websequitur and quizport

websequitur and quizport

by robert maran -
Number of replies: 19

Hi Gordon

I tried to incorporate a websequitur activity in quiz port. When clicked "check" button the following message appeared: "Could not insert record in database table: quizport_responses" and I was directed back the site frontpage. Any fixes for this?

Cheers

Robert

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In reply to robert maran

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Robert,
could you confirm that you have the very latest version of QuizPort?

Also, were you able to reproduce the error on my server? That would be a big help smile

thanks
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: websequitur and quizport

by robert maran -

Hi Gordon

OK, I uploaded the quizport with the sequitur to your server and lo and behold it worked perfectly and a score was recorded. I thought I had got our IT people to install the latest version, but my version is the reason why it is not working on my server, then could you provide a link to the latest version?

Just to let you know what I did: I created 3 hot potatoes quizzes and one sequitur quiz and used the masher to create a zip file so all quizzes would be in a chain. I uploaded this zip to my moodle and then created quizport. As I stated previously, an error occured with the sequitur quiz. I must report however that another sequitur quiz worked fine in quizport. This quizport was made up of individual quizzes that were added to the quizport manually.

Any thoughts? Or just install the latest quizport and see what happens?

Thanks as always

Robert

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In reply to robert maran

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Gordon Bateson -
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First things first, we must be sure you have the latest version of QuizPort: 2008033148

You can the latest version from my server or from the Moodle downloads page

If you continue to have problems on your server I suggest you turn on Moodle debugging so you can more details on *why* the record could not be inserted into the database.

all the best
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Glenys Hanson -
Hi Robert and everyone,

I've just put on Gordon's test site a mini QuizPort demo sequence including WebRhubarb, WebSequitur and Hot Potatoes exercises. I made it for myself to test different settings and thought it might be useful to others. It's in the first section.


Cheers,
Glenys



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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: websequitur and quizport

by robert maran -

Hi Glenys,

Thanks for sharing your mini Quizport demo! One question though: how did you tweak Exercise 4: Text Reconstruction - WebRhubarb (1) so that after a user clicks on "check", to continue they must first click on the "OK" button? (At present I think after the "check" button is clicked, the score is shown and the page automatically goes changes to the next page ).

Gordon: After completing a quiz users get this message "Choose your destiny ..." with different options. Great idea! I was wondering if another option button, "unit" might be a useful addition? This may be useful if a user is working on a sequence of quizzes in a particular unit. At the moment the nearest thing to it is "index" and if there are many quizports, a user would have to search the list of quizports. Or have I missed something?

Cheers

Robert

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In reply to robert maran

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Robert,

> I was wondering if another option button, "unit" might be a useful addition

You mean go to a report of the unit they just completed. That would be quite easy to do I think. I'll look into that.

Also, recently Jim and Glenys have requested that students be allowed back into unit attempts that are completed so that they can redo the quizzes without any conditions, allowing them to pick and choose which they redo. Does that sound interesting to you?

Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: websequitur and quizport

by robert maran -

Hi Gordon

You mean go to a report of the unit they just completed.

Yes- might useful if students are allowed multiple attempts and they wish to try a particular quiz again.

Cheers

Robert

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In reply to robert maran

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Robert,
at the moment "allow multiple attempts" doesn't mean what I think you think it means, and it doesn't work the way you would like it to work.

Once a unit attempt is finished, that is to say that all the necessary quizzes have been "completed", then the unit attempt is marked as "completed" too, and the students cannot redo quizzes within that unit attempt again.

They can look at a static report showing how they answered questions in quizzes in the completed unit attempts, but they can't then redo quizzes within a unit attempt that is marked as "completed". The closest they can get is to start a new unit attempt from the beginning and work their way through the quizzes again.

So I think what you would like is the same as what Jim, Glenys and probably many other educators would like, and that is to allow the students to have free access to quizzes in a unit once they have achieved a certain grade on at last one attempt at the unit.

hope that is clear smile
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Jim Ranalli -
Gordon, have you given any more thought to this feature (i.e. free student access to quizzes within a unit once they've achieved a predetermined grade)? In student feedback on my course, it comes up again and again; they like the materials but don't want to have to wade back through all of the quizzes in order to review the tougher ones.

I know you're probably still working on the Moodle 2.0 conversion and have bigger fish to fry. Thought I'd ask, though, in hopes of keeping it on your to do list.

Best wishes,

Jim
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In reply to Jim Ranalli

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Jim,
there are several points to consider.

  1. One idea is to spruce up the report pages so that the questions and answers look like the way they did when the students attempted the quiz. At the moment the quiz results are presented by a generic page, which probably doesn't mean much to most students. It is possible to create different output formats for the reports so that for example the JCloze results are presented on a page that looks like a cloze activity, and JCross results are presented as a filled in crossword. This would allow students to see the previous results in a meaningful context, but would not allow them to modify them or try the quiz again.

  2. Another possibility is to give the students free access to attempt the quizzes once the unit has been completed satisfactorily once. I can imagine doing this by modifying the code that checks pre-conditions, so that pre-conditions are disabled if the unit has already been completed with a certain score.

  3. And lastly, I would at some stage like to add the functionality to allow HP quizzes to be resumed, that is to say, allow students to restart a quiz attempt which not all questions had been completed.
(1) is easiest to do but it is time-consuming; (2) is more difficult to investigate but probably would be the quickest to implement once the solution had been identified; (3) is a considerable programming challenge, because HP quizzes were not designed to work like that. We would have to recreate the state of the partially completed quiz from the results that have been stored in the Moodle database. An interesting challenge, but I can't imagine having time for that this year.

