Quiz

At long last, the user-friendly interface we have dreamed of, with all those "useless" (to me) sections collapsed away.

Joseph

I think that the "Review Options" section needs to go back to looking like the old column format (2.4).  It is much harder to look at all those check boxes and how they change as you progress through the options now.  That will cause confusion on when things are visible and when they aren't.

I would vote to remove the idea of advanced options entirely.  It seems very silly to have a "show more"  that shows only 1 or 2 more options.  Now that the form isn't that long in the first place it makes sense to me to just dump them all out there.

EDIT:  I just read through some of Tim's comments in MDL-38600 and had forgotten that the advanced settings are customizable.  How much does this get used?

Overall this is a phenomenal improvement that will really help with training.  I think everything is organized and named well.  The collapsed sections make it easy to see the organization that has been there all along.

I notice that some sections that have a "show more" link, that only about one more item is added when you click on this link.  This being the case, and with the collapsed sections feature, I would suggest that the "show more" link be eliminated and simply show all the items in each section as the default.

While I like the potential idea of fast scrolling or elminating some scrolling, most of those rolled up options are important to me when I create a quiz.  I don't think it will save much work to have to manually open the section in order to be able to see what the current setting is.  Quiz creators shouldn't be ignorant of the actual settings.

At the very minimum, some abbreviated form of the current setting should be viewable without uncollapsing the section.

An expand-all button might also be helpful.

I've found CTRL+END to be a good pop-to-the bottom tool.

Might be worthwhile to consider a behavior of first time through or second time through.  Quiz setting templates might save some time as well.

Hello Tim,

thanks for advice to this discussion. We are very happy about the collapsed sections in activity settings pages in 2.5. Yesterday we made a general check about this for all activities and found that some terms in section names are confusing. We made the check mainly to change German  language pack.

The names of sections are the main orientation for teachers to select  a section for settings. So the naming has to be very clear and the diffferences between the names have to make a difference. Even for non-native english speaking teachers  or teachers that are beginning to use Moodle. Problem in quiz is 'Display' and 'Layout'.

But more generally.

I liked very much the concept in quiz module settings page to hide settings as advanved for teachers. My suggestion is sinsce long time to add this consequent to all activties. Some of the settings are very seldom used and should be hidden (advanced setting) normally. The quiz usage concepts in institutions are very different and I would opt for all solutions that admins can define default settings and hide each and every setting as advanced that is not a mandatory setting per instance like title and description for quiz.

The idea is

• reduce complexity to a minimum. Quizzes are complex by definition and teacher should concentrate to the main aspects.
• reduce number of sections and rename them
• make use of standard settings as quick as possible for teachers. Define titele and description and go to the question editing process
• give access to additional basic settings if required by opening sections
• give access to advanced settings if required by clicking to 'more' link
• disable some settings fully if required by hiding 'more'/'less' link through CSS definition in design (invisible)

The problem generally is that we can't predefine which setting is part of a standard configuration for a quiz, which is basic and which is advanced. Specially for quizzes we've seen lots of different concepts in institutions: secondary schools different than vocational schools than universities than corporate.

My suggestion now:

1. Go forward with adding default settings for all features in quiz module in plugin settings
2. Same for advanced settings.
3. Hide advanced setting in sections behind 'more' link.
4. Show only Title and Description in standard view  for activity instance settings in courses.
5. Re-sort order of sections and settings to sections
6. Check if all titles of sections are seperate and can be renamed individually by language strings.
7. Add help information to all sections

Some suggestions

• new order of section by teacher workflow process and user process through quiz
  Quiz Access -> Question presenttaion -> Grade and Feedback
• Reduce number of sections. No section with less than three settings. Otherwise it makes no sense to use more/less definition.
  • Rename Timing to 'Quiz access'
  • Add settings from 'Extra restrictions ...' to 'Quiz access'. Delete section 'extra restrictions'. Extra settings can be defined as advanced.
  • Add Review options and General Feedback settings to Grade section. Grade section is a default setting for graded activities. So it makes sense to collect all grade related settings here.
    Alternative: Add 'Decimal places in grades' and 'Decimal places in question grades' to 'grade'-section. Leave Review options as seperate section.
  • Add 'show users picture' from display to 'Layout' section. Elimate 'Display' section
  • Add overall feedback to 'Review options' or 'Grade' section.
  • Move 'Shuffle within question' and 'How question behave'to 'Layout'. Rename layout to 'Question presentation' or something similar.

