Hello,
How do you share Quiz questions with other Teachers on your Moodle in Moodle 1.9?
In 1.8, you just chose to Publish or not to Publish next to each category of quiz questions.
Thanks,
Jim
Jim, if you had done your "search" work on these forums you would have found the answer to your question. Took me 30 seconds to find it, in a post by Tim Hunt dated Sept. 5th: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Question_Engine_Changes_in_Moodle_1.9#Access_to_question_categories_shared_outside_a_course
I followed the instructions posted by Tim Hunt dated Sept 5th, and still had no results. I cannot even access a question bank that I placed in another course.Is there a trick to navigate from the test bank for one course to the test bank of another course. Even using the administrator rights I have not been able to access a test bak from a course that it was not created in.
No, you cannot access questions from other courses. That model that was used in Moodle 1.8 and earlier was fundamentally broken, because if the questions referred to resources (images, etc) in the original course, then they broke for students in the other course.
In Moodle 1.9, you have to move questions you want to share into the System area of the question bank.
In Moodle 1.9, you have to move questions you want to share into the System area of the question bank.
Thank you for the information.
Have a good day.
Hi
Where do i find other courses' questions then? I am the site admin (just in the last three days mind) and when I go to my class moodle and then look at the categories I can see my questions and many others in the System area but not any questions in another teachers course.
However, when I go into that teachers course I CAN see their questions and all the other stuf I could see before.
So where do i get a "master" list of questions in which i can move around courses so they're under System?
Pretty frustrated about this, so any help will be greatly appreciated
Cheers
Pete
Where do i find other courses' questions then? I am the site admin (just in the last three days mind) and when I go to my class moodle and then look at the categories I can see my questions and many others in the System area but not any questions in another teachers course.
However, when I go into that teachers course I CAN see their questions and all the other stuf I could see before.
So where do i get a "master" list of questions in which i can move around courses so they're under System?
Pretty frustrated about this, so any help will be greatly appreciated
Cheers
Pete
Hi Pete,
I share the same frustration, and I have been site admin for five years now!
Before Joseph scolds us for not searching the documentation,...
Yes, I just read the link and it does shed some light on the problem. It seems even site admins cannot see a master list of every question. Correct? By default, it seems teachers can only see their own questions inside their own courses. Of course, if you set the question category to "System" when you make it, this problem goes away. So this means there are two approaches to your problem: 1) change the questions to system level, or 2) change the roles of everyone to allow access. Am I correct?
1. Change questions to System level: To do this you need to select a list of questions and at the bottom of the list you will see a "move" button. You should be able to move the questions from the current question category to the System level question category. I do not know if you can move whole groups of questions in bulk. Someone please let us know.
2. Change roles: The docs suggest we make new roles for "Shared Question Creator" and "Shared Question User". However, I do not want to go around changing roles for all 200 teachers and 3000 students. Can we not just change the current roles of "Teacher" to create, edit and view anywhere and "Student" to allow them to view anywhere. It would seem to me that is a far easier solution. And perhaps a better default position for all of Moodle.
Any problems I am not seeing? And which of the two approaches is better?
Cheers,
Don
I share the same frustration, and I have been site admin for five years now!
Before Joseph scolds us for not searching the documentation,...
1. Change questions to System level: To do this you need to select a list of questions and at the bottom of the list you will see a "move" button. You should be able to move the questions from the current question category to the System level question category. I do not know if you can move whole groups of questions in bulk. Someone please let us know.
2. Change roles: The docs suggest we make new roles for "Shared Question Creator" and "Shared Question User". However, I do not want to go around changing roles for all 200 teachers and 3000 students. Can we not just change the current roles of "Teacher" to create, edit and view anywhere and "Student" to allow them to view anywhere. It would seem to me that is a far easier solution. And perhaps a better default position for all of Moodle.
Any problems I am not seeing? And which of the two approaches is better?
Cheers,
Don
Thanks for the reply Don.
Your #1 was my first try early on. However, when I go to another teachers moodle and then go to questions, I don't see ANY other choice of categories other than theirs! Frustrating to say the least.
I have also been in to the users>permissions and ALL teachers have the Moodle/questions.XXX set to Allow, so that should not be an issue.
I created, in my class moodle, a new category under System so we could all use the same group of questions, but only I can see it in the categor pull-down menu.
