Moodle in English: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

Hello,

I am trying to recreate some quizzes in 2.0 that were used in an earlier install as there were too many errors in those that I carried over in the upgrade. I have created a simple 5-question multiple-choice quiz as a starter and have been looking at how it behaves. With all the various options, the quiz runs as follows:

You click to open the quiz, then again to start the attempt.
Next, you answer all the questions. In adaptive mode you submit each question as you go. Using adaptive, I expected the quiz to auto-end once all the correct answers were submitted, but it doesn't. In adaptive, as all the answers have already been submitted, you shouldn't need to submit them again. Next, at the bottom of the page there is a button labelled 'next', which you click. Alternatively, just to help anyone who is confused, there is a link labelled 'finish attempt' at the top left corner of the page.

Now you reach a screen that gives one or two choices; 'start again' (sometimes) or 'submit all and finish'. After clicking 'finish', a pop-up box appears asking if you are sure you want to end the attempt. (I would dearly love to get rid of this box as, in my experience, many people automatically click 'no' when warning boxes appear).

Next, you get a review screen which shows lots of info relating to the attempt. I'm not sure what setting triggers it but sometimes there is a small table (history of responses) which details: attempt number / action / response/ time / raw score / grade. I'm sure this is useful in some circumstances, but I don't want it displayed. The only way I found to avoid the history box was to deselect the relevant feedback page and lose the entire review.

Anyway, having read all the info, at the top-left corner of the page there is the 'finish review' button, which you click in hope.. However, the button takes you back to the start page of the quiz, at which point you can start it all over again if you want. In fact, all the end or finish buttons finally take you back to the quiz start page.

To exit the quiz and go to the course homepage you need to know where to look in the course menu, and click there. I'm used to teaching people with very basic computer skills and I know this will baffle more than a few. Seriously.

I've played with all the various settings but to no avail. What I want is to start a quiz, submit the answers, finish the quiz and go to a basic review page (if not in adaptive) and then a button to bale out of the quiz and go to the course homepage again. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Tuesday, 14 December 2010, 2:44 AM

Some basic facts:

the sequence of clicks required is almost exactly the same between Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0. The only significant difference is the new summary page, which is one extra click per quiz attempts.
- That is not to say that we should not aim to do better in future.
what you have to click may have changed. Basically, in the past, there were three confusing buttons at the bottom of the page during a quiz attempt. Now, there is one simple 'Next' button.
'Start again' always appears to teachers when they are previewing a quiz, and never appears to students.
The response history is similarly mainly shown to teachers. I students only see it in adaptive mode, when they took multiple tries to get a question right - in which case it is the only way they can see how many tries they took.

Now, some things that may be more of a matter of opinion:

I don't think that a quiz with 5 simple multiple choice questions represent the pinacle of pedagogy. So, the quiz is not necessarily optimised for this case.
The quiz in Moodle 2.0 is designed with the thougth that one question-per-page is a good thing. It is good to encourage the student to focus on one thing at a time, particularly when we expect the student to go through a complex sequence of interactions with each question, as in interactive mode.

All activities in Moodle work by having a main page. For example, in the forum, it is the list of all discussions. That is always the place you are taken back to, for example, after posting a new discussion. Suppose you set your students a task "Go the the social forum, and make a post introducing yourself." After they have done that, they are not automatically taken back to the course page. Why should the quiz be any different?

Now, as it happens, if the quiz is set to only allow one attempt, then after they sudent has completed that one attempt, and clicked "Finish review" then they no longer see a "Re-attempt quiz" button. Instead they see a "Continue" button that takes them back to the coures page.

However, if the quiz allows multiple attempts, then after finishing the review of your first attempt, you are taken to the start page again, with a button to re-atteimpt the quiz. Perhpas you want to try again, to see if you can get more questions right this time.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Tuesday, 14 December 2010, 7:49 AM

Tim wrote The quiz in Moodle 2.0 is designed with the thougth that one question-per-page is a good thing. It is good to encourage the student to focus on one thing at a timeAs a teacher I have quite another opinion. "encouraging" students by focus on one question per page we forcing them on some order throught the questions. They can't easily look on all questions and decide, which ones they want to do first (especially in a timed quiz), navigating using clicks for, say, 10 question quiz, it takes too much effort. So the results may be lower, beause students couldn't plan their time on quiz (and I remember you talking about more freedom and choice for the students).

