Which sort of plugin is best for the question bank

Which sort of plugin is best for the question bank

by Tim Hunt -
Number of replies: 3
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For a long time I have thought that it would be good to re-organise the question bank code so that each part of it was a separate plug-in. That is, we would have plugins qustionlist, questioncategories, questionimport and questionexport.

The reason for doing this is that occasionally people want to add extra functionality there. For example a tool to automatically create questions from glossary entries, or a page to display some extra statistics about where each question is used.

Now, one way to do this would be a new plugin type, say in question/ui/...

But I was just wondering, is that necessary? Woudl it be feasible to do each of these plug-ins as something more generic like admin/tool or report plugins?

While I am on the subject. With hind-sight, I think we got it wrong when we introduced separate admin/tool and report plugins (at the same time that we mearged admin/report and course/report plugins). What I now wish we had done was to create a single plugin type tool, that replaced all of admin/report, coures/report, local, and the new admin/tool. Oh well. Too late now.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Which sort of plugin is best for the question bank

by Itamar Tzadok -

Right in time, as I'm starting to work on an alternate ui for quiz authoring to improve usability and efficiency which in my experience have only decreased since the introduction of the new quiz editing ui in Moodle 2.

For instance I'm exploring an idea of organize all question bank functionality - categories, question list, import/export - in one view by way of blocks which could be arranged in whichever order that works for me in a blocks type page (such as My Moodle). The block would serve as a ui wrapper to the function api to the effect that if I want to create an alternate ui I can implement it as a specialized block.

For quiz editing I can have a "question cart" block to which I add questions from the question bank. Then when I edit the quiz I can dump the references from the "question cart" into the quiz and proceed to set quiz specifics such as order, paging etc.

smile

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In reply to Itamar Tzadok

Re: Which sort of plugin is best for the question bank

by Tim Hunt -
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Yes. The quiz editing page is definitely a problem - and I have not had any great ideas for a solution yet. I look forwards to seeing what you come up with.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Which sort of plugin is best for the question bank

by Itamar Tzadok -

Here is an illustration of some conceptual work on the question bank interface. The idea is simply to have all 4 functions - questions, categories, import, export - on one page. Here the last three functions are pushed into blocks and added to the questions page.

This is just a rough start but for what it's worth, here goes. smile

 

 

The questions categories is currently enhanced with two bulk functions - add categories ('import' in the illustration but should be 'add') and delete categories.

Adding categories is done in the custommenu style so you can add a hierarchy by one go.

Deleting categories uses a swipe left gesture for marking categories and then a click on a delete button that appears for that purpose, to delete all marked categories.

 

Then there is import and export each one in its own block so as to benefit from the block builtin collapsibility for better usability. The blocks use the original question import/export forms and processing. For my purposes I slightly tweaked these forms to change the file format radio buttons to dropdown to save space. The latter is a bit more important for the import form where I also added an editor which allows me to import questions to html formats (if supported) by entering them into the editor in the designated format.

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