Approve submission of questions to the bank or in a quiz

Approve submission of questions to the bank or in a quiz

by Michel DENIS -
Number of replies: 5

Hello,

I would like to get with Quiz/Question bank the functional equivalent of the "approval" feature that exists e.g. with Glossary and Database :  sets of questions would only become visible/usable when an admin "approves" that submission of questions (we don't want teachers to submit crazy questions...). 

AFAIK the feature does not exist OTS apparently. 

In this case, please could you share with me/us the tricks you are/would be using for producing this capability ? Here are the alternative options I'm thinking of:

1- teachers produce questions in text form using Aiken or Gift syntax, and mail them to the admin to check and import them into the bank or as a quiz. No early test possible by the teacher.

2- teachers use Hot Potatoes to create, test and produce content that can be imported into Moodle. Teacher can can test questions before submission

3- perhaps the Workflow bloc functionality of O.U. could implement the creation of the questions into the bank or as a quiz activity

What do you think ? Do you see more direct ways to implement this ?

Thanks in advance,

-michel


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In reply to Michel DENIS

Re: Approve submission of questions to the bank or in a quiz

by Marcus Green -
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This feature does not exist in standard Moodle. I believe the reason it does not exist is because  teachers are assumed to be entirely in control over the questions they create and typically they are the people who deliver them. 

I think there is also an assumption that teachers are not crazy, although this may not be a well founded assumption. By contrast  Glossary entries (and database entries?) may be added by students so there is value in having an approval system.

If I were doing this I would have a special teacher question creator course so they could create any and all manner of wild ideas and then the approver would export to XML format and import to where they were wanted. This would push the clicky button typey typey part of the work onto the teachers.

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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Approve submission of questions to the bank or in a quiz

by Michel DENIS -

Hello Marcus,

Makes sense. only issue is that it requires quite some work from the approver as in the case of my customer there are about 50 teachers who would submit sets of questions from time to time-- some automation is needed I think.

Thanks,

-michel

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In reply to Michel DENIS

Re: Approve submission of questions to the bank or in a quiz

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

At the Open University, we use our Workflow block to manage production of assessed quizzes.

Actually, there is a bit more to it than that.

  • The Workflow block manages the production of each quiz.
  • Then for admin staff to monitor all the quizzes being produced, we have the related Workflow report.
  • There is also a custom quiz report called the 'Parameter check report'. This is very specific to the OU, so we have not shared it, but given the type of quiz, and where you are in the workflow, it compares lots of the quiz settings against what they are supposed to be, according to our policies, so it is easy to see what is wrong. (But, because it just hilights differences, rather than changing settings, it is possible to have special cases that don't follow the policy when necessary.)
  • One of the things that the Param-check report verifies is that all the questions are stored in the Quiz area of the question bank (not the part shared between all quizzes in the course).
  • The reason we do that is that that the Workflow can automatically create permission overrides, for example to stop questions from being edited after they have been approved.

This may seem rather complicated, and in some ways it is, but in fact we did it like this so that, as much as possible, we could just use standard Moodle functionality without altering it; with several add-ons that worked together, each trying to do one things well, and therefore being simpler.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Approve submission of questions to the bank or in a quiz

by Michel DENIS -

Hi Tim,

Many thanks for your response.

In the case of our customer we "just" need each set of "new questions" to be first approved by the admin, so it is a simple policy : would the Workflow Block & Report be enough to get that functionality ?

Cheers,

-michel

ps: fyi, the customer is a kind of NGO, not a private/commercial organisation

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In reply to Michel DENIS

Re: Approve submission of questions to the bank or in a quiz

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

The Workflow block is not the best documented thing ever, I am afraid. I suggest you try it on a test server, and see if you can make it do what you want.
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