I don't think that a quiz with 5 simple multiple choice questions represent the pinacle of pedagogy. So, the quiz is not necessarily optimised for this case. I neither create 5-multiple-choices quizzes, nor think they are pinnacle of pedagogy. But I think that students (pupils?) who need to attempt such quizzes may be confused by complex interface. And I think that having Moodle quiz only really usable on the pedagogy-pinnacle quizzes, and not in a simpler situation is a kind of loss. Thats really a sad thing.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Tuesday, 14 December 2010, 10:23 PM

I would like the quiz to be usable in all scenarios.

And your point about a single-page quiz making it easier for the students to choose order to answer the questions in is a good one.

The summary page and new navigation are also meant to help that. They make it clear which questions you have not answered yet, so you can easily get back to them, after they have made a first pass through the quiz and answered the questions they can do easily.

I think even for a one-page quiz, the summary page is useful. You can see at a glance (without scrolling) whether you have answered all the questions before you submit.

And in the past, we often had reports of students who accidentially submitted thier quizzes by mistake, before they had finished. So there was a real problem to solve in 1.9.

I wonder whether the confirmation pop-up on the submit button is really necessary. What do other people think.

If you want ot get rid of that confirmation, it is quite easy. Just comment out (or delete) the line of code at the end of mod/quiz/summary.php (currently line 133) that says:

$button->add_confirm_action(get_string('confirmclose', 'quiz'));

We could aslo consider chaning things so that the summary page is not used at all for one-page quizzes. That is also something that is relatively easy to tweak (I think). In mod/quiz/attempt.php, replace the line (line 151)

echo '<input type="submit" value="' . get_string('next') . '" />';

with

if ($attemptobj->get_num_pages() > 1) {
echo '<input type="submit" value="' . get_string('next') . '" />';
} else {
echo '<input type="submit" name="finishattempt" value="' .
get_string('submitallandfinish', 'quiz') . '" />';
}

(That one is completely untested, but a change about that simple should work.)

So, none of this is set in stone. As you can see, it is actually quite easy to tinker with. ... and, as any usability person would tell you, the only way to really find out what is usable, is to put things in front of real users and observe what happens. You cannot tell very much from theoretical arguments.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Friday, 17 December 2010, 5:07 AM

I agree about usefulness of summary page in case you forget to answer something. It is very good as a warning.

But I guess the best way is to skip it when all questions are in answered states. You need a warning only when you really forget something. That would be somewhat harder than changing it for 1-page quiz, but still simple enought (write if you agree on this, and I'll create issue for it in the tracker). You can't change the button title this way, but "next" is good enought. I think it's better (thought more tricky) to leave confirmation still. The best way to implement it may be to redirect to confirmation and end of the quiz when generating summary page and find out that all is done.

More serious thing to consider for Moodle 2.1 is to make quiz work in such way, that renderer (i.e. theme) could affect this, so you can have themes with separate navigational interfaces for simple quiz for kids, long one-page quiz or long one-question-per-page one. The power you give to renderers should be sufficient to do this.

And let me remind you, that my words is no theoretical arguments when it comes to the Moodle quiz. They are from real observations. I am real teacher, who use Moodle for 2 year-long heavy-quizzed courses (more than 100 students in each, more than 1000 questions in each) - and some not heavy-quizzed ones too. Each week I personally supervise many quiz attempts. As our Moodle expert I also gather opinions from assistants on these courses, and from other teachers of our University. Actually I spend much more time using Moodle, than participating in it's development - thought you know me from development side, of course.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Friday, 17 December 2010, 5:32 AM

I worry about the lack of predictability if clicking next on a one-page quiz does different things depending on the state of the set of all questions. You would get back to the old problem where people submit their quiz without really meaning to. By all means experiment, but I think it is premature to create a tracker issue.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Friday, 17 December 2010, 7:28 PM

I'm not entirely understand about lack of predictability. If we call "summary" page a "warning" page instead (reflecting it's actual role) and place there a big text about "you have some questions unanswered, are you really sure?" - with table beneath (this text should not be seen when user navigates to this page during quiz navigation block), than for me it's entirely natural that a warning would appear only when there are potential problems around. (OK, this is just me). Change title/adding text when getting to the page several ways is easy.

Then the button on the last page of the quiz would be called "finish" (or something), the confirmation may work on it, but then - even after confirmation (and i would give a user a profile setting to skip quiz confirmation) - you see additional warning page and confirmation in case you have unanswered questions. This behavour seems to me quite consistent and logical.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Sunday, 19 December 2010, 7:32 PM

Hmm, Tim? What do you think of my last post?

