Hi Tim,
I've read about drag and drop questions for Moodle 2 and have seen an example in question 5 of this quiz
However there isn't a drag and drop question option when I go to create questions in the question bank (using 2.1). How do I get the drag and drop questions?
Many thanks in advance
Rick
There has never been a drag-and-drop question type in any official Moodle release. (By the way, you are running Moodle 2.0.1. Moodle 2.1 has not been released yet.)
There are several third-party plugin question types:
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=975&filter=1
and
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=978&filter=1
have now been updated, so there are Moodle 2.0 compatible versions.
I don't think there is a Moodle 2.0 version of http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=390&filter=1 yet.
The one you link to on OpenLearn LabSpace is yet a fourth question type running on the OU's customised version of Moodle 1.9.
We have made so many customisations to the quiz that our question types are no longer compatible with standard Moodle 1.9, and vice versa, which is a terrible situation to be in. We are gradually digging ourselves out of that hole, which is why the quiz in Moodle 2.0 looks a lot like that quiz on lab space.
However, that is only half the battle. You will notice that LabSpace quiz is described as "interactive with multiple tries", which is a bit like, but not exactly the same as "adaptive mode" in standard Moodle. Resolving that difference is what I am working on now Development:Question_Engine_2. All that work should be in Moodle 2.1, and then we will finally be able to release our question types to the world, and benefit from everyone else's question types.
Brilliant, thanks for this Tim. I've just read your Question Engine 2 development doc too and think that sounds really exciting. Is it your overall ambition to have all the Openmark capabilities incorporated into Moodle? Is there scope for Moodle to have the type of sophisticated short answer questions used by OpenMark (IAT (Intelligent Assessment Technologies) Free Text system) too? Or would things get too complicated!?
Rick
It is not our plan to have "all the Openmark capabilities incorporated into Moodle". There will always be capabilities that other systems have that are prohibitively expensive to (re-)implement in Moodle. In OpenMark it is the ability to write arbitrary Java code to process the student't response and determine the feedback. In Stack it is that they have incorporated a computer algebra system (Maxima) written in Lisp. Therefore, the the current approach of using the Opaque bridge (Development:Opaque) to allow questions implemented in other compatible systems to be used in a Moodle quiz will continue to be a good option to have.
However, there are other times when it does make sense to re-implement certain functionality directly in Moodle, because a lot of people will find it useful, so it is worth making it available right there, nicely integrated with all the question editing and import/export that Moodle provides.
Free text matching is one of those things. I posted a few months ago about the OU's development roadmap for the quiz, and you will see that this feature is there. In fact, we have moved away from IAT, not because it wasn't working, but because we found that a simpler approach (The_OU_PMatch_algorithm) worked just as well and was easier to author questions with. So that is the way we are going.
This might be an opportune moment to announce that we are outsourcing the development of all those new question types, and the person we have contracted to do the work is Jamie Pratt. Jamie did the new quiz reports in Moodle 2.0 (again with the OU paying) and he made the Question creation activity module (it's downloadable from the modules and plugins database), and did a lot of work on the question bank at the same time. We will be publishing all these question types in the modules and pugins database once they are done, and there is a finished Moodle 2.1 that they can be used with.
Thanks for this Tim, that's a great insight for me to plan for the future
Rick