It must be a permission thing, but I'm damned if I can find teh switch to sort it out.
Cheers
Pete
Your #1 was my first try early on. However, when I go to another teachers moodle and then go to questions, I don't see ANY other choice of categories other than theirs! Frustrating to say the least.
I have also been in to the users>permissions and ALL teachers have the Moodle/questions.XXX set to Allow, so that should not be an issue.
I created, in my class moodle, a new category under System so we could all use the same group of questions, but only I can see it in the categor pull-down menu.
It must be a permission thing, but I'm damned if I can find teh switch to sort it out.
Cheers
Pete
OK, I've got the message: the way question sharing works in 1.9 is incomprehensible to a lot of people (or just some vocal people). That is a problem. I am thinking about ways to improve the situation when I do some work on the question bank in Moodle 2.0. In the mean-time, we all have to work with Moodle 1.9 the way it is, so can we have more helpful questions and answers, and less whining and telling people to RTFM.
And it is not actually that complicated. Let me have another go at explaining it as simply as possible: Question permissions explained with diagrams.
And it is not actually that complicated. Let me have another go at explaining it as simply as possible: Question permissions explained with diagrams.
Thanks Tim (although I'm not sure people are actually whining...)
QUOTE; "Annie creates a new role 'Question user' that allows all the permissions needed to access the question bank. Annie assigns Fred that role in the whole system"
One thing is still a bit unclear to me. I have read, very carefully mind, about permissions and capabilities and also the piece you wrote about making a new user type. It does not say whether making the new user type (Question Creator) needs only those permissions, or whether a copy of teacher should be made, renamed and then have those permissions enabled.
In the quote above from you excellent new explanation, you use the word System. Is this in reference to making these cahnges under Users > Permissions > Assign System Roles rather than doing these changes in Users > Permissions > Define Roles ?
Cheers
Pete
QUOTE; "Annie creates a new role 'Question user' that allows all the permissions needed to access the question bank. Annie assigns Fred that role in the whole system"
One thing is still a bit unclear to me. I have read, very carefully mind, about permissions and capabilities and also the piece you wrote about making a new user type. It does not say whether making the new user type (Question Creator) needs only those permissions, or whether a copy of teacher should be made, renamed and then have those permissions enabled.
In the quote above from you excellent new explanation, you use the word System. Is this in reference to making these cahnges under Users > Permissions > Assign System Roles rather than doing these changes in Users > Permissions > Define Roles ?
Cheers
Pete
The Question Creator role should just have the extra permissions needed for accessing the question bank. That role assigned to people in addition to the other roles they have, for the specific purpose of controlling their access to the question bank. (And the legacy role type in the role definition should be 'None'.)
Your question about the system context is a good one. And actually, there are two answers, the simpler answer that helps you understand how to define roles, and a deeper answer that you probably only need to understand if you are a developer working on the roles system.
First answer: The contexts, like Course: Maths, Category: Miscellaneous, Quiz: Week 1 test, and so on are parts of the Moodle system. System is one of those contexts. It is special, but only because it represents the whole Moodle site, and is, therefore, the only one of its kind. Contexts form a tree structure, because some contexts are inside other contexts. This is like folders on a hard disc.
Contexts have two main uses. When you check whether a particular user can do something, you do so in a particular context. If you want to know whether Sally Student attempt the quiz Week 1 test, then you test the capability 'mod/quiz:attempt' in context Quiz: Week 1 test. In the code this appears as a call to the has_capability($capability, $context) function. (Normally the user being tested is the current user, so it is not passed explicitly.) To see whether Annie can change the site configuration, a capability would be tested in the System context.
The other use of contexts is that contexts are where people are given roles. So Moodle does not just record that Fred is a teacher. It records that Fred is a Teacher in Course: Maths. One user can have many role assignments to different roles in different places.
So my use of the word System is to do with assigning the Question Creator role in the System context. Role definitions are more global than that. They exist independently of the contexts, and a particular role can be assigned in any context, at the administrator's discretion.
If you really want to understand this better, it may be worth your while downloading a copy of Moodle 2.0 and installing it somewhere to look at. I did a lot of work on the roles user interface there, in the hope of making it easier for people to learn and use the system [[http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Roles_administration_improvements_for_Moodle_2.0]]. The way it works internally is still the same, so everything you learn about roles while playing with Moodle 2.0 applies in Moodle 1.9 - it is just harder to see what is going on in Moodle 1.9.
