Quiz

Here is my MootUS15 presentation on the subject:

So, you are not allowed to use Moodle as an LMS. However, surely you are allowed to link to other learning resources (e.g. selected YouTube videos, Kahn Academy, etc.) from your new course site?

And, one would hope that the would not care about the underlying technology of the other sites you link to, just educational quality of the materials, and issues like data protection.

So, why would they care if you link to some specific online quizzes that just happen to be hosted on a Moodle somewhere? You can use https://moodle.org/plugins/local_ltiprovider to let another LMS connect to quizzes on a Moodle server. (I have not tried it, I just know it works in theory.)

So, certainly worth asking about that. I don't know much about other quiz systems, but other people here might know more.

Joshua, are you in the same district as Doug.  See https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=327026#p1314719.

It might be that the publishers have better quiz engines because they can cross link to the electronic version of the textbook.  This is just an idea, but I haven't really explored these myself.

Would your district allow you to pick the textbook publisher's website?  If so, the students typically pay a fee for this.  If this is the case, maybe you should suggest to the district that instead of using the publishers' quiz engine and forcing students to pay for this, that you can provide a free solution by linking to your moodle (oh, only for quizzes).

It has been a little while since I posted this but I wanted to let everyone know of the progress on things.  I sent our tech folks an email suggesting using Moodle as an LTI provider last week.  I have yet to get any response.  I imagine this means that they'd like to say no but have no rational basis for saying no...  I'll continue to keep you posted along the way.  I foresee this being a long and drawn out battle.

The interesting tidbit in all of this is that our career and technical education folks use a Moodle instance run out of NC State University for their classes.  This is run for the entire state of North Carolina... Like I said this is going to be an interesting battle.  You should have seen the looks on the tech folks faces when I pointed that out...

For the record, I would miss this community of people almost as much as I would miss the software.  It makes me sad to think that I might ever stop seeing my inbox full of messages from Moodle.org.  I'm reminded of this tweet from years ago...

Joshua - I'm pretty late spotting this discussion. I like your practice and feedback approach - perhaps with students working together as well as on their own. So far as I can see, my CBM Self-Test software at www.tmedwin.net/cbm/selftests would satisfy all of your 'critical' requirements and most of the others. It doesn't implement Drag & Drop or Cloze, since they would require multiple certainty ratings and would tend to become clunky with CBM, but pretty much everything else.

The use of CBM and immediate feedback are optional and, if appropriate, students can decide which questions to bother with and which to ignore - so they can challenge themselves on a subset of a very large file of questions. Everything about an exercise is specified in a single text file, which makes editing, annotation and management relatively simple. Students (authenticated on your server) can see their own past session data while staff can see data from selected individuals, exercises or questions. Student comments or queries about questions (very important in my view) are much easier to manage than on Moodle. The main manual is at www.tmedwin.net/cbm/selftests/sys/resource/manual.htm , though probably missing a number of tricks I haven't documented. As always, there are lots of things to improve - so I tend to encourage people in other institutions, unless doing development work, to access the software off my own site.

Hi Joshua, 

I arrived to this thread by accident so I didn't know about your problem. It's really sad that after spending long time creating good educational resources for the benefit of your students and, without depending of commercial software now, you were being forced to leave it. 

I can't imagine how I'd react if I were in your situation. It's a nightmare. 

I think you summarized very well a sadly popular tendency nowadays regarding the arguments to move to new 'cool' applications:

"Haiku is easy to use."  Our IT department thinks that the elementary school teachers are incapable of doing much at all."

For whom is it easy to use? For teachers or for IT departments who outsource the service? And for what kind of teachers? For those who ask for every new and cool invent out there but abandon very soon or for those who want to make it sustainable and useful? 

I'm so sorry Joshua! I hope you had found a workaround to solve this issue. Count me as an allied to help and/or fight against this kind of unfair decisions. 

Let us know if common sense returns to your district. 

Best from Spain. 

Toni Soto 

Hey all, since there has been some recent traffic again on this I realized I had never given you a final update.  The district officially approved the LTI integration and I think everything is on track for me to continue to use Moodle for the quizzes.  They do want me to transfer files and such into Haiku but that's no big deal.

As people here at school have been asking me about it, I've been telling people that "Haiku is simple to use but not very sophisticated.  On the other hand Moodle is so sophisticated and flexible that it is capable of embedding itself in Haiku.  That is what a superior LMS will do for you." That usually gets laughs from my students and faculty members...

I'm actually pretty grateful that Moodle is bundling the LTI provider functionality now in core with 3.1 so that I don't even need a plugin to do this.  So I'll still be hanging around here... Now that I know all of this, hopefully I can engage back here again and earn back my PHM status.   

Also, on another note, I'm actually going to be moving schools within my school district.  We have a satellite campus where all of the lower enrollment AP classes are taught.  I'll be teaching a full load of AP Chemistry at that school instead.  So actually, I'll be building an entirely new course all over again at the same time.  This is a definite upgrade in working conditions so I'm pretty excited to be making the move.