Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

by Bill Junkin -
Number of replies: 7

Hi, Tim and others,

I am the primary author of the Moodle optional module, IPAL. (https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_ipal) This module uses the question bank and either uses or mimics most of the features of the quiz module (thank you very much, Tim and others). In Ipal, the teacher sends a question to all the students and then can see the student responses as they answer that question or the teacher can go to a spreadsheet view to see, in real time, the answers that students have given to all the quiz questions so far. The teacher must use a browser for the teacher interface but students can use either a browser or the Ipal App we have built (free) for the iPhone and the Android phone to respond to questions.

Anyhow, it occurs to me that it might be desirable to have in-class polling as an option for the quiz module. As I see it, there are various pros and cons:

Pros:

  • For ipal, as changes were made in the quiz module it wouldn't break the ipal code
  • For ipal, the results of an in-class polling session would be recorded in the gradebook (right now this is not a feature in ipal).
  • For the quiz module, students would have an app they could use to answer multichoice, true-false, and essay questions if they wished. (Right now other question types are not supported in ipal.)
  • For the quiz module, teachers would have an interface that they could use to see how students are doing on questions in the quiz.
  • For the quiz module, teachers would have an interface that they could use to display back to students in an anonymous form the answers to multichoice, true-false, and essay questions if the teachers so desired.
  • For teachers and students, they would use the same module for both types of quizzes.
  • For teachers, a quiz prepared for one type of quiz could be used for the other type of quiz without recreating the entire quiz.
  • For the quiz module, there are a few other features of ipal that might be useful (such as its ability to interact with other optional Moodle modules, such as the attendance module and the ejs module) but we can consider those later.

Cons:

  • This would add some more code to the Moodle distribution, including the interface needed to receive responses from the Apps.
  • This would add about two tables to the Moodle database and would add several fields to two or three of the current quiz tables.
  • This would require a lot of programming. However, I feel that this is important enough that I would be glad to do all the programming and testing. (Of course, anyone who wanted to help would be very, very welcome.) If I succeeded in this endeavor, it seems to me this would be a win-win situation. If I was unable to successfully integrate these features of the ipal program into the quiz module, this whole attempt would be discarded and the quiz and ipal modules would continue to be separate modules. I would have wasted a lot of time, but I am willing to risk this if you think this is desirable.

Bill Junkin, junkinwf@eckerd.edu

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In reply to Bill Junkin

Re: Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

by Tim Hunt -
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It is possible to attempt Moodle quizzes using the Moodle mobile app (and it supports all question types).

The in-class display for teachers could probably be added to the standard quiz module as a new Quiz report plugin. (https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Quiz_reports).

But, I am not sure in-class polling should have exactly the same feature-set as tests for students to attempt in their own time. It could well be better to have a different activity for in-class polling with features targeted towards making that as effective as possible. That is why questions from the question bank were made re-usable by other parts of the code. https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Using_the_question_engine_from_module

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

by Marcus Green -
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"It is possible to attempt Moodle quizzes using the Moodle mobile app (and it supports all question types)."

To be exact, it supports all core question types. I am still getting my head around what is necessary to make 3rd party question types work with the Mobile app. I asked a question about this recently and just noticed that Daniel Palou has given a rather useful reply.

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=334322#p1347011

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

by Bill Junkin -

Thanks, Tim.

I think that having one or two Quiz reports that support in-class polling is a good way to go. If you favor this, I will start working on this. Of course, help from others will be very welcome or if someone else wants to take the lead, I will be happy to help.

Many of the teachers who use in-class polling use multichoice questions (probably influenced by the history of using "clickers"). For the ipal module we created a histogram to represent responses from multichoice and true-false questions and we added a different view that seemed to work well for essay questions. So, I guess the first thing that must be figured out is the best way to display student responses to each of the other type of core question types. The display needs to be such that a teacher can glance at the display and get a good feel of how the students in the class are responding to the question in classes where there are 20 or more students (maybe even up to 200 or 300 students) in the classroom. Any suggestions from anyone would be greatly appreciated. As Marcus has noted, 3rd party question types will pose additional problems.

