Friendly print format for quiz

Friendly print format for quiz

by Miro Iliaš -
Number of replies: 15

Greetings.

I appreciate all your work in the development of Moodle.

I have a problem: In Moodle 2.3 I prepared a quiz for my students of Chemistry, but  this quiz can be distributed in paper form only. There are too many students and they can be examined only with pen and paper.

So I printed the pdf-layout. But as you can see in the pdf attachement, the print layout is a little uneffective  - there is a lot of empty space on the left side, while the important text with all quiz questions is compressed on the right side.

Please can this default printing format be somehow improved ?

 

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In reply to Miro Iliaš

Re: Friendly print format for quiz

by Ian Hunt -

I teach Chemistry too, large class (> 700). I not sure why you don't think you can use online materials for a quiz. Larger size favours online over pen and paper unless you require your students to all write at the same time. If this is the case, then I not sure why one would use a Moodle quiz to create a paper based test. That seems to be the equivalent of trying to use a car as a boat.

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In reply to Ian Hunt

Re: Friendly print format for quiz

by Miro Iliaš -

Good morning (from Slovakia),

I would like to use Moodle in both ways, for online and for paper work.

Question bank serves as unique storage of material for exams, which students can elaborate individually on-line. Especially I appreciate generic calculated questions with adapted numerical answers represented as formulas.

However, at our faculty (www.fpv.umb.sk) we don't have a room with 30 working computers, so I have to resort to paper and pen examination. For that I have to print  the quiz (and its solutions for me) out.  And the printing layout becomes the issue.

 

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In reply to Miro Iliaš

Re: Friendly print format for quiz

by Ian Hunt -

OK, that explains that side of things. We too still use paper examinations but I would not use moodle to prepare a paper test since that really is not the intent of moodle.

 

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In reply to Miro Iliaš

Re: Friendly print format for quiz

by ben reynolds -

Hi  Miro,

I'm going to agree with Ian. Basically, a paper quiz is a paper quiz, and the fact that it is a pdf is not a moodle issue. It's a pdf formatting issue for Acrobat.

You will do best looking for layout solutions at acrobat sites, not moodle sites like this one.

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In reply to Miro Iliaš

Re: Friendly print format for quiz

by Steven Mao -

Hi Miro,

I was working on the a similar feature and implemented it using javascript. In case it might help, here is what I did to the attempt.php file:

- Create a print button, onclick it calls a function printQuiz()

- In printQuiz() function:

--- printQuiz() = window.open()

--- use querySelectorAll to grab qtext and ablock, which are the div classes for question text and answer block

--- loop through the arrays and printQuiz.document.write

--- additional formatting and styling

Hope this helps.

 

Mao

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In reply to Steven Mao

Re: Friendly print format for quiz

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Hi, Steven,

You have posted 3 times the exact same post to this Quiz forum. What's the point? Cross-posting is not considered good practice, please refrain from doing this in the future.mixed

Joseph

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In reply to Miro Iliaš

Re: Friendly print format for quiz [still wondering]

by Derek Chirnside -

This is one of several threads to do with quiz printing.  Plus

  1. Printing of quiz for archiving: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=181486
  2. Printing in PDF and other stuff https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=90791
  3. Oral testing: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=222565

The original tracker item is here: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-348 from 2003.  

Does anyone have any suggestions on a good way to get a little movement on this?  

What would be an ideal way?

  • Create a plugin to greate a print friendly view of the questions in a quiz?
  • Add a button on the page.  Can a plugin do this: insert some other functionality into a page?
  • a Report?
  • ??

Why I'd like this is today I had to do a whole bunch of edits to quiz questions, and needed hard copies to effectively work.

-Derek

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In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Friendly print format for quiz [still wondering]

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

You shouls "Create a plugin". If you just want the questions currently in the quiz, then a quiz report plugin is probably best.

If you want all questions from a particular area of the question bank, there is not an ideal plugin type for that. Perhaps a report plugin, or a block.

Of course, people mean two different things when they ask for "A way to print question":

  • For question editors, a display that shows all the content in all parts of the question.
  • For students, a hard-copy of just the question, that they can answer.

In the editors there is the question: can editors really review an iterective experience (how the question works) from a static representation of all the content? We have always been sceptical about that at the OU, which is why we have not developed this ourself yet, but our scepticism need not stop you.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Friendly print format for quiz [still wondering]

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

If you want all questions from a particular area of the question bank, there is not an ideal plugin type for that

Maybe a qformat plugin could do the job ?

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Friendly print format for quiz [still wondering]

by Derek Chirnside -

Tim, I was convinced you had posted sometime (in the last few months) saying an OU plugin for some sort of print format for quizzes was now available, but my Google skills have been inadequate to find it - or I am imagining things?

I'm about to need printed versions of tests again . . .

-Derek

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In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Friendly print format for quiz [still wondering]

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

We have a quiz report plugin which displays all the details of the question as it appears on the editing page, for a teacher to review. Sounds like that is not exactly what you are looking for.

And, it seems like we have not acutally put the code on github yet, but I think that is just lack of time.

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In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Friendly print format for quiz [still wondering]

by Eoin Campbell -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

I developed a quiz question format plug-in called WordTable, that allows you export questions from a question bank category (not a specific quiz) into a Word table format that displays all components of a question in a reasonably readable and paper-efficient format. You can also run a Word macro that re-formats it for printing as a student quiz, hiding the answers and hints.

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In reply to Miro Iliaš

Re: Friendly print format for quiz

by Frankie Kam -
Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Miro

 

You can check out the Moodle2Word plugin at which is found at:
https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=qformat_wordtable

In fact, 2 years a go, I blogged about the Moodle 1.9 version of this plugin
which I 'enhanced' with some format improvements so that I could generate printer-friendly
versions of my Moodle quizzes.
Here's the blog entry which could give you some idea of what can be done:
http://moodurian.blogspot.com/2012/08/export-questions-from-moodle-19.html

Cheers
Frankie Kam

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In reply to Frankie Kam

Re: Friendly print format for quiz

by Eoin Campbell -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Just to note that today I released a new version (v2.8.3) of this plugin (cf. Moodle2Word) so that it now handles questions containing badly formatted HTML.

Originally, Moodle2Word failed entirely to export questions where any component of any question in the selected category contained any content which was not well-formed XHTML. If chunks of text from Word are copied into the various question component fields in the editing form, they might not always be cleaned up properly by the rich text editor (TinyMCE?) before being saved. In addition, I have seen it mentioned that after a lot of editing, question components within the rich text editor can progressively become less well-formatted. The latest version resolves this issue, I hope. 

Technical note: the plugin uses the PHP HTMLTidy extension to clean up text, if it's installed. If not, it uses the PHP strip_tags function instead, and makes a less reliable but still decent effort to ensure the export succeeds.

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