Quiz

Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

I hope it is not considered off-topic is I post here about what development the OU is planning to do in relation to the quiz module over the next year.

To set the scene, about a year ago, there was a lot of consultation withing the OU about what we wanted from our VLE. This lead to a document called the "Learning systems roadmap" which divided what we want into 10 separate areas. 5 innovation areas, and 5 'mainstream' areas. eAssessment was one of the mainstream areas. (If you are as cynical as me, you would expect a document like this, produced by an institutional committee, to be totally horrendous. Actually, they came up with something surprisingly good.)

Then they decided, for largely financial reasons, that we should try to do everything on the roadmap, and move our Moodle site to Moodle 2.0, all in the course of one year. So, it is certainly an exciting time to be a VLE developer at the OU. My prediciton is that we don't have a hope of getting everything done, but we should get a lot done. I think it is worthwhile to try. I just hope they don't fire us all when we 'fail' to do it all

Anyway, Phil Butcher (project manager) and I have been doing a lot of planning over the last couple of weeks, and we now have a pretty good idea what we are trying to do, so here it is:

1. Make Development:Question Engine 2 work on top of Moodle 2.0, and the get it included in Moodle 2.1 - assuming everyone is happy with that.
2. Create a whole lot of new question types. This includes
• several variants of drag-and-drop;
• a question type that can grade answers of up to a sentence length;
• a variant of shortanswer/numerical qtype where students can easily enter superscripts and subscripts;
• a question type that allows you to embed applets like the Java Molecular Editor or GeoGebra, the have what the student did graded by Moodle;
• possibly a manually graded question type where the students can recored an audio clip, instead of writing an essay.
(Of course, these will only work with Question Engine 2, so you won't be able to use them until Moodle 2.1.)
3. Try to improve the question authroing forms, so they are not so horribly long and complex.
4. Try to solve MDL-3030 and related issues - that is the one about dealing with overdue or late quiz submissions.
5. Do some work on question import/export, probably wrapping them in web-services, so that if you have an off-line question authoring tool, it can link into Moodle and let you edit questions in the Moodle question bank.
6. Make sure the integration of STACK and Moodle works well with Question Engine 2.

I hope you agree that there is a lot of good stuff there.

Can I also take this opportunity to appologies in advance, in case I get a bit tired, and stressed during the course of the next 10 months

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

Very interesting and as usual in software development most often very ambitious.

"...I get a bit tired, and stressed during the course of the next 10 months"

Take care that "deadline" should not be taken literaly...

"possibly a manually graded question type where the students can record an audio clip, instead of writing an essay"

This remind me a demo on how the UQAM moodle and audio-visual teams  have developed an easy to use interface  for recordings audio elements to generate questions for the langage translation department.

The technique used which allows the teacher to record and add the audio question and the student to record and add his audio response, could be useful for your project.

Pierre

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

"a variant of shortanswer/numerical qtype where students can easily enter superscripts and subscripts;"

You need only to add the HTML editor to the Unit input element in the question display and to the unit field in the edit_numerical_form to the 2,0 numerical qtype version.

A restricted feature HTML editor should not give the problems associate when using the essay questiont type.

This is why I add the multiple answer display of the unit so the the teacher can could even use LATEX.

If you allow me to do it, I could easily add the HTM editor to the unit field in the edit_numerical_form to the 2,0 numerical qtype version and do the necessary changes in the validation form code.

Pierre

P.S. I just remember this discussion on subscripts with the Josep Rézeau solution to use Unicode text that appears as subscript or supscripts.

These characters could be put in specific help in the question display.

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=93522

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

here the list of available characters

&#x2070 ; give ⁰
 207 208 209 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

Pierre

P.S. If you think this is useful you can move this highly technical details dsicussion elsewhere in the forum.

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

"Try to improve the question authroing forms, so they are not so horribly long and complex"

I hope MDL-20732 Development:Javascript-interface for repeat elements function fits in there.

And maybe MDL-20251 too.

(Edited by Helen Foster to fix the documentation link - original submission Thursday, 14 October 2010, 01:00 PM)

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

I hope so too. There are a lot of other things higher on the priority list for us to do, so I will be able to wait and see what progress you make, and then build on that. Thanks.

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

Tim,

What is your up-to-date planing to encouter the 2,1 release ?

You github is quite active,

https://github.com/timhunt/Moodle-Question-Engine-2/

You have contracted Jamie Pratt for new features

...

Pierre

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

We have contracted Jamie Pratt to develop five new question types. To of those are now basically done, dropdown menus in paragraphs, and pmatch.

There are various other bits of in-house development going on. This week I am trying to sort out what those are, write specifications, and then assign them to the developers on my team.

I am still trying to finish of the core of the new Question Engine so that it can go into 2.1. Most of the remaining work is converting the remaining question types, I think. Can you remind me where I can get at the work you did on this last year? Thanks.

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

They are first two  attachments to  MDL-20636 .

The cloze question code  test some of the limits of the last year engine code and even if my solution was working, I understand that it can also reflects my last year knowlegde of PHP 5 class structure .

As my winter courses are almost finshed, I can do further work on them if you think I can help within your time delays.

Pierre

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Re: Quiz developments at the OU over the next year

Doh! Sorry, I should have been able to find that.

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