Joseph,
I appreciate you taking time to respond to my previous post. Here are a few clarifications.
1. first things...
- Good point on the documentation. I haven't looked at the code itself (which I should). I only went to the development wiki and noticed it was somewhat behind. The user documentation also needs some work explaining some of the new choices. Clicking ? on "How questions behave" doesn't explain those options very well yet, for instance. (Perhaps this is someone else's assignment besides Tim's.)
- I understand on the bugs. The particular one I mentioned is already in Tracker.
2. (print feature) I keep running into situations where students or course reviewers would like to see my quiz questions during a period when the quiz is not currently open. In a student role or guest role, this option isn't available to them. Here are some examples that have come up in my personal teaching.
- A student didn't complete an online homework assignment by the deadline. Because of this they didn't get credit, but wanted to see a copy of the questions so they could use them to study for the exam.
- A campus administrator or committee is reviewing my course. They wanted to see samples of assignments I give students to assure themselves that my assessments are aligned with my published learning objectives.
- A colleague (who did not use moodle) asked for a copy of some of my quizzes for adaptation in a similar course.
5, 6. Interactive with multiple tries type: Tim has created a new question behavior that seems quite powerful called interactive with multiple tries. It is similar to the older adaptive mode except that students are presented a new hint for each successive try at an answer. When no more hints are available, the student is given no more tries. I agree with you that adaptive questions are a powerful and important feature in moodle. My suggestion wasn't to eliminate them, but rather to consolidate these two types. Since they are so similar, it seems like this would improve maintenance and reduce complexity for users. If the new interactive with multiple tries questions had an option box to not display the hints (with everything else the same) they would be essentially the same as the old adaptive questions. To generalize them further, they could give the students an option to either ask for a hint (with an associated penalty) or try again without a hint.
You requested an example. Here is one:
Question (calculated): Muons at rest in the laboratory frame have a half-life of 1.6 microseconds. In an experiment with high energy muons going close to the speed of light, they are observed to have a half-life of {hl} microseconds. How fast are the muons travelling in meters per second?
Correct Answer: 3e8*sqrt(1-pow(1.6/{hl},2))
Hint 1: Recall that time dilation is responsible for the difference in lifetimes for the muon in the two different reference frames.
Hint 2: The relativistic factor gamma is the ratio of the half-life in the moving frame to the half-life in the rest frame.
Hint 3: The relativistic factor beta is related to gamma by the relation gamma = sqrt(1/(1-beta^2))
Hint 4: The speed v is related to beta by the relation v=beta*c, where c=3*10^8 is the speed of light in m/s.
One student tries the question and checks to see if their answer is right. They are very confident about knowing how to do this question but get the answer wrong. Upon checking their work they discover a simple error such as keying the numbers incorrectly on their calculator and want to resubmit the answer without additional assistance. Upon submission, they discover their answer is correct. An appropriate score in this case would involve a small penalty for being sloppy using the calculator, but reward the student for being able to answer the question without additional assistance.
A second student is very uncertain about how to approach the problem. They come up with an answer but are quite uncertain they even have the correct approach. When they check their answer, they find that the answer is wrong. They check their work and can think of no way to do things any differently. They decide it is worthwhile to try the question again after getting some assistance in terms of a hint. After they see the hint, they recognize how to solve the problem and solve it correctly. They get partial credit for the question, but less credit than the student who arrived at the correct answer without needing the hint.
A third student tries multiple random guess in solving the problem, hoping some combination of the supplied parameters might give him or her the correct answer. Eventually, they exhaust the available credit and get no points for this question.
Presently, adaptive questions (if they worked for calculated questions) wouldn't work because they only give one hint (feedback) no matter how many times a student has attempted a question. The interactive with multiple tries questions gets closer to working. Students can get more and more hints as they need them on successive tries. A student who doesn't require multiple tries can get more credit than a student requiring hints to answer the question. However, this question type still lacks the ability to allow a student who doesn't require a hint to try answering again without using the hint which he or she may not need.
7. What I was suggesting here was a way to take advantage of Tim's great work by being able to bundle existing moodle components activities and resources together in a bundle, similar to what a lesson does. The linking and branching in lessons need to be present, but the chance to simply give students a linear progression through set of activities related to the same topic seems helpful. Let me give you an example to illustrate what I mean. Let's say I wanted to give prepare an online activity for my students to help them understand Newton's Second Law.
- They start by clicking on a link in moodle which says Newton's Second Law.
- Next, they are asked to take a pre-assessment quiz (using Tim's quiz module) to see how well they understand the Second Law already.
- If they get above a certain score on their quiz, they don't need to proceed further and get credit for mastering the concept.
- If they get below that score, they are asked to read a resource (HRL, web page, file, wiki, ...) dealing with the first aspect of the concept.
- Next they are given a mastery quiz (using Tim's module again) to see if they understand the first part of the idea.
- If they have done well enough on the quiz to move on, they are allowed to do so. Otherwise, they are asked to go back to the resources about the idea and review them (or choose other resources).
- After they have demonstrated mastery of this first concept, they are given another.
- After they have finished all concepts, they are given a final assessment on Newton's Second Law.
Many of the ideas in my field of physics are vertical. Students who are used to using the web to randomly search for information often don't recognize the need to proceed sequentially through course material in order to be able to build on earlier concepts when presented with later ones. This kind of approach helps guide them in the kind of learning they need to master this kind of vertical material.
The building blocks for building this kind of "lesson" are mostly already there in moodle. With completion tracking I think we can set up the check points as I've outlined above. We can then use existing moodle modules for resources and activities. We're just lacking the ability to bundle a set of activities together in a nice unit where we can tell the students to complete an entire activity and give them a single grade for that unit when it's done.
