Hotpot (plugin)

Hi Jeff,
in a nutshell then, you would like to present your students with a random subset of exercises taken from a large bank of similar exercises. Also, you wish to use JCloze because it requires students have to insert the answers at specific points within the target chemical equations. I also infer that you would like to put these activities into a single QuizPort that is marked as "completed" when a certain number of exercises have been succesfully completed.

As you say, JQuiz handles the random subset very nicely - so, by the way, does JMatch. However, JCloze, JMix and JCross don't allow for random subsets because there is only one "question" in each file.

I am currently wrestling with this issue myself.

Recently, I wanted to do random subsets with JMix activities. Each JMix required students to rearrange letters to spell some target vocabulary. I didn't want to give *all* the words to *all* the students. I just wanted to give them a few random ones, and if they did those OK, I would let them skip on and do something else.

QuizPort has a relevant setting on its post-conditions. You can choose "Random quiz" for the next quiz. This solves the problem of randomly selecting a quiz, but students will still need to complete *all* the quizzes before the QuizPort is marked complete. There is currently no way to have a QuizPort marked complete when, for example, "five quizzes have a score or 90% or more".

I have plans to add this functionality, that is to say, allow conditions to specify when an attempt at a QuizPort can be considered completed. I already have planned out the required modifications to the database and the PHP code, but at the moment I am in the middle of a teaching semester, so I do not have the quality programming time required for major modifications to QuizPort. Rather, this work will have to wait till the summer.

In the meantime, I have been using JQuiz shortanswer questions to replicate the JMix vocabulary exercises. As part of the question, I give the students the jumbled letters that when rearranged will form the answer.

I have also found that if I import these JQuiz questions into a single Moodle question category, I can create nice random subset questions in Moodle's Quiz module.

In summary there, I suggest that QuizPort cannot do what you want at the moment, but there are plans for updates in the summer which will be useful for you. In the meantime, I think you should concentrate your efforts either on JQuiz, or on continuing to make JCloze activities and import those into a Moodle question category so you can make a Moodle Quiz activity that uses radomly chosen questions from the Moodle question category.

cheers
Gordon