Hello,
Back in 2008, Jamie Pratt created the Question creation Activity for Moodle 1.9 (qcreate) with funding from Future University Hakodate http://www.fun.ac.jp/e/
The module was originally conceived and partially designed by Peter Ruthven-Stuart (http://www.ruthven-stuart.org) from Future University - Hakodate. You can learn about it here and here.
The idea is very simple : students create questions and you grade them
Since the begining I found it a marvellous idea (it's so Moodle said Marcus Green), so I was sad when I updated to Moodle 2.x to have to say goodbye to that activity.
I was pleased to see that people from GTN Gmbh (global training network ltd. - http://gtn-solutions.com,
http://www.exabis.at) have done a lot of work to update the code to Moodle 2.x, but unfortunately more work was needed to have a finished version.
This Summer I needed a new project for my holidays so I decided my goal was to have a working version for the beginning of the next academic year.
Today I made available a first version of the Question Creation activity for Moodle 2.7 (sorry it will not work with previous versions as it uses several new features of Moodle 2.7). I will submit it to the Moodle plugins Directory as I have Jamie's and Gtn approvals to do so, but you can already find it on my Github repository.
It started as a plan to simply make it working but slowly changed to an exercise on "How to code an activity module for Moodle" because in fact it was the first time I was working on a module (most of my work have been on question types, the question bank and question import formats) so I made a lot more changes than expected.
- Migrated the code to a more OOP structure defining a class for most qcreate operations
- Move display to renderers (not finished, the student view is using renderers but not the teacher view)
- Use "fun" new features of Moodle 2.7 : scheduled tasks, new logging system, ...
From the user side there is not so much new features
- activity completion with a fixed number of created questions
- optional notifications for the teachers of new created questions
- optional notifications for the students of new graded questions
- scheduled tasks for synchronisation of students capacities on questions and for grades updates (as it is written in the 1.9 version docs you must absolutely have a cron working to use this module)
I think we really miss a kind of peer to peer action in this activity: once students have created questions it would be nice if they could test the other student's questions and give some kind of feedback.
I don't intend to do a full "question workshop"activity with the complexity of the workshop module, I think we should keep it simple, but I would welcome comments from the Community before starting to design this.
PS: if you find bugs in this version of the Question Creation activity, please create an issue in the tracker it will be easier for me to manage things that way.