Now for the fuller answer. When you look at how the role definitions are stored in the database, you will see that as well as the 'role' table that stores things like the role name, there is also the role_capabilites which stores all permissions for each capability for each role.
If you look at where Moodle stores the Permission overrides for each role in different contexts, they are also stored in the role_capabilites table, which has a contextid column.
As I said above, "Role definitions are [..] global"; and the System context represents the whole Moodle site. So in makes sense that, role definitions are stored in the system context, but you don't really need to know that most of the time.
Hmm. That turned into a longer post than I was expecting.
Your question about the system context is a good one. And actually, there are two answers, the simpler answer that helps you understand how to define roles, and a deeper answer that you probably only need to understand if you are a developer working on the roles system.
First answer: The contexts, like Course: Maths, Category: Miscellaneous, Quiz: Week 1 test, and so on are parts of the Moodle system. System is one of those contexts. It is special, but only because it represents the whole Moodle site, and is, therefore, the only one of its kind. Contexts form a tree structure, because some contexts are inside other contexts. This is like folders on a hard disc.
Contexts have two main uses. When you check whether a particular user can do something, you do so in a particular context. If you want to know whether Sally Student attempt the quiz Week 1 test, then you test the capability 'mod/quiz:attempt' in context Quiz: Week 1 test. In the code this appears as a call to the has_capability($capability, $context) function. (Normally the user being tested is the current user, so it is not passed explicitly.) To see whether Annie can change the site configuration, a capability would be tested in the System context.
The other use of contexts is that contexts are where people are given roles. So Moodle does not just record that Fred is a teacher. It records that Fred is a Teacher in Course: Maths. One user can have many role assignments to different roles in different places.
So my use of the word System is to do with assigning the Question Creator role in the System context. Role definitions are more global than that. They exist independently of the contexts, and a particular role can be assigned in any context, at the administrator's discretion.
If you really want to understand this better, it may be worth your while downloading a copy of Moodle 2.0 and installing it somewhere to look at. I did a lot of work on the roles user interface there, in the hope of making it easier for people to learn and use the system [[http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Roles_administration_improvements_for_Moodle_2.0]]. The way it works internally is still the same, so everything you learn about roles while playing with Moodle 2.0 applies in Moodle 1.9 - it is just harder to see what is going on in Moodle 1.9.
Now for the fuller answer. When you look at how the role definitions are stored in the database, you will see that as well as the 'role' table that stores things like the role name, there is also the role_capabilites which stores all permissions for each capability for each role.
If you look at where Moodle stores the Permission overrides for each role in different contexts, they are also stored in the role_capabilites table, which has a contextid column.
As I said above, "Role definitions are [..] global"; and the System context represents the whole Moodle site. So in makes sense that, role definitions are stored in the system context, but you don't really need to know that most of the time.
Hmm. That turned into a longer post than I was expecting.
Hi,
I'm not sure of what I have missed. Should all questions placed on System level be visible for all editing teachers? That doesn't work for me (I use1.9.3).
The editing teachers still se only the questions that are in the category of their course.
My permissions settings for editing teachers: http://screencast.com/t/PpIblbGHiot
I'm not sure of what I have missed. Should all questions placed on System level be visible for all editing teachers? That doesn't work for me (I use1.9.3).
The editing teachers still se only the questions that are in the category of their course.
My permissions settings for editing teachers: http://screencast.com/t/PpIblbGHiot
You might quite reasonably think that but no... you need to create a new question sharing role and assign the teachers that you want to be able to see the questions - at the site level (that's the important bit). The detailed instructions are pointed to earlier in this thread.
Much as I try to resist being negative about stuff, I have to say something here..
The question sharing model in 1.9 is *effectively* even more broken that that in 1.8 and earlier. I guess this is a bit of a religious standpoint but as soon as the explanation mentions roles I would argue that you are doomed. A teacher should not have to get their admin to create a special role. Period. It assumes way too much.
There is some stuff that fell through the net here. My $00.02:
* If I, as a teacher, create questions in a course then I should be able to use them in my other courses. I don't care how that happens, it should just happen.
* If I want to share my questions with some other course then I should be able to do that intuitively. That is, there should be a "share my questiions with..." button.
