, I encountered a completely unexpected problem. I created eight questions in Moodle and put them in my quiz. When I tried to add the last two questions the interface for editing quiz changed and there was no option for adding questions. I was pretty confused trying to figure out how to add questions to the quiz. Then I discovered that adding questions is not possible because somebody made an attempt at the quiz. Luckily, I was able to erase the attempt and to add the missing questions.
The quiz in my Moodle site comes after the learning modules but in the real-life course I intend to create the quizzes will probably be included after every module as a mode of formative assessment.
References
Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
Jenkins, M. (2004). Unfulfilled promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1, 67-80. Retrieved from http://resources.glos.ac.uk/tli/lets/journals/lathe/issue1/index.cfm