Offline quiz questions (my future development)

Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Frederic Triquet -
Number of replies: 9
Hi,

I'm going to begin the code of what I call "offline quiz" : I would like to be able to download a quiz, take it offline (at home, for instance), save the answers and bring them back to school and submit them to the moodle server.

I don't want to have a web server with moodle running on the computer "at home" (actually I don't want my students to install all this on their personnal computer).

Some questions about this :
  1. is it possible to "submit the answers" without having to submit the form ? I mean : is it possible to add some code that would "import an submission" from a file ? (maybe using something like  http://snoopy.sourceforge.net/ ... , no?)

  2. what seems to be the best set of tools to develop those things like radio buttons, checkboxes and all the stuff you have in the quiz-display ? I first thought of GTK, then I've been told QT is much better... I need something, easy, efficient, free and portable (linux/windows). What would you recommend ? (note: I'm going to code in C++)
Last, I am not requesting new features, I want to code this but I just want
to know if what I'm planning seems feasible to the people who deeply
know moodle.

Thanks for you help,
Fred

PS: my code will be opensource, and I'll share it here if people want it
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In reply to Frederic Triquet

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Timothy Takemoto -

Dear Frederic Triquet

Sorry I can not supply answers to your questions, and I am not sure what sort of off line quizzes you are aiming for, but if there were ever the sort of functionality as provided by the memorization software then I would be enternally grateful.

Lots of such software reviewed
http://webs.ono.com/usr032/learners/flash.htm

One using SQL
http://s91279732.onlinehome.us/flash/

Perhaps it would be possible to import an SQL database quiz file generated by an external program.

I would like to be able to go beyond the test into the realm of practice.

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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Frederic Triquet -
Dear Timothy Takemoto,

by "off line quiz" I mean it is a quiz you can:
  • export from moodle,
  • take back home,
  • answer at home,
  • bring the answers to school and submit them
I have to mention that we use quizzes only to test what students have understood: no matter if they cheat, good grades (at moodle quizzes) are not required to get the diploma.

Fred.
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In reply to Frederic Triquet

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Josep M. Fontana -
This is a great idea. One of the factors that hampers the use of VLEs at my
university is the fact that students do not have an easy access to computers connected to the internet. When they are at the university most computer rooms are usually packed all day (used in teaching or by many students working on their assignments). If they have an assignment due after the weekend they often complain that while they have computers at home their access to the net is limited since they can only connect through a slow modem (Spain is a horrible country for internet users: phone rates are among the most expensive in Europe). We cannot force them or their parents to get ADSL (also pretty expensive in Spain). What Frederic is trying to do would be extremely useful for they could work on their assignments virtually in any computer, save the results onto a floppy disk or penn drive and then just upload the results quickly when they go back to school.

Please, Fred, let us know how it goes. This is a great, great idea and Moodle would be even better if this function can get incorporated into it.

Josep M.
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In reply to Josep M. Fontana

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Dennis Daniels -
I too like the idea of having offline questions but the solution may not be as easy as having students bringing in their results. On my high school campus students are not allowed to use floppies or pen-drives because of the security threat they pose. In talking to other school teachers they tell a similar story.

The real trick would be to get the tests hooked up to a cell phone so that students could do the MC quizzes on their off charge cell phone hours.

regards,
Dennis
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In reply to Frederic Triquet

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Hi, Fred!

Certainly a "tricky" project, if you'll pardon my pun!

1) I imagine your program will produce a data file (use XML!), which can be uploaded into a PHP page that parses it and submits it just like the current quiz does.  All the quiz data is in the database, of course, so this script just needs to translate your format into appropriate database entries.

2) I hear good things about http://www.wxwindows.org/ (especially if you want GPL code)

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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Frederic Triquet -
Hi Martin,

(good pun approve)
  1. what is the easiest way to submit back the data from the xml (of course) file ?
    • use snoopy to submit post-data to the php page
    • insert lines in the sql table (will there ever be any changes to the database structure that will affect this table and oblige me to modify my code when I update my moodle server ?)
  1. yes it seems to be the toolkit I need wink
Thanks a lot

Fred Tricky big grin
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In reply to Frederic Triquet

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
It you look at mod/quiz/attempt.php you'll see that, after all the parsing stuff to build the data structure it's mostly just a couple of calls to a couple of quiz functions which do all the processing.  I would advise building a whole new PHP page with an interface to accept the XML file as an uploaded file, which then parses it and calls the same functions that attempt.php does.
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
If I were picking a C/C++ cross platform library, I too would pick wxWindows (or wxWidgets as it is known since our friends in Redmond unleashed the dogs of law). I would select it over GTK or QT for various technical reasons, but they also would be usable alternatives. For storing the information sql_lite could be a usefull tool. I have toyed with doing a project like this and only a lack of time and complete lack of ability at C/C++ have stopped me smile . I think that such a project could have a wide take up, and the ability to interface with Moodle would be a "killer feature".
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In reply to Frederic Triquet

Re: Offline quiz questions (my future development)

by Matt (M) -
I have not digested the entire thread here, but I thought it worth mentioning:

I plan on attempting "remote quizes" with an entirely remote server, and then dumping the data from the remote server into the "central server."

I detail this scenario further at:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=11750

I'm not sure if you want to offer this kind of support with your solution (I'm guessing you may not), but if you do, I would love to have support to automate the integration of a remote quiz data back into the central server, among other things possibly needed. Who knows, maybe this would work fine as is with moodle 1.3.5 or above.

For what it's worth, I find it quite easy to run a remote moodle server using XAMPP on my win XP laptop. In fact, that's how I originally evaluated moodle before making a full-fledged server.

-Matt
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