Is there solution for self test type of question, like there in WebCT?
Ivica
I don't know WebCT. What does the self-test question do?
Hi!
They are simple true/false questions, without remembering what student has said. We put this questions on top of lessons (html file) so that student can check for himself how did he understand what he learned.
Ivica
They are simple true/false questions, without remembering what student has said. We put this questions on top of lessons (html file) so that student can check for himself how did he understand what he learned.
Ivica
Thanks for explaining.
At the moment there is not a nice way to do this, a quick and hacky method is to fiddle with the permissions for students, and then link to the question preview page in an iframe - sorry, that is a very rushed description of what to do. Perhaps someone could flesh it out.
If people think this is useful, then say so, and I might try to find some time to polish up the question preview display, and maybe write a filter, to make this general idea usable in a slicker way.
At the moment there is not a nice way to do this, a quick and hacky method is to fiddle with the permissions for students, and then link to the question preview page in an iframe - sorry, that is a very rushed description of what to do. Perhaps someone could flesh it out.
If people think this is useful, then say so, and I might try to find some time to polish up the question preview display, and maybe write a filter, to make this general idea usable in a slicker way.
Hi Tim et al.
Has there been any progress with this?
We're trying to decide what to do with hundreds of hierarchical pages of text, images, videos, embedded JS 'activities' and, importantly, questions embedded in text, which are used by our medics. Most of the pages are behind our SSO but this simple example shows the sort of thing we are talking about: http://msdlt3.physiol.ox.ac.uk:8080/medlearn/theglobalhealthnetwork/RTO/Interpretation.html ...normally the pages are much longer and contain numerous questions.
They're currently hosted in Magnolia CMS but we are considering a move to Moodle as we're increasingly using this for other purposes. Assuming that there is currently no way to do this in Moodle, I'd be grateful for anyone's thoughts about where to start to allow us to scatter questions through e.g a Book or whether there might be a better way of achieving this...
BW, Damion
Hi Damion,
If I remember correctly, I think there was some work being done on making it possible to add questions into a book resource, but I just did a quick search and didn't find anything, so I could be doing some wishful thinking.
Another possibility is a newly released plugin, TaskChain, located at https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_taskchain.
Thanks - this looks great for external quizzes/interactions (if I have understood it correctly) but still lacks the question as self-test in a page of text, images, videos from what I could see? Have I missed something?
Thanks Emma.
As I understand it, the Lesson activity doesn't let you have questions in the pages - just at the end, linked to navigation...it also doesn't support all the questions types we currently use (unlike the brilliant Quiz).
We're trying to make this as easy to use as possible by people who aren't necessarily technology enthusiasts...I think having to embed things in Camtasia or even mentioning the word 'SCORM' may put various potential users off...
I think the answer is that there has not really been any progress.
I saw Nadav at the UK MoodleMoot a few months ago. Nadav made a plugin for this for a very old version of Moodle. We discussed that we really ought to make his old code public and try to update it, however, that still has not happened.
My current thinking on this has changed a bit. I now think the best way to implement this would be by making a plugin so any Moodle question could be embedded using the oEmbed mechanism. Then, questions could be embedded elsewhere in Moodle using the oEmbed filter (https://moodle.org/plugins/filter_oembed), but they could also be reused elsewhere.
I still don't think this is a huge amount of work. It just requires someone to have time to do it. I really wish I could persuade the powers that be at the OU to tell me to do it
Thanks Tim. My colleague's been having a look at perverting the Quiz tool, using information questions to display the static content snadwiched between self-test questions, thereby producing a quiz per 'page' of content. I note that Dundee, who have just sent us some learning materials with self-test questions, appear to have had the same thought and this is exactly what they have done - it may be quite a widespread practice?
However, I think it's going to be very difficult/unmaintainable to start hacking around to remove the behaviours that are quiz-specific: start attempt, scoring, reviewing questions/feedback, etc. And unless we can remove them, we're not going to be able to provide user-friendly next/previous style navigation between 'pages' (quizzes), with courses and sections providing chapter/sub-chapter-style LH navigation.
So back to the question in Book idea. I see two problems with the oEmbed filter, if I understand it correctly:
1. In order to insert a question, you'd have to have authored it first in a Quiz, you'd then have to copy the question's (or its preview's) URL and paste that into the Book. This is awkward and not very WYSIWYG, making it easy to accidentally mess up in the editor. We have students/non-technical staff regularly creating/editing content so would be a concern.
