Auto saving during Essay question

Auto saving during Essay question

by Lauren Panton -
Number of replies: 10

Hi, 

One of our faculty members given essay quizzes only in Moodle. The answers can be very long. She is looking for a way that students can save their work while they are writing their answers. We've experience Internet outages before so she is concerned with lost work as it have happened before. I know every time student change pages in a quiz, Moodle will store their answers, however the test is set up so that each quiz contains only 1 essay question. For a variety of reasons, this has to be the set up. I'm looking for best practices to address the saving of essay questions while the students are in progress. We are running Moodle 2.6.2. 


Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks, Lauren

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In reply to Lauren Panton

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

by ben reynolds -

I use Lazarus Form Recovery in FireFox. It auto saves anything you type into a web form. I've never tested it with the essay question in Quiz, though.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-recovery/

If it is a long essay, I'm not convinced Quiz is the best choice, especially if there is no time limit. Moodle will time out. Assignment is a better solution, I think.

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In reply to Lauren Panton

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

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

Just turn on this admin setting:

http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/Quiz_settings#Site_administration_settings


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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

by Mike Jackson -

I tried changing this setting to 2 minutes, but as far as I can tell, the answers were not autosaved. Is there anywhere else I need to enable something for autosave to work with essay questions? I had two students lose a few paragraphs of work today as a result of not autosaving...

If this works, it will be great!

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In reply to Mike Jackson

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

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

It should work.

The way to be sure is to use your web browser's developer tools:

  1. Press F12 to open them.
  2. Switch to the Network tab.
  3. Start a quiz attempt.
  4. Type something into the Essay question.
  5. Wait a few minutes.
  6. The developer tools show show a request to mod/quiz/autosave.ajax.php, which should result in a 200 OK response.
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

by Mike Jackson -

Thanks. I will test this.

One user was using the test configured in "full screen popup with java security mode" and the other was in a Chromebook "secure exam browser kiosk". I will see if I can test various modes.

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In reply to Mike Jackson

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

by Mike Jackson -

I have done a bit of a test using a student account taking the same test.

It does seem to be saving fairly often if I review the attempt in another browser using a teacher account.

I think I may have figured out what happened. 

The auto save seems to just save the current "state" every few minutes. When my students deleted their work accidentally, they must have navigated out to another question or something, and thus the saved content was updated to nothing.

The autosave does not seem to create a true save or version, but maintains a current version, which can easily be emptied. Does this make sense?

Am I understanding this correctly? To get true saved versions, the student must navigate away from the question and back.

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In reply to Mike Jackson

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

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

That is correct. When I implemented this feature, there was a design decision to make about how long to keep the auto-saved data, and in the end I decided to only keep each one until the next auto-save or real save. That is because to keep every version would end up being a huge amount of data, and people already complain about how big the question tables get.

The problem autosave is trying to solve is the Moodle server crashing, the student's browser crashing, or the network connection getting lost.

It was never intended to deal with user error, like them deleting all their work. There is already a fix for that: Undo. (One reason not to use the crappy 'Secure' window. It hides the browser's menu bar, so the only way to undo the delete is to know the keyboard shortcut CTRL+Z.)

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

by Mike Jackson -

Thanks for that confirmation. For some reason CTRL-Z did not work for us. I will make sure we don't use the secure window any more.

How hard would it be to include a save button on the essay question page? I know that students can save a current status  by going to another question, but that is awkward.

BTW, the MOODLE quiz module is great and I am promoting its use at our school. We had 115 students writing an exam with it yesterday and the teachers were pretty happy with the process and results. Thanks!

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

by Paul Lindgreen -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

hi Tim

Thanks for the Network tab troubleshooting tip.

The Console tab in Internet Explorer also helped me troubleshoot some auto save issues. We set up 3minute tests to demonstrate the functionality in a testing environment but the autosave did not work to my surprise. Looking at the Console tab a message appears when there is 2 minutes left in a quiz 'moodle-mod_quiz-autosave: No more saving, time is nearly over.'.

I'm not sure why this feature would be disabled at 1.5-2 minutes left in a quiz, some documentation may help in case others give up implementing it because they can't demonstrate it working as expected. My test could have been longer of course, 'shortcuts make for long delays'.

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In reply to Paul Lindgreen

Re: Auto saving during Essay question

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

Quiz auto-save disables itself shortly before time expires, to avoid really bad things happening.

What do I mean by really bad things? Consider this:

  1. 1 second before time expires in the quiz, an auto-save starts. This starts sending data to the server.
  2. Before that completes (perhpas the user is on a mobile phone with a bad connection) time expires in the quiz so the quiz auto-submits itself.
  3. Now the Moodle server has to process two things at exactly the same time, relating to the same quiz attempt.

It would be extremently hard to handle that without bugs. I challenge you to even define what the correct behaviour would be in that hypothetical situation. Much better to avoid it alltogether. The risk is only losing a minute or two of the student's work.


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