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Sunday, 19 December 2010, 10:40 PM

Well, I don't think it is necessarily better than the way Moodle 2.0 works. And the way Moodle 2.0 works is not just something I made up. It is the the way the OU's customised version of the quiz has worked for over 2 years; and it is the way the OU's OpenMark system has worked since the start. That seems to work effectively in practice.

So, I see a choice of known and effective, and unknown and not necessarily better, and I don't like the change you propose.

However, OU quizzes tend to use the quiz in a certain way. One (or just a few) questions-per-page. Quizzes open for several days or weeks, not short timed tests. So I am happy to listed to suggestions for how to make the quiz work better in more circumstances.

One thought I have had is that the new quiz editing UI makes it very clear to the teacher what pages they have in their quiz, and lets them control that. Perhaps we should let people, on that page control whether their quiz has a summary page. Perhaps we could even let them customise the text that appears on it.

I know that, in general, it is a bad idea just to add more configuration options because you can't work out the 'right' way to make the software work. However, in this case, it may well be that no one way of doing things is right for everyone, so it makes sense to make it configurable, and there is a natural way to make it configurable in the UI. We could set the defaults so that if you create a quiz with 'All questions on one page' then by default you don't get a summary page, and if you have a paginated quiz, you do get a summary page by default.

What do people think about that?

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Monday, 20 December 2010, 1:57 AM

Well, Tim, I still couldn't see the need of summary for long, question-per-page quizzes when all questions are answered (and you could see question status on quiz navigation block), but it may as well exists.

And I certainly have nothing against adding configuration option that allow me to do what I want +1 for configuration with defaults and help button attached (thought having different text with/without unanswered question may help too). Maybe adding an admin setting or constant to tweak these defaults (i.e. how many questions per page you should use to not get default summary page).

Who is creating issue, you or I?

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Monday, 20 December 2010, 5:26 AM

I am not going to be working on this any time soon, so go for it.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Monday, 20 December 2010, 7:15 AM

I am not going on working this soon too. For one thing the 2.0 is in too raw state to upgrade for it production site in any near time anyway (thought it is pain quite the ass, as we would soon have many good plugins for 2.0). Another one is that you are already overloaded with my unreviewed code, and important one would be added soon, so I don't see a point writing more until previous code was reviewed.

However, it is still good to record conclusion we have on the tracker, to be dealed with later. So please like MDL-25740.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Monday, 20 December 2010, 6:18 PM

If you have got stuff to push in the future, it would be really good if you could use git. I should know from recent discussions how experienced a git user you are, but I can't recall now.

Anyway, the good way to submit code now is:

1. Make a 'fork' of https://github.com/moodle/moodle. That will get your own private copy like https://github.com/timhunt/moodle.

2. Do the fix as a branch in your private copy, with a branch name like wip_MDL-25654, branching off master.

3. When you are done, push your new branch to github, ask me to review, giving my a URL like https://github.com/timhunt/moodle/compare/master...wip_MDL-25654 to indicate which changes you want reviewed.

github then provides a nice interface for commenting directly on the changes. For example https://github.com/timhunt/moodle/commit/b35f5cea12fc328bb57a3b9c4c0accc57d047c7f

Of course, the important thing is the code changes, not how you get them to me.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Monday, 20 December 2010, 8:55 PM

Tim, would it be OK if we post changes that we finishing developing now (doing them for some months in CVS) as CVS patches and start to make further changes with GIT?

These ones may contain complex code - like MDL-20732 - and I don't really want experimenting with way of sending code on them. I guess it would also be even harder to you to track which issues containing code when it will be just link in the comments.

P.S. Any chances of getting MDL-24640 into Moodle 2.0? Or 2.1 only?

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Joseph Rézeau - Monday, 20 December 2010, 9:33 PM

Hi Tim,

This all sounds quite interesting. I have finally made the move from CVS to GIT for my local installation of Moodle and am gradually learning the intricacies of GIT. What I (and probably many fellow-developers) am missing at the moment is a detailed step-by-step, or several step-by-steps (for different platforms) on how exactly to achieve operations which you summarily call in your message "make a fork", "do the fix as a branch in your own copy" etc.

It would be quite useful if you (or some other person familiar with GIT - but not so familiar as to forget how to teach absolute beginners) would write some guidelines in the Moodle Wiki docs on that topic. And before you say so, I do know there is general information available on GIT, but what I think is needed is not general info but info directly geared to moodle "small-time" developers.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

Joseph

PS.- This is beginning to be off topic as it does not concern only the Quiz activity, maybe it shoud be moved to the General developer forum, either to an existing or to a new discussion about GIT.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Monday, 20 December 2010, 9:57 PM

Joseph, did you consider reading so called "Git Book"? http://book.git-scm.com/ It is written quite clear (like CVS Book etc), and hold on many details on both how GIT varies from CVS and how to do routine operations.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Monday, 20 December 2010, 11:07 PM

There are already some threads in the general developer forum. It might be better to continue there.

