Hello all,
I'm wondering if I would be able to take several consecutive Quizports in a course and make them share a common time limit, i.e. a student has 6 hours to complete X number of Quizports.
I didn't see a way to accomplish this. Is it possible? If so, how should I go about doing it?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Chad Jones
Thanks Gordon.
Essentially here's what I'm trying to do. I'm designing a course that must be completed within a 6 hour period or the student will be given a failing grade.
Your Quizport module works very well and gives me the functionality I'm looking for as to operating with pre-conditions/post-conditions and the ability to group many HotPots together as a single course unit.
Is there any other possible way to make use of QuizPorts as the main instructional content in a course and make the course have a 6 hour time limit? I'm open to any and all suggestions.
Thanks again!
Chad
Hi Chad,
Couldn't you put everything in a single QuizPort? And set a time limit on that?
Cheers,
Glenyus
Hi Glenys,
That's a possibility. I was a little concerned about the length of the Quizport. I'm looking at including about 40 subtopics (40 HotPots) each containing a video clip.
I have little experience with the Quizport module, so let me ask, do you think it would be too awkward for the student to navigate through it?
Also, please forgive me if this is an ignorant question, if I used this approach, is there a way to display the time remaining in the course?
Thanks for your help!
Chad
Hi Chad,
I think the largest number of HotPots I've put in QuizPort is about 35 but I think Deborah Delin has put many more.
I don't think the fact the HotPots contain videos makes any difference.
The ease of navigation depends mainly:
As far as I know, the time remaining is not displayed but I've never used the timer so I'm not absolutely sure.
Cheers,
Glenys
(Edited by Gordon Bateson - original submission Tuesday, 28 December 2010, 02:20 AM: corrected the spelling of Deborah's surname)
Hi all,
Glenys you have a good memory! Yes, I do have a couple of really huge quizports with nearly 200 quizzes in them. I don't make them so large any more because making changes to them became slow and cumbersome, but there is no problem in terms of student use.
In the case of the very large Quizports they are courses which students return to many times. I set "resume" to "force" and each time a student selects the Quizport he is automatically taken to the point where he left off last time, which is really great.
Deborah
Hello again,
So I've taken the approach of creating a course using one Quizport with lots of HotPots, with a set time limit to complete the entire course.
I'm wondering if the time limit function in Quizport is working the way I need it to. It appears that time limit works in terms of aggregated time spent in the Quizport, not counting the time the student was logged out. Is this correct?
Is there a way to set a Quizport time limit to start counting once the student has first entered and continue it's count regardless if a student closes out and returns later?
I'm looking for a solution that will allow a student a fixed period of time per attempt at the Quizport.
Again, thanks everyone for your advice and help!
Chad
Hi Chad,
I see what you mean: if the student starts at 2pm and has 6 hours to complete the material, then they must finish by 8pm regardless of how many times they log out, log in, go to sleep, take a break, etc.
Unfortunately, the QuizPort timers don't work like that.
The QuizPort timers count the time the material was displayed to the student. Of course, we don't know if the student was actually looking at the material on the screen, or if they copied it somehow, and worked on it offline somewhere, before coming back and completing it later. But QuizPort tries to keep track of how long each student was interacting with the material on the screen.
If your class was all meeting together and were working through the material in step, then you could set dates and times when the material was to "open" and "close". That would allow you to control each person's access to exactly six hours. However, it sounds like you want your students to be able to access your course freely, so it is not possible to set the same start and stop time for everybody.
Related to this point, I have heard requests for limiting course enrolment to a specific time after a student enrols in a course. Each student's enrolment time would always be the same duration, but their start and stop times would be unique. I do not recall what happened to this idea, "relative enrolment", but it sounds similar to what a you want.
Just a minute, I have found it:
So this facility is available for courses - the duration is measured in days not hours. At the moment though, QuizPorts don't work like this. QuizPorts attempt to count the total time students are interacting with the material. If a student navigates away from the QuizPort, the timer pauses and will be resmed when the student comes back to have a look at the QuizPort material.
regards
Gordon
Gordon,
Thank you again for your help. I think I might be able to make Enrollment Duration work for my needs.
I'm extremely impressed with your Quizport module! Thanks for developing a very useful tool.
Happy new year,
Chad
You're welcome Chad.
For my future reference, I have added "investigate relative open and close times" to my QuizPort to do list.
I am thinking in terms of allowing both the open and close dates to be absolute (as they are now) or relative. The could be relative to the students enrolment in the course, relative to the open (or close!) date of another QuizPort, or relative to the first time another QuizPort was first accessed.
This would solve the situation you are in. All QuizPorts except the first one would be closed until the first one had been accessed. Then they would all close 6 hours after the first one was accessed.
I am slightly concerned that it might make the programming to fussy and slow, and I think it would add complexity to the setting up of QuizPorts. We would have to think about what to do in the tricky situations. For example, how can we easily show a teacher what QuizPorts start relative to a given QuizPort? What do we do if the first QuizPort gets deleted? Or the section it contains becomes hidden, thereby making the other QuizPort inaccessible? It may be better to add this functionality via the "Conditional activities" functionality of Moodle 2.0 core - i.e. not in the QuizPort code, as this is merely an activity module and should not really worry about other modules.
Anyway, it is on the list, and will resurface in due course and recieve due consideration.
Happy New Year to you too!
Gordon
Hi Chad,
How does this six-hour QuizPort course fit into what you are teaching? Is is a supplement, an assessment, some blend of purposes?
Just curious. The variety of people here that use HotPots and QuizPorts have a variety of aims. I have learned loads by just observing and sometimes asking here and there.
Thanks,
Jeff
