Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Gerald Grow -
Number of replies: 10

Using Moodle 2.4.4+ here. I have had extensive experience with Moodle 1.9 using Hot Potatoes and Quizport, and I am trying to convert to Moodle 2+ and quiz.

(1) I'm trying to learn how to update my Quiz questions. If I update the question bank, does that automatically update the questions that are embedded in quizzes?

If not, how do I find the questions that need updating, when they might be repeated among a number of different quizzes?

Using Hot Potatoes and Moodle 1.9, I could see the files containing the questions. Not so on Moodle 2+ and Quiz?

I have a large course with a large question bank (2,000 + items), so keeping it up to date is important.

Thanks for any help. And BTW, I spent a half hour looking everywhere I could think of before asking the help of the forum. It's a dumb question, I know.

 

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In reply to Gerald Grow

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Tim Hunt -
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Questions really live in the question bank. When you add a question to the quiz, you are just making a link from the quiz to the question in the question bank.

So, you can add one question to many quizzes, and then if you edit it, it will change in all quizzes.

I am not surprised you could not find an answer to your question by googling. For this sort of question, it is often easier to experiment in Moodle, to see what happens. It is useful to have a test course where you can do that, and it does not matter if you mess things up.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Mary Cooch -
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Thanks for your question. You might not have found the answer by googling but I added your question to Questions FAQ so others might be luckiersmile

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Gerald Grow -

Aha! I think I understand a limitation I was concerned about.

I have two copies of the same course on the same Moodle site (each created by restoring the same backup).

When I edit a quiz question in Course 1, it changes all instances of that question in Course 1. But it does not change anything in Course 2, even though its questions are identical to those in Course 1.

That's the result I just got by trying it on a development site. Does that sound right to you?

In practice, I might have 20 copies of the identical course running at the same time, in use by students from all around the country, on the same Moodle installation. In order to update a particular question in all of them, it looks like I will have to perform the update on EACH of the 20 copies.

In this sense, there is no "master" question bank. The question bank, apparently, is copied into each instance of each course. Am I right about that?

Thanks for your time and attention in answering this.

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In reply to Gerald Grow

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Rick Jerz -
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I do not think you are correct.  It might depend upon how you set up your test banks.  Are all 20 quizzes using the same test bank?  If so, changing the test bank question once will change the question in all 20 quizzes.  If each quiz has its own unique test bank that it uses, then yes, you will have to change all 20 questions.   Based upon what I think you want to do, I suggest making sure that you have only one test bank that is used for all quizzes.

Tim and/or Mary will probably be able to confirm what I am saying.  This has always been the beauty of the Moodle quiz engine, it makes it easy to correct and modify quiz questions (unlike some LMS's, such as Blackboard).  I am surprised that your experimenting did not confirm this, which makes me wonder how you have your test banks set up.

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In reply to Gerald Grow

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Tim Hunt -
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Well, by default questions are shared within one course.

You can share more widely than that: http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/How_to_let_teachers_share_questions_between_courses, but there are issues with this. E.g. if you do that, then sometimes you hit problems when you try to backup and restore a single course.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Gerald Grow -

Thanks for the information AND the warning.

The ability to back up and restore individual courses is important, so I would not want to risk having problems with that function.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Gerald Grow -

On second thought, Tim, could you say more about why question-sharing could cause a problem during backup and restore, and if there is a way around these problems?

In our case, all questions are imported and added and edited only by the administrator -- because we produce a standard course used by a number of different schools. Teachers of individual courses do not modify the questions or quizzes.

Would I as administrator have the necessary permissions to share questions among different courses? And would those courses backup and restore properly if nobody else is changing the questions?

Is there a known answer to this, or do I need to go try it experimentally?

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In reply to Gerald Grow

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Tim Hunt -
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Well, if I understood the problem well enough to explain it clearly, I might acutally have fixed it wink

You can get a list of the issues from the tracker: https://tracker.moodle.org/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20MDL%20AND%20resolution%20%3D%20Unresolved%20AND%20component%20%3D%20Questions%20and%20component%20%3D%20Backup

Of those, the ones to worry about are MDL-38870, MDL-20570, MDL-20570, MDL-12403.

If you are operating as admin, then these things are much less likely to actually affect you. For example, one of the hard cases is when a teacher who does not have access to the shared area of the question bank backs up a course using shared questions, and then restores it into another course.

As admin, you have permission to do anything, including share questions. When you are looking at the question bank, you should see question categories 'Shared in Context: System'.

Who has edited the question in the past does not affect these backup and restore problems.

Again, experiments to confirm what does and does not work would be a good idea. And if you think you have learned something new, consider adding a comment to an appropriate bug report.

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In reply to Gerald Grow

Re: Newbie questions: Does updating question bank update quizzes?

by Rick Jerz -
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Gerald, I am not sure if I am off target with understanding your problem, along with Tim's comments.

Sharing questions across courses heavily depends upon setting up course categories to support what you want to do.  If you want questions to be shared between two course, for example, they must be in the same course category (right, Tim).

Also, in Moodle you can have quiz categories that you need to know how to use to your advantage.

It might be possible that when restoring a course, that if its backuped category does not exist in your current Moodle, Moodle might be confused with which category to put it into, so it may not end up in the right category.

Having said this, we go back to Moodle does naturally share quiz questions, but be careful to manage categories and quiz hierarchies.  This category issue can cause some havoc when backing up and restoring courses (questions not being where you expect them to be).

Hope some of this helps.

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