Quiz

I tend to agree with John's remarks, and would like to add to them.

1- About the Quiz and the Questions database: which comes first in the two-step process?

Well it all depends on the teacher's strategies. I would very roughly state two typical use cases for quizzes.

a- Testing (exam)

Teacher would create a number of questions aimed at testing the students' knowledge of a course. Those questions would likely be created into separate categories (or sub-categories) and be closely related to "learning objects" from the course. At the end of a learning period (month, semester, etc.) the teacher would create a testing quiz (exam), probably using random questions from various categories. The order of creation in that case would clearly be 1) create questions; 2) create the quiz.

b- Learning

Alongside with creating course resources, teacher would create quizzes of the "self-assessment" variety. Those quizzes would consist of questions created specifically for each quiz, would be put in a category named after the name of the quiz (to avoid confusion), would not use random questions. The quiz would of course be set as Adaptative. The order of creation might be 1) create the questions; 2) create the quiz; but might equally well be the opposite: 1) create the quiz; 2) create the questions.

2- About "quiz/questions tutorials"

It follows that anyone creating a quiz tutorial will have to choose between one of the two strategies described above, for the sake of brevity and clearness, against the sake of completeness.

3- About "video tutorials" in general

For my own teaching purposes I have created a number of tutorials (Hot Potatoes for teachers, MS Word for writing research articles, doing research on the Web, etc.). In the process of creating those tutorials I have watched a number of video tutorials and I have rarely be favourably impressed by them. At worst they display their creator fumbling their way through the menus, doing a number of unwanted or un-necessary actions; the spoken comments (if any) are merely descriptive and do not add significant information; it is not easy for the end-user to pause, rewind and have an overall view of the tutorial. At best they involve using expensive, proprietary software, spending a lot of time editing the video, the audio comments, adding tooltips, etc. At best, when they are of professional quality, they can be quite impressive, but not necessarily more useful to the end-user than plain text or HTML files with screen shots included (the kind I advocate).

I am aware that some people are more "visually" inclined while others are more "verbally" inclined. The video tutorials might better appeal to the former and the "text plus screenshots" tutorials to the latter. Research has probably been done in this field and I would be grateful if someone would point to useful references. I am thinking of Richard E. Mayer Multimedia Learning.

Joseph