* Upgrading from earlier versions should work. It isn't acceptable that previously published categories are made inaccessible to their "owner".
There's an old saying, "if it must be done the computer must do it". Documented or no, it's nuts that users are expected to go and create some arcane role (when they don't understand roles anyway, and probably will break their site doing it - another story) AND have to get their head around the badly named Question category structure JUST to share a few questions.
It isn't just this stuff - but this is as good an example as any - but I'm getting desperately worried that we (as developers) are losing site of what is easy and intuitive for real users. That's ordinary teachers and part-time admins - nearly everybody if you like.
Rant over.... I'll get my coat now!!
The question sharing model in 1.9 is *effectively* even more broken that that in 1.8 and earlier. I guess this is a bit of a religious standpoint but as soon as the explanation mentions roles I would argue that you are doomed. A teacher should not have to get their admin to create a special role. Period. It assumes way too much.
There is some stuff that fell through the net here. My $00.02:
* If I, as a teacher, create questions in a course then I should be able to use them in my other courses. I don't care how that happens, it should just happen.
* If I want to share my questions with some other course then I should be able to do that intuitively. That is, there should be a "share my questiions with..." button.
* Upgrading from earlier versions should work. It isn't acceptable that previously published categories are made inaccessible to their "owner".
There's an old saying, "if it must be done the computer must do it". Documented or no, it's nuts that users are expected to go and create some arcane role (when they don't understand roles anyway, and probably will break their site doing it - another story) AND have to get their head around the badly named Question category structure JUST to share a few questions.
It isn't just this stuff - but this is as good an example as any - but I'm getting desperately worried that we (as developers) are losing site of what is easy and intuitive for real users. That's ordinary teachers and part-time admins - nearly everybody if you like.
Rant over.... I'll get my coat now!!
Well said Howard! I whole heartedly agree with you (and I am not being bias here
). I've been listening to the same comments and outcries of 'WHAT? but it worked before' from staff at Glasgow University for some time now and I've made my views known elsewhere about changes like this which sneak up on real users and render hard work with collaborative quiz building unusable. And, for the record, I don't really think that it is is appropriate or constructive to be asked not to whine about issues that are as significant as this (or any issues, really)-- it is that kind of 'put you in your place' tone that makes people like me NOT want to contribute in these spaces when it seems to me, what is distinctly missing from these discussions is the educationalists point of view. The bottom line is that collaborative sharing of quizzes is *essential* to quality assessment processess and practices. Barriers to this, in Moodle, are incredibly problematic and there is no mileage in ignoring that fact because people will go and use something else.
). I've been listening to the same comments and outcries of 'WHAT? but it worked before' from staff at Glasgow University for some time now and I've made my views known elsewhere about changes like this which sneak up on real users and render hard work with collaborative quiz building unusable. And, for the record, I don't really think that it is is appropriate or constructive to be asked not to whine about issues that are as significant as this (or any issues, really)-- it is that kind of 'put you in your place' tone that makes people like me NOT want to contribute in these spaces when it seems to me, what is distinctly missing from these discussions is the educationalists point of view. The bottom line is that collaborative sharing of quizzes is *essential* to quality assessment processess and practices. Barriers to this, in Moodle, are incredibly problematic and there is no mileage in ignoring that fact because people will go and use something else.
I'll second that Well Said, Howard - and I'm definitely not biased! 
Howard you have nailed it here.
I just want to create some questions and then share them with all the other teachers in the science faculty.
I want to make it so anyone who is a course creator in the science faculty can veiw and use and edit any questions in any other science faculty courses. This should not be hard.
This should be intuative and easy to do. I'm really struggling.
I discussed automatically creating a shared question user role on upgrade to Moodle 1.9, but Martin vetoed the idea, because adding an extra role to the UI complicates the UI for everyone, and only some people need this role.
Of course, in Moodle 2.0, we have changed it so the assign roles page is not cluttered up with irrelevant roles, so we could reconsider this.
If you want course creators to share questions within a faculty, just change the definition of the Course Creator role to Allow them to do things with questions.
I have some problems with Howard's suggestions:
"* If I, as a teacher, create questions in a course then I should be able to use them in my other courses. I don't care how that happens, it should just happen.
"* If I want to share my questions with some other course then I should be able to do that intuitively. That is, there should be a "share my questiions with..." button."