I agree, Tim, that when question are used with in-class polling it will be necessary to have a different feature-set. But I think that this will be easier to handle than developing a good Quiz report that can handle all the core question types. So, first I plan to see what we can figure out on this. 

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In reply to Bill Junkin

Re: Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

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

I don't think you necessarily need to support all question types at first.

A good approach to this type of thing is to put the code you need to support each question type into a separate PHP class. Let us suppose that you call your plugin the "Live results" plugin, so the Moodle name might be quiz_liveresults.

Then you can have classes like quiz_liveresults_qtype_multichoice_support.

Then, when displaying the report, for each question, if the class exists, use it. Otherwise, display a message "This question type is not supported yet."

That makes it very easy to add support for different question types one at a time. (Of course, you do need to ensure that the framework is general enough to support the kind of things that all different question types will want to do.)


The other bit you might want to look at is how the 'Response analysis' bit of the standard quiz statistics works. In each question type it uses the get_possible_responses and classify_response methods. That may, or may not, be helpful.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

by Bill Junkin -

Thanks, Tim, for pointing me in the best direction.

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In reply to Bill Junkin

Re: Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

by Ian Hunt -

I very recently looked at IPAL because I was interested in the "next generation" of "clicker" / polling technology.... timely.

I'm an organic chem instructor and have used clickers in classes since 2004 (IR technology at that time) in classes around the 200 students range. From my perspective here are the things I feel I need in my display while a question is active and then in the results. These are based on issues I've had with systems we have used in the past.

While question is active:

  1. Countdown timer (if selected) with the ability to pause the timer while still collecting data (or the ability to add time), and a stop option.
  2. A display of the number of students who have responded as an absolute number (this helps me manage the timer).
  3. Optional display of the live poll results (potentially useful during a discussion)

Results

  1. Bar graph and / or pie chart of poll results with % value for each answer
  2. Correct answer options (show in different colour, turn on / off)
  3. Ability to rerun the same question again
  4. Next question

Other... Up to now, I use what I refer to as the "on the fly mode"... for me this means the actual question content is in Powerpoint, and the polling system just knows I am running say a 5 option MC question. This gives me as the instructor maximum flexibility in the classroom.

My dreams ?

I've love to be able to use the JSME (JME) drawing questions in this type of activity (it's just a short answer type question).


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In reply to Ian Hunt

Re: Is in-class polling a desirable feature for the quiz module?

by Bill Junkin -

Hi, Ian,

Here is the current status of IPAL. Right now my efforts are devoted to seeing if we can modify Ipal, keeping all its features, into the Moodle quiz module by adding functionality to the quiz module.

The results in Ipal are available while the question is active and also after the question has been finished. Thus, there is no difference in what the instructor can see when the question is active vs when it is not active (You separated your issues/wish list based on whether or not the question was active.)

Currently IPAL has no count-down timer. The questions are put into an ipal instance (similar to a quiz instance) and listed above the results. When the teacher clicks on a question, it gets sent and stays sent until the teacher clicks on another question or stops the polling. If I get ipal integrated into the quiz module then maybe I can add a count-down timer.

Ipal lets you know how many students have responded to a question. I will be including this.

There is a display of the live poll results in Ipal. This will also be included. The results for multichoice and true false are displayed in a histogram (bar graph) that is constantly updated (until polling is stopped and then the graph is frozen). Student responses to essay questions are displayed with each student getting one "line" of text. Both the bar graph and the text display are anonymous but there is also a spreadsheet view that the teacher can use to determine which students gave which answers. These will be included. It should not be too hard to display the answers from the JSME questions if giving each student one line in the page that the teacher views is a good solution. The display in the spreadsheet view will be trivial. Does this sound like something that would be useful?

In Ipal, questions can be run again. If the teacher wants to send the next question, in Ipal, the teacher clicks on that next question. However, having a "next question" button may be a good suggestion. Ipal has no option for the on/off feature you mentioned, but this should not be too hard to do. Moodle has no way to interact with a Powerpoint presentation (that I know of) so the questions in a Powerpoint will have to be copied into the Moodle question bank. Sorry about that.



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