I ran into http://www.learnclick.com/ ... I wish Moodle had a graphical way to edit cloze questions that was as easy as that.
Surely it's not too hard now to have a new editor that can read and write our cloze text format. A start was made here and then abandoned: MDL-16154 Any volunteers to finish that off?
That UI is OK for creating simple questions.
The difficulty is that our aspirations in Moodle are rather higher. We want to be able to to give targetted feedback when students put certain common wrong answers into a given box, and so on.
Of course it is still perfectly possible that we could build a nicer JavaScript interface to edit such questions, to replace the current monolithic form, but it would be a lot of work, both to build and maintain. So far that has not happened, but it could in future.
We have a web developper at our university who would be interested to develop such an editor. However, he's quite busy in January and could start in February. In the meantime, why not continue the discussion on how the editor should look like and what kind of functionalities it should include?
Cheers,
Samuel
There have been at least 5 attempts at a new interface for the Cloze question type in the last 10 years using at least three different technologies, Java, Javascript and plain HTML forms.
This indicates that plenty of people see this need and find creating questions with the current syntax a challenge. The lack of any standard adopted solution from all this work indicates it is not a trivial problem. Part of the reason is the inherent complexity of the Moodle Cloze question type, it does more than any other question type I have seen covering a similar problem type.
In the end I decided I was asking the wrong question. Instead of "how can I improve the interface to Cloze question creation” I asked "do I absolutely need all the features of the Moodle Cloze question type". I decided the answer was no and created an entirely new and much simpler gapfill question.
https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=qtype_gapfill
Because there have been several attempts at an interface to the Moodle Cloze question type, anyone starting a new one would have existing code to be inspired by such as
http://projects.ael.uni-tuebingen.de/quiz/htmlarea/index.php
I have played with that solution and it looks really quite good.
Hi all,
so far the Javascript TinyMCE plugin we developed (which Marcus mentioned above) has served us well, and (I think) it covers all of the options you have when using the bare syntax (which none of our teachers could be bothered with). Coming from language teaching, the lack of a CLOZE quiz user interface has always struck me as an incredible oversight. And it's really not all that complex?
Just for completeness' sake (Marcus, your link points somewhere else than where it's saying):
http://projects.ael.uni-tuebingen.de/quiz/htmlarea
It can be quite helpful as a mere "webservice" too. I'm extremely happy to see that Moodle now seems to allow "real" plugins to TinyMCE (i.e. adding plugins without modifying core). We'll start making the necessary modifications to make the plugin fit 2.4 - but if anyone wants to take it as a codebase for something "official" go ahead!
The correct URL for the tuebingen project is http://projects.ael.uni-tuebingen.de/quiz/htmlarea/index.php
Joseph
Dear Pierre,
this editor currently does not attempt to validate input, it only aids in creating well-formed syntax. Validation is done server side by the Moodle question form, independent of whether you have used the editor or not. We simply did/do not have the resources for duplicating the existing validation functionality in javascript.
This means that the editor will not keep users from blundering and creating a faulty quiz question under certain conditions.
I understand that you want to have a tool that is foolproof and perfect, but I personally don't think perfection is the way to go in this particular case, for this particular purpose - a little more guidance in creating the syntax goes a long way.
One part of the problem is that the Moode Cloze question is not a "real" question but more like a mini-quiz, containing a number of questions, or "sub-questions". And since the Cloze question aims at containing a number of different sub-question types, it is really difficult to obtain at the same time the inherent characteristics of each of those sub-questions and to provide a user-friendly interface.
The solution I offered, a few years ago, was to first create all the needed sub-questions separately, place them into their own category and automatically build the Cloze question out of those sub-questions. For those Cloze questions containing a fairly large number and a variety of sub-questions, I found it to be a good solution. Since there has not been much interest in that solution I have not upgraded it to MOODLE 2.
Actually, at the moment, none of the solutions that have been proposed will allow retaining the full capacity of each individual sub-question in a user-friendly interface. As underlined by Tim this is far from being a trivial problem.
Joseph