This is expecting the computer to 'do what I mean', and computers don't have that much common sense. I can immediately think of several problems.
Fred is a teacher in courses A and B. Mary is a teacher in courses B and C. Fred has made some questions in course A, and used them in a quiz in course B.
1. Fred goes off sick. Mary finds a problem with one of Fred's questions in course B. Should she be allowed to edit it? or should she be stuck?
2. If yes, and if Fred disagrees with Mary's correction, does this mean that Mary has just broken Fred's quiz in course A?
3. Will Mary be able to use the questions from Course A in course C?
4. How does Moodle know that students in course B are allowed to see the course files in course A that are used by the questions?
Actually, 4. is a red herring. The new files API fixed that, but that was not available when the changes in Moodle 1.9 where publicly discussed and implemented.
Of course, in Moodle 2.0, we have changed it so the assign roles page is not cluttered up with irrelevant roles, so we could reconsider this.
If you want course creators to share questions within a faculty, just change the definition of the Course Creator role to Allow them to do things with questions.
I have some problems with Howard's suggestions:
"* If I, as a teacher, create questions in a course then I should be able to use them in my other courses. I don't care how that happens, it should just happen.
"* If I want to share my questions with some other course then I should be able to do that intuitively. That is, there should be a "share my questiions with..." button."
This is expecting the computer to 'do what I mean', and computers don't have that much common sense. I can immediately think of several problems.
Fred is a teacher in courses A and B. Mary is a teacher in courses B and C. Fred has made some questions in course A, and used them in a quiz in course B.
1. Fred goes off sick. Mary finds a problem with one of Fred's questions in course B. Should she be allowed to edit it? or should she be stuck?
2. If yes, and if Fred disagrees with Mary's correction, does this mean that Mary has just broken Fred's quiz in course A?
3. Will Mary be able to use the questions from Course A in course C?
4. How does Moodle know that students in course B are allowed to see the course files in course A that are used by the questions?
Actually, 4. is a red herring. The new files API fixed that, but that was not available when the changes in Moodle 1.9 where publicly discussed and implemented.
Tim,
The scenario you describe, in answer to Howard's suggestion, implies that one course has more than one teacher. I do appreciate that this situation may occur, so it should be taken into consideration, but I suggest that this is not the dominant situation. "Normally", one given course is taught by one teacher to several students. So, teacher Fred teaches courses A, B and C. He wants to share a certain number of the resources and activities created in course A with his own courses B and C. By "resources and activities" I mean not only quiz questions but also glossaries, files, etc. At the moment, the general architecture of Moodle does not allow me to do that, which means a lot of useless and boring duplication work.
Let's come back to your scenario. I would modify it as follows.
- Fred and Mary have a teacher role in courses A and B. Fred is the only teacher in course C. Mary is the only teacher in courses D and E.
- The Fred-Mary team have created questions in course A.
- Those questions should be available to the Fred-Mary team in course B.
- Either Fred or Mary have the rights to edit a question in either course A or course B. For any question edited by either Fred or Mary in course A or B the changes are immediately made in both courses.
- The questions created or edited by the Fred-Mary team are only available to courses taught by that same Fred-Mary team. So, questions created by Fred or Mary in course A are not available to Fred in his Course C or to Mary in her courses D and E.
- Questions created by Fred in course C are only available in that course.
- Questions created by Mary in course D are also available to her in her course E (and vice versa).
- If either Fred or Mary want to create questions which they will make available to all the other teachers in their moodle site, then they will make them "public", as per present situation in moodle 1.9.
- To sum up the advantages of my scenario:
- In the courses where Fred and Mary act as a team, they are really considered by moodle as a unique teacher. They share the responsability of creating and editing questions, using them in their quizzes in all of the courses where they act as a team.
- If Fred disagrees with Mary's editing of a particular question (in the event that Fred goes off sick), that is a matter of negotiation between them, it has nothing to do with the inner workings of Moodle.
- A "unique teacher" or a team of teachers can share their questions in all of the courses where they have the role of unique teacher of team (which is not possible in moodle at the moment).
- Disadvantages
- As said in point 9.2 above, teachers acting as a team have to agree among themselves.
- When a teacher is a member of a team for one of his courses, he cannot share the questions created by that team with the other courses taught by himself alone (or where he is a member of team consisting of people belonging to a different team).