The metaphorsis from QuizPort to TaskChain is underway, but the TaskChain module something of a mushed up PHP soup at moment as I get to grips with the new renderer class and the file_storage object. One particular challenge I am facing is that QuizPort had introduced similar objects (renderer = output_format, and file_storage = file), so I am having to rethink and redesign these very fundamental parts of the module.

Luckily I do not have to teach any students in March, so I can concentrate on this line of my research.

all the best
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Philippe Decloitre -

Hello Gordon,

I followed a bit of this thread and must admit that the possibility for Qzport (or TC) to understand what to do next when a HP attempt has not been completed sounds very promising.

All the best

Philippe 

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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Students going back in to a "completed" unit

by Glenys Hanson -
Hi Gordon,

My students react in the same way as Jim's. I think some of them inadvertently "complete" a unit when they don't intend to. Maybe I don't have the settings right - though I've practically given up with pre and post conditions because it leads to so much student irritation. But I have kept "End of unit" for the last exercise so that they see the page that asks them what they want to do next. Maybe I should abandon that too because I suppose that it's when they click on that the unit is considered "complete".

Cheers,
Glenys
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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Students going back in to a "completed" unit

by Jeff Finnan -
Hi Glenys,

My students did not like the pre- and post conditions too at first. They seemed to have gotten over it though. I had fairly high post conditions and I told students that they had to make through the whole chain to get any credit at all. My test scores have improved where I have used QP. Just the other day a student complained as to why I did not have a Moodle on hydrocarbons just before a test they had to take.*

The few who just want to click through everything still suffer. They are the ones who just fill out a worksheet with no concern as to whether it is correct or not.

As to going back to hard quizzes, could they not be broken out of the big chain and listed separately or grouped together?

Later,
Jeff

*I could have but did not have the time to build, plus other time constraints.

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In reply to Jeff Finnan

Re: Students going back in to a "completed" unit

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Jeff,

> As to going back to hard quizzes, could they not be broken out of the big chain
> and listed separately or grouped together?

You could certainly do this manually - create a new QuizPort from what you judge to be the hard quizzes. We are a way off being able to do that automatically, but Jim's idea of allowing students free access to QuizPorts they have completed will probably help your students.

regards
Gordon
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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Students going back in to a "completed" unit

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hello Glenys,

> I've practically given up with pre and post conditions
> because it leads to so much student irritation

I'd be interested to hear more details. In particular, a specific example would be helpful for me. Which student said what about which QuizPort?

> I have kept "End of unit" for the last exercise
> so that they see the page that asks them what they want to do next.
> Maybe I should abandon that too because I suppose
> that it's when they click on that the unit is considered "complete".

If you have no post-conditions on any other exercises, then I recommend removing the "End of unit" condition on the last exercise. It serves no purpose, because QuizPort will detect when all the exercises have been completed anyway, and mark the unit as complete at that point. Students will then be shown the exit page, i.e. the page that asks them what to do next.

best regards
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Students going back in to a "completed" unit

by Glenys Hanson -
Hi Gordon,

Thanks for the clarification about "End of unit".

Yes, I realise that saying that there's a general problem with pre and post conditions isn't helpful to you. Sorry about that, I should have been more thoughtful.

I'll try and find some specific examples of problems but when a student complains (a hardworking, adult student) I usually modify the Unit pre and/or post conditions so I can no longer show you the situation. I'm also handicapped by the fact that I can't backup and restore the course and preserve the problem situation in that way.

But what they complain about most, is what we've discussed above : not being able to go back into a "completed" unit and improve their score.

Cheers,
Glenys

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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Students going back in to a "completed" unit

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Glenys,

> But what they complain about most, is ... not being able
> to go back into a "completed" unit and improve their score

Ah, that's a new idea new for me. In such a situation, we would just let students continue in the same unit attempt forever. The unit attempt would never be marked completed. Every time a student accessed the QuizPort, they would resume their one and only unit attempt, and just keep doing or redoing exercises as they please.

Perhaps we need to allow the teacher to specify when a unit attempt it judged to be complete? At the moment, a unit attempt is marked as completed when either an "End of unit" post-condition is satisfied, or all the quizzes are completed. From what you say it would be useful to allow a situation in which a unit attempt *never* becomes completed.

I have just realized something else - sorry if this is what you were saying all along blush - How about more generally allowing students to resume any unit attempts - not just the "in progress" attempts. Is this what you mean?

Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Students going back in to a "completed" unit

by Glenys Hanson -
Hi Gordon,

I'll try and find time next week to find a concrete example but what I feel has happened that caused student annoyance :

In a given Module of work, students had two QuizPorts to do:
  • QuizPort A comprising between 12 to 20 "short" exercises, each taking between 1 to 10 minutes to complete in an ordered a sequence of pedagogical difficulty. The whole taking a student between 30 minutes to 2 hours to complete, depending on their level (the course was very heterogeneous). Originally, I specified each exercise should be done before doing the next (no minimum score required) with a minimum score of 70% for the Unit before continuing to:
  • QuizPort B - a single Text reconstruction/dictation exercise taking students between 15 to 75 minutes to complete.
Some students were in the situation that QuizPort A was shown as completed with a score of, say, 65%, though they hadn't in fact done some of the exercises (but had done most of them). Understandably, they didn't want to start over and do everything right from the beginning (though some of them did). I felt I could only remove the 70% requirement.

It's quite possible I wasn't setting my pre and post conditions correctly. I'll try see if, with my now superior knowledge, I can find my errors.

Cheers,
Glenys


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In reply to robert maran

Re: websequitur and quizport

by Glenys Hanson -
Hi Robert,

"Wait till student clicks OK" is one of the advanced settings you can chose when you update a quiz. See the screenshot below.

I like it because I want students to be as much in control of their learning process as possible. Who am I to see how long they need to look at an answer?

Cheers,
Glenys
Attachment 27-10-2009_22-43-11.png
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