Suggestion for renaming of sections. We found that section titles with two or three words gives better orientation than one word titles.

Ralf

Apologies for twice replying:

Quote Tim: "There will be an expand/collapse all button before 2.5 is released:"

Agree 100%

Quote Tim: "might make sense to split the form into more or fewer sections;"

Reorganize so that related settings are together. Though current grouping is logical, Timing settings are related to: number of attempts, review options, and extra restrictions on attempts. Dispay grade setting is related to grade. Groups is related to grade. Restrict access is related to timing. Either that or unhiding a category that is related to another category should unhide those as well.

Quote Tim: "it may no longer be necessary to have show/hide advanced fields (which now also work slightly differently)."

Definitely not necessary for separate unhide buttons if unhiding by category. Asterisks should be enough.

Quote Tim: "should we make any changes to the quiz settings form ...? ... the settings are currently grouped into logical sections with clear names."

Agree names are clear. Relationships between sections however take time to learn. Any behavior or grouping that would enhance the understanding of setting relationships would help.

Wordy additional responses below:
---------------------------

Timing: I use this every time and would need it open almost every time. Unfortunately the review options depend on enabling the close quiz setting. Unrolling timing without unrolling review options might be problematic. Gets complicated when a checkbox on one form changes visibilty on another.
Grade: Must set category every time at minimum. Am still experimenting with number of attempts and grading method as alternative learning tools.
Layout: Almost never used. Default to as shown on edit screen 99%.
Question behavior: I am still experimenting here, even after 1.5 years of using Moodle. These settings are extremely related to review options and should probably be together. How questions behave should at minimum be visible from the main screen.
Review options: If roll-up behavior is used, this must unroll with Question behavior. Otherwise big mistakes might occur in quiz design.
Display: I agree that this should either be with Layout or should be split up. It is debateable whether grading under display should be separate from the "Grading" category.
Extra restrictions: I often use the password for in-class testing to control start time. Since this is an access limitation, it could be combined with the timing provisions and renamed "access".
Overall feedback: This group should always be rolled up since it is rarely used and takes the most space. A template should be accessible with commonly use atta-boys. This is the major problem when scrolling to the save button.

Common module settings: It is unclear what the relationships are between these. If all of them relate to groups, then the category should be "groups".

General strategy:
1) Add templates which aggregate commonly used settings. Display the template name at roll-up. Templates could greatly reduce the need to view and tweak the settigns.
2) Aggregate related categories so that it is difficult to overlook when a related setting change affects a hidden category.
3) Naming of categories should accurately reflect its contents but using 2 words always is not necessary. There is no advantage of "Quiz access" over "Access" since the context is "Quiz". Current naming is fine but if content is reorganized it should change to indicate the newness of the organization.
4) Show/hide all

Tim, this suggestion may not be directly related to what you are doing with quiz settings, but I thought that I would mention it to you here.

Has there been any work towards moving quiz statistics from the Navigation Block to the Quiz Settings Block?  I have noticed that others have made this suggestion, and thought that I would bring it up again here.

The concept would be that all quiz related items should be in the same block.  It could look something like my graphic below.

very good approach.

1) please add the collapse/expand feature like Rick esplained here: Re: Improving the quiz settings page

2) add a "save all"  buttons in each section - this will reduce scrolling a lot and is well known from many other web applications.

3) add a tag like in wordpress for "more" in the description part. This makes it easyier to give one line explaination on the course page and show the full description  when the activity is open.

Hi guys,

We’ve made some improvements to the question editing forms. They’re now part of Moodle 2.5 so you should see them pretty soon. Highlights are:

• Grouping the answer/choices fields so they’re more logical and need less scrolling to view

• Hide editor tools: Hide the html editor toolbars by default on most fields with a show/hide button to reveal the toolbars. Saves a lot of screen space.

• Pre fill combined feedback fields: Less fields to fill out.

Hope this makes your lives easier. I've attached a screenshot showing most of the improvments. You can even see the expand all/ collapse all buttons you requested.

If you have any comments or suggestions we’d like to hear them.