- As said in point 9.2 above, teachers acting as a team have to agree among themselves.
In conclusion, I propose that my scenario is an acceptable compromise which would satisfy those teachers who are the only teacher in their courses, as well as teachers who work as teams, would not cause the problems raised by Tim in his points 1 to 3.
There remains however the question of "files sharing" from the point of view of the students (Tim's point #4). For instance, if a question created in course A contains links to an image or an audio file "belonging" to the files of Course A, when that question is shared with course B, those image or audio files should be accessible by the students (not just by the teachers as is the case now)... I expect that is feasible but probably not that easily.
Joseph
I consider 10.2 to be quite a serious disadvantage.
Also, there is disadvantage
10.3. Given course X, which we know has teachers R, S, T, ... find all the other courses with the same set of teachers is a very hard computation. It would be hard (very computationally expensive) even if we did not have roles. With roles, especially with the separate use and edit capabilities, it becomes almost impossible.
And those different capabilities are useful to help resolve some of my scenarios.
As I said, don't worry about 4. In Moodle 2.0, which is what we are talking about here, files will belong directly to questions. So issue 4 goes away. Actually, no it doesn't. I have just realised that it is more difficult than I thought, because somehow questions will need to know which quiz they appear in to do access control. Oh, but I can solve that using the session or something. That's OK.
The other range of problematic scenarios relate to backup and restore. The whole point is that a Moodle course backup is a self-contained content package. Shared questions make that much harder to deal with.
The fact remains, there were all these nasty problems with edge cases before Moodle 1.9. In Moodle 1.9, we solved them at the expense of Moodle system administrators having to read some documentation. Do not underestimate what a big step forwards that was.
But it was just one step. I am interested in making things still better in the future, but a system with lots of weird gotchas and edge cases is not easy to use.
Also, there is disadvantage
10.3. Given course X, which we know has teachers R, S, T, ... find all the other courses with the same set of teachers is a very hard computation. It would be hard (very computationally expensive) even if we did not have roles. With roles, especially with the separate use and edit capabilities, it becomes almost impossible.
And those different capabilities are useful to help resolve some of my scenarios.
As I said, don't worry about 4. In Moodle 2.0, which is what we are talking about here, files will belong directly to questions. So issue 4 goes away. Actually, no it doesn't. I have just realised that it is more difficult than I thought, because somehow questions will need to know which quiz they appear in to do access control. Oh, but I can solve that using the session or something. That's OK.
The other range of problematic scenarios relate to backup and restore. The whole point is that a Moodle course backup is a self-contained content package. Shared questions make that much harder to deal with.
The fact remains, there were all these nasty problems with edge cases before Moodle 1.9. In Moodle 1.9, we solved them at the expense of Moodle system administrators having to read some documentation. Do not underestimate what a big step forwards that was.
But it was just one step. I am interested in making things still better in the future, but a system with lots of weird gotchas and edge cases is not easy to use.
Thanks for your reply. You clearly are aware of all our issues.
We do work in an education eutopia where Fred and Mary always agree and want to share whatever they create. They also want to fix up each others mistakes in questions and always agree on the corrections.
Fred and Mary are both course creators in the science course area. Fred has just spent 3 hours doing a sensational 30 question multiple choice test on Astronomy complete with Pictures on many questions. How does he share it with Mary?
You said "If you want course creators to share questions within a faculty, just change the definition of the Course Creator role to Allow them to do things with questions."
I'm not sure of what I'd need to do to roles to make this happen.
Can you tell me specifically what changes I need to make to Fred and Mary's roles.
Then I need to know what Fred would do to his Astonomy Questions to allow Mary to use them.
Thanks for you help. This type of sharing is absolutely vital to Moodle users. It is essential we are able to get it right.
Hmm, there was not a single page on Moodle docs that just told you what to do.
Well, there is now: How_to_let_teachers_share_questions_between_courses
It's really not rocket science.
Well, there is now: How_to_let_teachers_share_questions_between_courses
It's really not rocket science.
Hi Tim,
I just have to conclude that we have a very fundamental difference of viewpoint on this.
You are right when you say that the current arrangement is an elegant solution to a very complex problem. The tradeoff is that site administrators have to do a little research, reading, understanding, setup, user education, ongoing maintenance. Fine.
