Test development tools for Moodle

Test development tools for Moodle

by Derek McLellan -
Number of replies: 11

I'm a courseware developer for a computer security company. My manager has asked me to find a tool that will allow us to development quizzes for our online lessons and which can be exported to Moodle. We are using Moodle as our LMS. Training levels 1--3 are open to the general public and levels 4--8 are restricted to employees and partners. The quizzes have ten to twenty questions. (We use a partner for our accreditation exams.)

Our requirements are as follows:

- Output to Moodle (critical)
- Output to HTML5 (important)
- Supports different question types
    - Graphical questions/ multiple exhibits (important)
    - Conditional branching (nice-to-have)
    - Simulation question (nice-to-have)
    - Multiple choice question (critical)
- Supports feedback to student (critical)
    - Supports multi-level feedback (e.g. at the answer choice, question, and test level) (nice-to-have)
- Multiple outputs (format and resolutions) (important)
- Supports workflow (e.g. writer completes, QA is notified, QA completes, editor is notified, etc.) (nice-to-have)
- Multi-language support (e.g. Japanese) (critical)

It is a little overwhelming as to the number of products out there. So far, I have found Respondus and Schoolhouse Technologies that support export to Moodle. Can anyone suggest other test development tools that can front-end Moodle? Thx, Derek.

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In reply to Derek McLellan

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Hello Derek and welcome to Moodle smile Perhaps you could first explain why, if the quizzes are to go into Moodle, you don't want to use Moodle's built in and highly powerful Quiz activity?

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Derek McLellan -

Hi Mary,

As far as I understand, we need a tool for ease of use. I've used Moodle to generate test questions. It works fine but I think we are looking for something more efficient.

There may be other reasons that I'm not aware of. I asked for our technician's input but he hasn't gotten back to me.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Derek

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In reply to Derek McLellan

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Rick Jerz -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

You might want to explore products like Examview and Respondus.  

If you want to use moodle, you should explore the question types within the core moodle and all of the various plugins.  This should only take you about a half year or so.  smile

The problems that you will probably encounter are: 1) There is no product that can do everything that you want, but it is not odd to want it all.  2) External products (like Examview and Respondus) have to appeal to all LMSs, so their question types are more limited.  For example, I don't think that either of these projects support moodle's "calculated multiple choice" question type.  So do you not use this great question type, or do you not use an external product (for example)?

I have found Moodle's quiz engine to be the very best of any LMS.  If you do decide to use Moodle, you should be fine.  There are many question type plugins for moodle, too.


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In reply to Rick Jerz

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

There are more question types for Moodle than any other quizzing system and they include some of the most powerful question types anywhere e.g. the STACK maths question type and the coderunner questiontype (new to the plugins database but it has been around quite a while. It would make me happy if I could find some way of creating a minimal install of Moodle just for entering new questions where there was a very quick click/response cycle.  It would just be for content editing not for live use.

I currently use  WAMP and editing is a bit slow. It has occurred to me that IIS,nginx or Apache under Linux  might help, but I am probably missing out on where the bottle neck is. Any opinions?


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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Rick Jerz -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Marcus, I too do all of my question stuff first in my MAMP.  It's a little faster than my production moodle (small VPS).  What I like the best is that I can be developing these questions while not connected to the Internet.  I can create quizzes from the questions in the question bank, see how they look and behave, and then finally export the questions from MAMP and import them into my production moodle.

I haven't experimented with the many plugin question types, but when I do, it will first be on my MAMP installation.

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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by AL Rachels -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Over the past couple of years, the things I did that seemed to make the most notable improvement in any of my Moodle sites was to
  • make sure both Moodle, and the operating system, were installed on a solid state drive
  • upgrade to and use PHP 7
  • run MySQLTuner and implement its recommendations

There used to be a test file by Sam Marshall, that would let you see how many concurrent users your setup could handle. My homebrew server initially had a  WD 10,00 rpm drive and could handle around 23 concurrent requests. Switching to SSD and making adjustments based off MySQLTunner raised that to 55. Pictures of the System monitor Resources were really interesting with 8 cores running at 97% to 100%.

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In reply to Rick Jerz

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Derek McLellan -

Thank you, Rick. Yes, I haven't searched all of the Moodle plugins and it will undoubtedly take a very long time. smile

I have found Respondus and I'm evaluating the product presently. I will investigate Examview too. Thank you for that.

Another product that exports to Moodle is Schoolhouse.

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In reply to Derek McLellan

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

One way to rapidly create questions is to use the GIFT format. This involves creating plain text files that are imported. It can be used to create large numbers of slightly different questions through editing plain text file.

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In reply to Derek McLellan

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Eoin Campbell -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

I think you are looking for a question authoring/maintenance tool, and Microsoft Word might be a good way to go for ease-of-use, workflow, formats, and multi-language support.

There are 2 Word templates available for creating questions for the Moodle question bank:

I don't think either of these support all the question types you would like to have, but will do the most common, I think. The Moodle Lesson activity should cover the Conditional Branching question type.

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In reply to Eoin Campbell

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Derek McLellan -

Thank you, Eoin. I will take a look at both the template and plugin options. 

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In reply to Derek McLellan

Re: Test development tools for Moodle

by Guido Hornig -
Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Derek,

there is a nice QuizMaker tool from iSpringsolutions.

It can create Quiz with a grafical user interface and creates automaticaly a SCORM-Module.

This can be used in moodle and works well.

There are two chices:

Quiznmaker as part of iSpring Suite or standalone.

iSpring Suite also comes with a screenrecorder for creaing screen casts for software tutorials. It is based on PowerPoint.

Find iSpring here...

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