I have completed my first Moodle assessment, a quiz on fluid mechanics. Overall I thought the process went fairly well. In my mind the pros of using Moodle for this type of assessment are:
- Wide range of question types allows for variety of assessments, ranging from simple knowledge questions to concept synthesis and calculations
- Simple, consistent interface. It is easy to pick up and use. Once familiar with the tools, it should be possible to make new quizzes quickly.
- Questions can be tailored to specific needs fairly easily. For example if the goal is formative assessment questions can be set up to allow students to submit multiple answers as they work towards the right one.
While this quiz contains the various types of questions required for this assignment, quizzes that I will be constructing for this course will generally be calculation questions. To get a preview of how these work I played around with the calculation questions and included one on this quiz. Again I was really impressed by the question generator tool. It allows you to set up questions with randomized parameters (and therefore answers) so that students cannot copy each others work. It also allows you to give students an acceptable range which allows for rounding errors without penalty. You can even set the allowable significant figures. Although it would take a fair bit of work upfront to make all of these quizzes, they will be very easy to update and maintain which makes them very worthwhile.