At the moment documentation is limited because they are still working out the best way to do everything, and people are reluctant to change the current way of doing things when that might still change.

As well as the book Oleg mentions, there is also http://progit.org/. Github built-in help is also pretty good.

Oleg, ordinary patch files are fine. Although it is helpful if you can write what you think the commit comment should be somewhere, for example in a comment in the tracker.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Joseph Rézeau - Tuesday, 21 December 2010, 12:40 AM

Thanks for the links, Oleg and Tim. Will try to digest those pieces of info (after Xmas).

Joseph

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by brian avery - Monday, 20 December 2010, 12:19 AM

"I don't think that a quiz with 5 simple multiple choice questions represent the pinacle of pedagogy. So, the quiz is not necessarily optimised for this case."

You may be right. I believe, however, that I explained that I created such a quiz so that I could examine how moodle 2 behaves. Seems a tad wasteful to create a quiz that meets the approval of someone else's idea of a worthwhile quiz just to examine the most basic facets of a new program.

"However, if the quiz allows multiple attempts, then after finishing the review of your first attempt, you are taken to the start page again, with a button to re-atteimpt the quiz. Perhpas you want to try again, to see if you can get more questions right this time."

I'm sure I could have got more questions right had I tried hard enough, especially as I wrote the questions 5 minutes before testing them. However, i wanted to see what less capable students are faced with when they are struggling. What for a foreign student with no knowledge of moodle (it's a mistake to assume that online students ever read instructions, or that teachers of English are adequately fluent in all their students' languages as to be able to write crystal-clear instructions) seems to be an endless loop isn't helpful and is what I saw. I'm sure if my moodle knowledge were comparable to yours there would be certain things you mentioned that I would have already known. However, I asked because it isn't and I didn't.

Producing moodle courses in English for English-speaking graduates or school children is a different kettle of fish to producing them for non-English speakers. There are neon lights in the streets so that people understand what they need to do. Browsers have big fat 'back' buttons. In moodle, in my opinion, you often need to know where you have to look. I was asking, quite harmlessly, I thought, if there were any neon buttons available.

A one question per page structure may be fine for many purposes. However, I have a 100-question ESL level test that I have created in Articulate quizmaker and had been hoping to incorporate into moodle. Given that the new articulate quizzes appear to be slower than their predecessors, clicking page-by-page through 100 questions would appear to be a tedious task.

Brian

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by brian avery - Monday, 20 December 2010, 12:54 AM

Sorry, the reference to Articulate isn't clear or helpful as it doesn't refer to quiz. I decided to transfer a paper level test I use to Articulate rather than moodle quiz, if for no other reason than I can house it on a normal html page on my site. I haven't touched my site for a week so I'd fofgotten what the problem was.

Brian

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Oleg Sychev - Monday, 20 December 2010, 2:01 AM

Brian - if you know PHP slightly or have someone who knows, it's really very easy to add 2 buttons to you review screen: "Close and return to the course" and "Close and remain in quiz". That's assuming you couldn't write some text and screenshot, highlighting breadcrumb to them. It's actually the most convenient way to return to the course.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by brian avery - Monday, 20 December 2010, 4:32 AM

Thank you for your kind suggestion. Sadly, I'm a one-man business, an English teacher who is trying to build a moodle site without any kind of programming skills. I'm afraid I wouldn't even know which page to attach the code to (even if I copied the relevant code from elsewhere).

However, thank you for taking the time to reply.

Brian

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Michael Carter - Thursday, 22 December 2011, 7:06 PM

I agree with Brian, and I don't really see the argument for only a re-attempt quiz and no return to course button.

When I put up a quiz, it is after or part way through a lesson. If the student scores poorly on the quiz, they will of course need to review the lesson before they re-attempt the quiz. Forcing them to just have another guess seems largely pointless.

In fact, if a student is allowed to access and re-attempt the quiz from the course menu, what is the point of the re-attempt button and the questions answered confirmation screen and the are you sure pop-up? All of these are redundant if a return to course button is available. Using other features in Moodle, they cannot get past the quiz until they have passed it.

I don't have any experience with php, so cannot follow your suggestions of adding or changing a button.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Thursday, 22 December 2011, 9:19 PM

Wherever you are in Moodle, there is a consistent way to get back to the course page: Click the course name in the navigation bar at the top of the page.

