Are any of these 2 possible with the quiz timer in 1.9:
- Student can stop, then resume quiz timer
- Timer automatically stops when the student Is disconnected from the site/server?
Thanks
No. See http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=171800 .
There's no advantage to (1) over having no time limit. The student could print out the quiz in half a second, stop the timer, spend lots of time solving it, then start the timer and enter all the answers quickly.
For (2), there's just no way for the server to tell if the student is disconnected. The server can only tell when they load or submit a page. After a student loads a page, the server can't tell whether they're working on the problem, reading a book, or if their internet connection is down.
Thanks for the reponse.
The scenario: a location where there are frequent power, internet outages during quiz attempts, but you would like the students to be able to continue from where the left off, with responses intact, whenever a connection to the server/site is re-established. And this is a timed quiz.
In this scenario, why are you setting a time limit in the first place?
Because to begin with it is a timed quiz - our intention is to not give an indefinite amount of time for completing the quiz. But a power or internet outage can occur during that time (during the attempt)
In reply to Tieku Bortei-Doku
Re: Quiz Timer - possible to stop and resume?
by Raquel Sacristán P. -
Any solution to this?
The only really practical solution is to not use Moodle to enforce the time-limit. Get a human invigilator, who can apply common sense, to tell people when to start and stop, just like has been done in exams for years.
We also use the Remote Learner Moodle 2.4 Quiz module at our Med School in conjunction with the Respondus LockDown Browser. Students use their own personal laptops to take their quizzes/exams while connected to our secure campus wireless network and connecting to the Remote Learner Moodle server hosted in the cloud. This has worked well dating back to 2008 with minor problems but the biggest one being lost time when there is a computer problem or internet problem.
Since these student computer systems (Both MAC and PC) are not managed by the IT department, we always have a few students out of 100 that will have a freeze issue while taking a quiz requiring us to either close out their secure LDB or reboot their system completely which can take upwards of 5-10 minutes to get them back into their quiz .
If that does not work we have a few spare laptops that we will swap out on the fly, so the student can continue their quiz using the loaner. Unfortunately due to the time lost while these students whose systems froze or whatever other anomaly happened and required us to close out their exam and start it back up, opens us up to grievances/lawsuits filed by these students. Their claim, is that because they lost time on their quiz they failed the exam which would not have happened had they lost that additional time.
These students also use another online exam based system for their "Finals" in Med school that mimics their USMLE (Like the BAR exam for lawyers except for doctors) exam through the NBME (National Board of Medical Examiners). This system is called GEMS and requires the students to download a 2mb client called the PC-Secure Browser. It works very similar to the moodle Quiz module but has additional features such as: Strike out Text (Students can cross out text in questions); Highlight Text, (Students can highlight Important Keywords) and last but not least if there is an internet outage, computer freeze or any other reason the client computer loses connection to the Exam server the timer stops immediately.
Once the student starts back up their exam the timer picks up right at the exact second where it lost connectivity and they continue on without losing anytime whatsoever eliminating any chance they can file a grievance with the school. A feature rich quiz module like GEMS incorporated into a future release of Moodle would be the final piece of the puzzle to the problems we encounter while conducting online exams VIA moodle.
You can see how the GEMS system works here from either a MAC or PC https://wbt.nbme.org/wbtexam/practice/download.jsp It would be glorious if the Timer Stop, Strike out Text, and the Highlight Text features were integrated into a future release of the moodle Quiz Module.
Just my two cents
Thanks for reading
Strike out Text and Text Highlight are things that would be nice to have and could be implemented as question types for example. The other stuff is generally beyond the remit of a web application. A browser works like a browser works like a browser and when you are offering a web application you are depending on the browser to work and if people bring their own you cannot depend on it.
Actually, now we have JavaScript doing auto-save, and as-of Moodle 2.5.4, detecting when the student loses their internet connection (MDL-42504) it might be possible to do something with the timing. However, anything client-side, which this necessarily must be, is open to abuse, unless you are using a secure browser.
There is, of course, an easier way. The quiz lets you override the time-limit for a single student. If a student has had problems during an exam, the invigilator/proctor could add a user override for that student, extending their time-limit to allow for the amount of time they have lost.
Also, a student bringing a laptop to the exam is only a difference of degree to a student bringing their own pen. If that pen breaks, will the student sue the school? Well, of course the student will bring many pens to be safe, but they can probably only bring one laptop.
Marcus "Strike out Text and Text Highlight are things that would be nice to have and could be implemented as question types for example."
+1
I did spend some time working on how this might be implemented, but then decided I should finish the question type I had started, and I still have some features to add to that.
We implemented this sort of interaction in our OpenMark system (but I can't find an example online at the moment). It has not been used enough in our courses for it to be worth making a Moodle question type. If someone else wanted to make a Moodle question type for this, that would be great.
In order to implement this in an accessible way, what we did was to make each work in the paragraph into the label for a checkbox, so the HTML is something like
<p>Hilight the subject of this sentence:</p>
<p><input type="checkbox" name="word1" id="word1" value="1"><label for="word1" class="notselected">Moodle</label>
<input type="checkbox" name="word2" id="word2" value="1"><label for="word2" class="notselected">is</label>
<input type="checkbox" name="word3" id="word3" value="1"><label for="word3" class="notselected">wonderful</label>.</p>
If you do this, then clicking on a word automatically toggles the corresponding checkbox, and this also deals with submitting the list of selected words when the question is submitted.
Then, you need CSS to hide the checkboxes (while still allowing them to be submitted when the form is submitted. Base this on the accesshide style.) You need to ensure the words appear to just have a single space beween them. You need a bit of JavaScript to change the class name on the labels between selected/notselected when the state of the checkbox changes, and you need a bit of CSS to style the difference between selected/notselected in a usable and accessible way.
(I can't remember if you also need a hidden input like <input type="hidden" name="word1" value="0"> before each checkbox, like we do for advcheckbox type in Moodle forms.)
Would love to see someone taking on the challenge of building this question type. I suspect most of the work will be in making the editing form.
I really think there could be some great uses for a pause/resume feature with the timer. For instance, wouldn't it be useful for practice exams?
Imagine a student using the timer to budget their time spent on each question, but also having the ability to pause the exam. There is no concern about cheating, just the ability for the student to take a full exam in more than one sitting (at their own pace). Some have suggested to just remove the timer in this case, but then the student doesn't get the benefit of keeping track of their time.
Any advice on here?
Where should I start looking to get this accomplished?