Hotpot (plugin)

Adding a Hot Potatoes exercise as a HotPot activity

• make full use of the interactive and engaging nature of Hot Potatoes output formats (drag-and-drop items, receive instant popup feedback, clues about answers, hints about next letter, etc)

• exercise can modified (e.g. typos fixed and questions reordered) via Hot Potatoes application, which may people prefer to the edit screens of the Moodle Quiz module and Question bank, espcially for cloze activites

• questions can be modified or removed even after students have attempted them (not possible in Quiz module)

• can add your own modifications to styles, layout and even behavior of questions in the exercise

• some HotPot output formats are not available in the Quiz module, specifically crosswords (JCross), jumbled sentences (JMix) and "hybrid" questions (JQuiz) which start as short-answer questions but change to multiple choice questions after a specified number of incorrect responses

• can specify multiple images or sound files with the same question

Adding a Hot Potatoes exercise as a Quiz activity

• can be combined with questions from the question bank

• can be edited online

• more secure, in that students cannot "cheat" by looking at the browser's page source and trying to find the answers in there

Adding a Hot Potatoes exercise as a QuizPort activity

• all advantages of HotPot module, plus ...

• exercises can be chained together with conditional branching to create adaptive materials

• multimedia (images, audio, video, links) can be inserted with square bracket notation, e.g. [mysoundfile.mp3]

• Textoys exercises (WebSequitur, WebRhubarb) and Michael Rottmeier formats (JMemori, JIntro, Findit, Dropdown) can be run from the xml files (not possible in HotPot for Moodle 1.9)

• new output formats not available in HotPot module or Quiz module (e.g. JQuiz auto-advance, JCloze ANCT-Scan, JMix on-key-press)

Probably other people have their own preferences, but the above are some of the reasons I use QuizPort in some situations and the Quiz module in others (notably when I do exams and tests)