However, I just can't help thinking that the reality is that this is counter intuitive for most users. Most teachers and administrators I know will fall at one of these hurdles. Remember, the ones who make it here are a tiny, tiny percentage of users. Again, most users I deal with would rather chop their arms off than post in these forums.
You understand the sharing mechanism, I understand the sharing mechanism but we are both developers with years of experience. I hope you can realise that this is a complex abstraction and many/most users just won't get it - or want to spend the time to try.
99% of users and sites are not the University of Glasgow, Open University, etc. etc. that have a team of experts to fall back on who can spend a couple of days to work all this out.
I can only ask that you try to forget what you know and think about how some teacher, who is probably also the site admin, will approach this. He wants to share his question bank between courses, seems like a reasonable facility to have. So what does he expect to find... and this is my problem... I think he should expect to find a big button that says "Share My Questions". But it isn't there is it? That's just bad, for most people that means you might as well not have had the facility.
The only other thing I have to comment on is the upgrade from 1.8. I'm sure that there are still people doing this so it's still going to be annoying them. Luckily it only applies to big sites I suspect. Having your questions made inaccessible just because you hit "publish" (and that's the reality) was, shall we say, a surprising decision! I don't think you shouted enough at Martin about creating the role automagically However, this could have been (still could be) mitigated by a mechanism to detect if questions needed to have been published (I suspect most would not) and unpublish them if not. Then the role stuff only need be done for users/question categories where actually required. I write this knowing that next week I have to sort out several Moodle sites all with hundreds of categories pushed to site level and no way at all of knowing where they are used or by whom. Great 
Again, sorry to sound so negative, but I have been genuinely (as a Moodle administrator of a very large site) been given a properly rough ride by this so it's not just hot air.
I just have to conclude that we have a very fundamental difference of viewpoint on this.
You are right when you say that the current arrangement is an elegant solution to a very complex problem. The tradeoff is that site administrators have to do a little research, reading, understanding, setup, user education, ongoing maintenance. Fine.
However, I just can't help thinking that the reality is that this is counter intuitive for most users. Most teachers and administrators I know will fall at one of these hurdles. Remember, the ones who make it here are a tiny, tiny percentage of users. Again, most users I deal with would rather chop their arms off than post in these forums.
You understand the sharing mechanism, I understand the sharing mechanism but we are both developers with years of experience. I hope you can realise that this is a complex abstraction and many/most users just won't get it - or want to spend the time to try.
99% of users and sites are not the University of Glasgow, Open University, etc. etc. that have a team of experts to fall back on who can spend a couple of days to work all this out.
I can only ask that you try to forget what you know and think about how some teacher, who is probably also the site admin, will approach this. He wants to share his question bank between courses, seems like a reasonable facility to have. So what does he expect to find... and this is my problem... I think he should expect to find a big button that says "Share My Questions". But it isn't there is it? That's just bad, for most people that means you might as well not have had the facility.
The only other thing I have to comment on is the upgrade from 1.8. I'm sure that there are still people doing this so it's still going to be annoying them. Luckily it only applies to big sites I suspect. Having your questions made inaccessible just because you hit "publish" (and that's the reality) was, shall we say, a surprising decision! I don't think you shouted enough at Martin about creating the role automagically
Again, sorry to sound so negative, but I have been genuinely (as a Moodle administrator of a very large site) been given a properly rough ride by this so it's not just hot air.
Howard, we did spend a considerable amount of time worry about the upgrade. There was one particularly messy issues that consumed a lot of our attention, particularly at the expense of other stuff: Question_Engine_Changes_in_Moodle_1.9#Random_Questions_Selecting_from_Subcategories.
So, all that infrastructure is there for doing checks before, during and after upgrade. (Look in admin/report/questions in both Moodle 1.8 and 1.9; admin/environment.php and ...xml; and question/upgrade.php.
It is, in fact, perfectly possible to compute which courses, the questions in a particular category are used in. You just need to join on quiz_question_instances.
