Hi
I recently noticed that when creating new questions directly from a quiz (Add > New question) the default category for these questions is the COURSE level default questions. I would have expected the default category for new questions directly added from a quiz to be the QUIZ level default questions. How do others think about this? Or can anyone explain why this works as it does?
By the way: We're using Moodle 3.3.1 but I found the same behaviour on QA Testing site.
Cheers
Antonia
It has worked that way for a very, very long time.
The idea is that it should be as easy as possible for teachers to resuse questions between quzzes in the same course.
Anyway, that is the history. It does not meat that it is necsesarily right for the future. Please discuss.
I am not sure there is anything to discuss at this point as I believe this is a vital part of the new tagging features coming in 3.5 courtesy of MUA. Please correct me if I misunderstood that part.
I think this issue is not affected by the MUA changes.
You are probably right. I think to force the default category to the quiz level would be a serious regression because, as you mentioned - it would make it a lot harder for teachers to reuse questions. I actually would be tempted to take the quiz category level out all together and just keep all questions at the course level.
If having the quiz level category as default category is regarded a serious regression it might really be worth thinking about getting rid of these categories altogether.
I still like the idea of having an own category per quiz because this makes finding questions easier if I save them without caring much in which category. Which happens easily. So what about having a own category per each quiz that is a subcategory of the course level category? And this own category per quiz could then be used as default category when adding questions directly from quiz?
The structure of folders in the question bank would then look as follows:
Course level category
> Quiz 1 category
> Quiz 2 category
...
The activity level categories have their uses.
For example, https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_qcreate and https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_studentquiz use them.
Also, at the Open University, we use them for quizzes that form part of the final course grade. We have a rule that for such quizzes, the questions must be stored in the quiz-specific part of the question bank. We do that for two reasons. First, to ensure that those questions don't get accidentally reused in another quiz, and Second, once the quiz has been created and approved, we add a whole lot of permission overrides, so that those questions cannot be accidentaly edited any more.
So, there are reasons to keep these categories, even though in many cases there is no need to use them.
I agree with this idea. I'd like to move my Default quiz category to be a subcategory of the Course category but I can't.
You cannot get rid of the last category in an area. However, if you add another category, so there are two, then you can move either of them.
Thanks for your prompt reply, Tim. I see your point. Me and two colleagues both are working for a long time with the Moodle quiz module and question bank and never noticed which was the default category for a newly added question. So it certainly is not a huge problem.
We just noticed it works differently than we expected and wondered, why. Our expectation was that the question will be saved in the quiz level default category. This might be helpful especially if you do not care about where you save your questions (which certainly is not good practice but close to reality) and then are searching for this question you once created but then deleted from quiz.
However, if there would be an automatically generated tag relating a certain question to a certain quiz (when the question is directly added from quiz) this might solve the problem, tool. Though I did not understand from the public tags description, whether this happens.
Hi everyone,
Sorry to dredge up an older thread but I am interested in this area and currently writing documentation for our users and wanted to take advantage of Tim's suggestion above to 'discuss'...
I think the default category selection is fine for new questions added at a quiz context - namely being placed in the course default category (although it also sometimes seems to go to the last category I was using?) - with the option to change the category to the quiz (activity) category available.
Where I feel that this can get confusing for users and could be improved would be in the ability to SEE quiz/activity level categories/questions from the course-level question bank.
Tim, I'm wondering if this has been suggested/rejected before or if there are big technical reasons or functional reasons why this shouldn't be possible?
Thanks for your time.
Dave
If I may just add a comment here. Where the questions for the quiz are is (or used to be?) vital.
1) If the teacher wants to re-use questions across quizzes within the course, the questions should sit at the course level.
BUT - correct me if I'm wrong:
2) If the teacher wishes to backup a single quiz and restore / import it somewhere else or pass it to a collegaue in this way etc., all its questions must be packed inside its own question bank. Otherwise, such a single activity backup will copy the **entire course-level question bank*, which is wrong and a risk.
Such was my experience a couple of years ago, when we were upgrading our site and move things around.
Many, many teachers use quizzes, so this issue should be made clear in the documentation and/or the help tips.
Or maybe I'm wrong and things have changed?
Kind regards,
Przemek
Hi Przemek,
As far as I know you are correct - backup and restore of single quiz activities containing questions at course-level in the question bank does copy the entire course-level question bank along with it. So storing questions at activity context in the question bank is the only way to copy quizzes with subsets of questions out of the course question bank. We have also recommended users do export/import of questions to achieve partial copies of question banks based on specific categories.
My question was getting at making this a bit easier to manage for instructors by giving them the ability to see quiz-context question banks from the course-level one - both to know when questions exist that are limited to that context and to perform bulk moves of questions to and from these categories.
Regards,
Dave