2. oEmbed would then use an iFrame to show the question. One of the reasons we're moving from our current CMS is to overcome responsiveness issues. I wonder how easy it would be to make iFrames of questions reliably responsive across different devices...
I note that WordPress (if I'm allowed to mention it on this forum) has a plugin called QuizToolLite (https://wordpress.org/plugins/quiz-tool-lite/screenshots/ ). This isn't perfect - not least because it's in WordPress ;) - but offers pots of question (like Moodle Quizzes) and then an interface to browse the pots/questions when inserting into a page. The question is then rendered properly into the DOM rather than into an iFrame.
How feasible would it be to reproduce this sort of behaviour in Moodle? We still understand very little about how Moodle's put together. Is it something that we might be able to pay a developer to create?
I thought there was an automatic filter that turned all references to Wordpress into references to Moodle .
If you are looking for ways to re-use questions in other bits of Moodle you might look for inspiration in the Question Practice Module. However although I am the maintainer of that project I am more the "updater to work with later versions of Moodle" than any sort of expert in depth.
https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=mod_qpractice
I think it would be nice if Moodle had a "Question of the day" system based around standard quiz question types.
Thanks Marcus - we'll have a look at that.
Hmm, kinda makes me wonder, how hard would it be to convert the Poll block to use a question from the question banks, instead of making up a question from scratch?
Good idea - see reply to @Daniel Thies below...
Hello Damion,
I looked at your examples, and the self tests there are just simple forms with some inline javascript. I tried setting my editor preferences to plain text area and added a HTML block to a page. I then configured the block by copying the relevant section of one of your pages including the necessary scripts. This partially worked. Answers were duplicated, and the feedback was visible. If you are able to modify the javascript, it could be done simply this way. I think this is a pretty common technique in courses Wordpress or other content management systems, but it is not very sophisticated.
Thanks Daniel. You're right - we wrote the question types in Javascript ourselves. The CMS we are using - Magnolia - allows you create paragraph types with custom dialogues. We use a custom dialogue to collect the parameters of the question from authors, these are passed through into a jsp template by Magnolia where we write them out into javascript variables which are used to render the question by the js that we have already written into the template. As you say, we could just write JS into each page to create the questions but...
The key is that even if you are a technophobe authoring new materials, all you have to do is enter the normal information about questions (prompt, answer(s), distractor(s), feedback, etc.) into a dialogue box - the question then appears in the correct place in the page. It would also be nice (although not necessary) if we could keep track of who has answered which question - in Magnolia, we have written a little ajax routine which saves students' previous answers in a separate DB..they can click a 'Previous attempts' button on a question to see what they wrote previously.
That's got me thinking - I have seen some mention of RESTful web interfaces to Moodle, but nothing specifically about the Quiz - are there web services for this? If there were, or if they could be created fairly easily(!), could we pick up on @AL Rachels idea above and modify the Poll block to call in json describing a question from the question bank and render it using JS...
The type of functionality it sounds like you are looking for is a block plugin in Moodle. Blocks can be easily configured to be in the margins of any page. A question could be placed on a page with a filter, but this probably harder conceptually for teachers. Blocks are simple plugins to develop.
To do a javascript only self test you could create a block with a web form with the appropriate blanks for teachers to configure, and then add javascript to process it. However, this will not record the attempt. In order to do that you would need to use AJAX or direct to a new page. In principle the block could use a a question from the bank and record the attempts. This is not a small undertaking.
You might start by looking at block tutorial in the developer docs.
Ooh, that's a very clever idea - do you think it's possible to attach a block to a specific page?
Yes in general that is true. Blocks can be set to appear throughout a site or course or on specific pages of an activity. They can also be controlled by roles and permissions so that students and teachers view them differently. Not all of the standard blocks do this. The developer determines what options are available to users.
You might experiment with the HTML block. Try adding it to a specific page. In the configuration options are set under 'Where this block appear'. See general documentation on Blocks.
Thanks Daniel - sounds good - we'll have a play with this
We think that the Generico filter and Atto plugin is going to do what we need.
We've defined a template which includes an iframe and retrieves a preview of the question. We've made modifications to the preview php to strip the unnecessary options.
In due course we'd like to modify the Atto plugin to browse the Question Bank, and we might use Javascript to write the contents of a preview into the page instead of using an iframe.
Thank you to everyone for your suggestions.