Actually, it will be easier if you don't think about single question categories. Question categories form trees in the question bank. Let $categorylist be a comma-separated list of all the category ids under a single top-level category, then:
SELECT DISTINCT quiz.course
FROM mdl_quiz quiz
JOIN mdl_quiz_question_instances qqi ON qqi.quiz = quiz.id
JOIN mdl_question q ON q.id = qqi.question
JOIN mdl_qc ON qc.id = q.category
WHERE qc.id IN ($categorylist);
Will get you a list of the courses with quizzes that use any of the questions in that category. (I typed that off the top of my head, you may need to debug.) If there is only one course in that list, you can safely do
UPDATE mdl_question_categories SET contextid = {get_context_instance(CONTEXT_COURSE, $courseid)} WHERE id IN ($categorylist);
If you want to help, I suggest you code that up. I think the natural place would be to add it to admin/report/question.php - as an after-the-face fix-up in Moodle 1.9, and with a similar query in Moodle 1.8 that offers to un-publish categories that don't need to be published.
Also, if you feel so strongly about this, and think this whole situation is so bad, why haven't you edited the 1.9 release notes to save other admins to make the warnings about this issue clearer?
Finally, the admin/report/question.php report would be a natural place to give admins a one-click button to create the Question sharer role (if one does not already exist).
Oh, and then if the query above shows that there genuinely are questions shared between courses, you could find the people with question editing rights in those courses, and give admins a simple way to assign those people the Question sharer role.
I don't have time to implement any of these suggestions, I'm afraid, but I will try to make the time to be helpful to anyone trying to do them. Although I am about to go on holiday for a few weeks - however, I will probably still be online intermittently.
So, all that infrastructure is there for doing checks before, during and after upgrade. (Look in admin/report/questions in both Moodle 1.8 and 1.9; admin/environment.php and ...xml; and question/upgrade.php.
It is, in fact, perfectly possible to compute which courses, the questions in a particular category are used in. You just need to join on quiz_question_instances.
Actually, it will be easier if you don't think about single question categories. Question categories form trees in the question bank. Let $categorylist be a comma-separated list of all the category ids under a single top-level category, then:
SELECT DISTINCT quiz.course
FROM mdl_quiz quiz
JOIN mdl_quiz_question_instances qqi ON qqi.quiz = quiz.id
JOIN mdl_question q ON q.id = qqi.question
JOIN mdl_qc ON qc.id = q.category
WHERE qc.id IN ($categorylist);
Will get you a list of the courses with quizzes that use any of the questions in that category. (I typed that off the top of my head, you may need to debug.) If there is only one course in that list, you can safely do
UPDATE mdl_question_categories SET contextid = {get_context_instance(CONTEXT_COURSE, $courseid)} WHERE id IN ($categorylist);
If you want to help, I suggest you code that up. I think the natural place would be to add it to admin/report/question.php - as an after-the-face fix-up in Moodle 1.9, and with a similar query in Moodle 1.8 that offers to un-publish categories that don't need to be published.
Also, if you feel so strongly about this, and think this whole situation is so bad, why haven't you edited the 1.9 release notes to save other admins to make the warnings about this issue clearer?
Finally, the admin/report/question.php report would be a natural place to give admins a one-click button to create the Question sharer role (if one does not already exist).
Oh, and then if the query above shows that there genuinely are questions shared between courses, you could find the people with question editing rights in those courses, and give admins a simple way to assign those people the Question sharer role.
I don't have time to implement any of these suggestions, I'm afraid, but I will try to make the time to be helpful to anyone trying to do them. Although I am about to go on holiday for a few weeks - however, I will probably still be online intermittently.
Tim,
Thanks for the pointers. I'm not going to promise either, as I have mountains of stuff to do already and I don't want to be "that guy"
Having said that, it might be quicker than the alternatives, so watch this space. I'll add it to the tracker.
Are you seriously suggesting that people read release notes??
EDIT: Release noted modified with dire warning. And, MDL-17640
Thanks for the pointers. I'm not going to promise either, as I have mountains of stuff to do already and I don't want to be "that guy"
Having said that, it might be quicker than the alternatives, so watch this space. I'll add it to the tracker.
Are you seriously suggesting that people read release notes??
EDIT: Release noted modified with dire warning. And, MDL-17640
Well, as you said, it probably mostly affects big sites, and I have some hope that people with big sites might read the release notes.
Thanks Howard.
Thanks Howard.
Hi,
Is that method (2 queries) is still ok for fixing questions categories previously published in 1.8 ? At least for the ones that are used in only one course.
For categories used in multiple courses, is there a way to avoid giving a new role ? For example duplicating a category and re-attached it to a quiz/course ?
Thanks in advance,
Julien