I imagine many of the regulars here know that I use the Moodle quiz system for a massive interactive homework and formative feedback system. In a nutshell, students work practice problems and input their answers into Moodle. I've spent lots of time writing feedback for common wrong answers so that students can figure out what they're doing wrong on their own. The most important behavior to me is Adaptive mode (no penalties), although I do use deferred feedback for practice timed quizzes and immediate feedback with and without CBM for other purposes. If you want more information then I'll post a link to my US Moot Presentation from 2015.
I've been using Moodle somewhat out on my own since 2009. I was briefly on our school district's staff development Moodle site before they moved hosting and told me to take care of myself. I've set up our school's own Moodle site and we've been humming along happily since.
Recently, our district finally decided to join the current decade and get an LMS and signed a contract with Haiku Learning to be our district's LMS provider. Now sixth months later, I've been informed that Haiku is now our district's standard and we're not allowed to use any other LMS to deliver content to students. I have until August to find a replacement for my homework/quiz system.
To put it simply, Haiku's quiz system is gigantic flaming pile of canine refuse. It is quite literally in the same spot that Moodle's quiz system was in on March 3, 2003 way back in 1.0. In fact, I've yet to find a single thing that Haiku can do that Moodle can't other than a gradebook integration with our SIS. Of course the only reason our school Moodle couldn't do that is because I never bothered to ask our district folks because I knew the answer would be no. The only reason being given for the pick of Haiku is the "Haiku is easy to use." Our IT department thinks that the elementary school teachers are incapable of doing much at all.
I'm heartbroken to say the least. I love my school and love my district and love my home. I'm incredibly angry about being asked to just throw away years worth of work on the homework system. I'm in a bad position as far as my future goes in terms of the choices I'm going to need to make.
In the short term, I'm researching alternatives to the Moodle quiz system. Does anyone have any suggestions for things to look at? I'm open to just about anything that will let me approximate the Moodle quiz system. The features of Moodle Quizzes that I consider to be absolutely critical to the proper functioning of the system in my chemistry class are listed here:
- Fully automated grading
- Supports numeric answers with units
- Supports short answer with wildcards or some regex matching
- Can display feedback for individual specific wrong answers
- Allows essentially unlimited attempts by students
- Question randomization
- Statistics that allow me to identify common wrong answers
Features that I also use quite a bit that have huge value to me that aren't absolutely imperative:
- Calculated type questions
- Drag and Drop question types
- The ability to group subquestions together so I can assess the student's work directly (I've been using Cloze for this mostly although Combined questions and STACK both allow this)
- CBM, Immediate Feedback, Deferred feedback
I'll take any suggestions or comments you have no matter how out of the box. I'm not completely given up on having to let Moodle leave me behind in the dark ages but I do need to do the research on other options along the way.