Teaching with Moodle

Sorry Przemek, I don't know. I only know that LON Capa is meant to integrate with hotpotatoes.
I have not attempted to load LON Capa onto my server. I think that I would want to set up my
on server before I try.

Hotpotatoes as a stand alone has the option of sending the results as a mail to someone.
I have not even tried that. I wonder if it sends the answers. Should not be difficult. The
Hotpotatoes site says that it is okay to modify their perl.

Perhaps it would be possible to alter the Perl to enable Hotpotatoes to be integrated with
moodle. Perl comes with all sorts of modules for manipulating databases.

I agree, teachers at my schools ask for the same reason "hotpotatoes-like"-quizzes: just find (also playfull motivating) ways to get students work with the resources of a subject in different ways.

Another way of using quizzes is: "Let students construct a quiz question for - lets say - page 4 and let them explain the correctness of the 4 answers, you will be suprised about so many misconceptions on page 4.."  (Moodle must get a quiz-create-option for students then, or they deliver it as a essay and you bring in all these quiz questions..)

Interfacing with hotpotatoes: I took some output from hotpotatoes exercises and made an resource of it for Moodle... The point is that it will stay black-boxes for Moodle and they will never end-up in the student-overviews of Moodle. (I think that I have to look in the create newmodule_template.zip, but  on the moment that is broken in CVS.)

Thanks Martin,

When I said "extension of the cloze format,"  I meant an extension of the moodle cloze
format. I know it exist but I would love it to include comments on each answer, (already
supported by the database), grading (as Tom has recently implemented, and also supported
by the database), multiple choice question layout, flashcard style shuffling of the queston pack
such that porroly resonded questions come out more. I would also like to see, tree esponse
question layout, and timing.  Maybe in the summer.

Yes my students are motivated by grades. They are also motivated (as Tom says) but simply
being able to do quizzes. And perhaps (as Quiztest allows) the possibility of being on "high
score" chart shown to all sudents. They are so non communicative and or scared of
communication that it is difficult to get them to submit to journals, forums and assignments
but that is one of the things that I would like to get them to do.

You really need to try teaching English to Japanese students before you can get an idea of the
silence. I have taught learners of other nationalities and the experience is very different. I have
been in classrooms were it is difficult to progress with the lesson since there are so many
questions. But not in Japan.

The quizzes would be a way of getting them to reach a point where they would start to
use the forums etc.

Good luck with moodle.com, I am try to spread the word.

Tim

Moodle already has exactly this feature! It's called the "Missing Word" format (look for the import button on the quiz category page). I'd not heard of the name "cloze" at the time, but a search on goodle.com seems to show it's the popular name for that format.

Actually, missing word (or short answer) is not a cloze task type. A classic cloze test is a longer passage with every n^th word removed. The task is to recreate the text by putting in the missing words. However, this type is not very often used nowadays, and rightly so, because the words get removed at random without real pedagogical purpose. A more modern version of the cloze test is simply a text or passage with a number of words deleted. And this type can be very useful in teaching English as a foreign language, because it focuses on testing lexical and structural accuracy, common word collocations, etc. An example is in the attached zip file. Two main differences between Moodle's short-answer question and this cloze test are that 1/ there can be a lot of blanks in one question, and 2/ some blanks can have alternate (multiple) correct answers, e.g the third blank in the attached quiz can be answered with 'under', 'beneath' or 'underneath'.

A modified version of cloze test is a multiple-choice cloze, where for every gap there is a choice of answers to choose from (one correct and a few distractors). Again, an example in the attached zip file.

Neither of them is supported by Moodle at the moment. I have some experience with webct and they don't have any of these two question types either. However, it is possible to use their short-answer question in this way, because it allows to create a number of blanks for each question and specify which answer(s) can appear in which blank. It is not very elegant, because you get the text with numbered typed-in blanks (like this: (1)_____) which is then followed by the actual blanks (form fields), where the student writes the answers. Again, an example in the zip. However, I think this is not possible in Moodle at the moment.

With the multiple-choice cloze, there is a workaround in Moodle, though not perfect. You can create a number of multiple-choice questions and attach the text with blanks to the first one. However, the problem is that the whole set (all of these multiple-choice questions together with the text) should be treated as one question, and with this workaround it is treated as a number of multiple-choice questions.

These two question types (cloze and multiple-choice cloze) are definitely something I'd love to see implemented in Moodle, but knowing how busy Martin is I've never aksed for it, and I don't think I should On the other hand, I do not have the programming skills to do it myself or the financial resources to have it done by somebody else But who knows? Maybe in a few months?...

Just one final note: the tests in the attached files are not mine. They are taken from a sample of the Cambridge FCE exam available at http://www.cambridgeesol.org/support/dloads/ums.cfm