It seems that what you really want are two links: If the student has done badly, you want to link them back to the start of this week's material. If they have done well, you want to link them to the next thing. Well, you can do that using the Overall feedback bit of quiz settings.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Michael Carter - Friday, 23 December 2011, 5:04 AM

Throughout the lessons, and the quizzes, to progress the student clicks on a button below the material. That is where they look for navigation. I have currently over 200 students doing one of my courses, and this is their biggest complaint - navigation is difficult because they don't know where to click next.

For consistency, the quiz should have a next button to get to the next question that looks the same as the next button in the lessons, and in the same place. End of lesson and end of quiz should also match. Setting it up in any other way is not intuitive or logical and creates confusion. It also cheapens the appearance of the whole learning system.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Tim Hunt - Friday, 23 December 2011, 8:04 AM

You can customise the look of any particular part of Moodle to your particular requirements by creating a theme: http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Themes_2.0

Once could say that for consistency, the lesson should look like the quiz.

Did you try my suggestion of using overall feedback?

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Michael Carter - Friday, 23 December 2011, 7:08 PM

Yes, I have tried a link in overall feedback, but again that is inconsistent.

The method used for navigating in lessons is clear, consistent and easily set up and used, except for the end of lesson.

End of lesson introduces an extra step that is completely different and unnecessary. If wanted it could be very simply included as an extra lesson page.

Navigating quiz is ok but is not as good as lesson navigation. That is why I suggested that quiz navigation copies lesson navigation rather than the other way round.

I think moodle is excellent, and I wish I had time to learn php and css to a level where I could do these things myself. Maybe I will one day. I really appreciate the time many people (including yourself) put into it to help people like me. I only started with moodle about 4 weeks ago and I am on a very steep learning curve. The majority of moodle works in reasonably obvious and excellent ways, but there are a few other parts which seem inconsistent and far more difficult than they should be, to me the most major one is the transition between elements that we are discussing.

Thanks for the suggested link, but Themes_2.0 is dependant on knowing php and css, which I don't.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Joseph Rézeau - Friday, 23 December 2011, 7:35 PM

Hi Michael and welcome to the community of Moodle users!

Actually, the Moodle Lesson and Quiz activities are two totally unrelated modules. Each has its own "philosophy", interface, development history, strengths and weaknesses, etc. Which means you cannot really compare them or rather you can compare, of course, but you should understand that asking for more consistent behaviour/look/display between both modules is not trivial at all.

The Quiz plugin (and the underlying Questions database) has a very active maintainer , a very active forum and a wide community of users. In comparison, the Lesson plugin does not currently have an official maintainer and the Lesson plugin does not seem as widely used on Moodle sites as Quiz. Which may explain why you feel that:

The majority of moodle works in reasonably obvious and excellent ways, but there are a few other parts which seem inconsistent and far more difficult than they should be, to me the most major one is the transition between elements that we are discussing.

Joseph

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Michael Carter - Wednesday, 28 December 2011, 6:38 PM

I think you have actually explained the reason that people use individual parts of moodle and tend not to combine them. Currently it is very difficult to generate a combination of the parts of moodle so that they flow. Having a consistent navigation system available to transit between them would go 90% of the way towards accomplishing a good flow. If the end of each section (lesson, quiz, whatever) were to offer similar buttons in similar positions (with one of them being for returning to the course menu) that would help tremendously.

I have no problem with the differences in presentation between quiz and lesson, they are different tools that do different jobs, and I think they both work very well. Whilst in a lesson or quiz the operational and presentation options allow course designers to generate a "professional" feeling execution, but the transition between the two feels "amateurish" and "clunky" (not my comments, these are from course feedback).

What I don't understand is why there seems to be such resistance to offering a link option that would allow users to move smoothly from the quiz to the course menu if students are allowed to retake the quiz. It's available if they are only allowed one attempt, so I would not have thought this a difficult option to allow.

I suggested using the lesson type navigation only because it is better than the quiz navigation. Consistency is more important and gives a much more professional look and feel.

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Re: Is there an easy way to exit a quiz in 2.0?

by Jean-Michel Védrine - Thursday, 29 December 2011, 8:13 PM

Hello Michael,

The best option to permit a change to happend in Moodle is to create an issue in the tracker explaining your proposal. You can also link to this forum discussion in the tracker issue.

Then, if people find it relevant and interesting, they will vote for it, and maybe it will be implemented in a future version of Moodle.

This is how quite a lot of changes (both minor ones and big ones) have been introduced in Moodle along the years.

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