'Editing form for questions'

Do you mean when editing an individual question type?, i.e. creating or modifying a multi choice question or a short answer question?

I am using Moodle 3.5, and I am one who cannot agree with your points about the Moodle Quiz engine. 

When I see these kinds of comments, I find that they are not justified.  Let me explain.

Your point #1 - "too many settings."  

It is simple to create a quiz in Moodle. The only thing that an instructor is required to do is to give the quiz a title and save it.  That’s it.  What could be simpler?

All of those "settings" is what makes Moodle the best major LMS for quizzing.  If a teacher says "I want to set a due date," it is there in the settings.  If the teacher says "I want to allow multiple attempts," it is there in settings.  So as your teachers get more knowledgeable and demanding, Moodle can handle many of these requests. 

Yes, simply opening up all the features might be overwhelming to some, but Moodle does provide a little “question mark” icon next to these for people to quickly explore what a feature does.  This is much better than any other LMS.

Your point #2 - "editing questions is complex".

As far as I know, there are only two ways that I know of to add a new question.  1) You can “edit” the quiz and create new questions on the fly, or 2) You can create a question bank category and add new questions to the question bank.  So are two ways too much for your teachers to handle?

Moodle provides the most powerful question bank feature of all major LMSs.  It is worth learning how to use it to your advantage.  For example, I never create new questions from the “edit” quiz environment, I always create them in the question bank first and then add them to a quiz. It helps me stay organized. I am one who believes developing good habits is worth it in the long run.  So I only see one way to add new questions, in the question bank.  But Moodle does allow the creation of quiz questions on the fly.  If you are the Moodle administrator, I would recommend spending time on understanding the question bank and then teaching teachers how to use it.

Getting teachers to understand the advantage of the question bank should not be that hard.  Consider how the best textbooks and publishers provide help ... they supply a "test bank" of questions.  They leave it up to the teacher to pick which test bank questions they want to use.  This is exactly how Moodle can be used - create the question bank first, then add these questions to a quiz.

Your point #3 - "not obvious where to add new questions".

Again, Moodle is a powerful LMS.  I have never found its most commonly used question types (true/false, multiple choice, short answer) to be difficult to understand.  Not any harder than any other major LMS.  However, some of Moodles more advanced built-in question types, such as “calculated multiple choice” are challenging to understand, yet very powerful when one does take the time to understand it.  If you prefer something simple, consider Blackboard’s Ultra product.  It only offers 3 question types.  Really simple-minded.  But Moodle is not trying to be simple, it is trying to be complete.  The variety of built-in question types is pretty strong, and there are many plug-ins.

Relative to "UX team" improvements that you suggest, I am not sure who the "team" is.  I do know that Tim Hunt has done a lot to improve the quiz engine, and the changes that have been made since 1.9 have been very good.  Also, I am one who believes that Tim Hunt has done an excellent job asking for UI improvements, and is very thoughtful about how to improve the quiz engine.

So I believe the best way to get the ball rolling is to offer specific improvements ideas and create feature requests.

I have used the quiz engines in Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Canvas, and Moodle's quiz engine outperforms all of these.  For example, Canvas lacks the ability to import quiz questions from a variety of sources, and it doesn't provide any organized way of managing quiz bank questions.

One way to improve this slightly is to install User tours (for example). However, the responsibility for this is with the individual admin and is not multilingual.

I've created a tracker issue for this now

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-62990

There is one thing which could be improved in the quiz module:

Making a copy of a question within a test.
(At the moment you have to go to the question bank to duplicate a question.)

This would simplify question writing for unexperienced users because an administrator or somebody who knows what he/she is doing, could set up example quizzes for teacher. Working with the question bank is not an option for people who use the quiz functionality only once in a while.

Thanks for starting this really interesting thread, which I have not had time to do more than skim read yet.

However, there are some general points that I think are worth making:

Types of usability

Usability is not a single concept, and it can help to be aware of the different dimensions to clarify your thinking. The main ones are:

1. Learnability / Discoverability - how easy is it for someone to work out how to create of modify a quiz for the first time, or to know to use one of the more specific advanced features that exist when they happen to need it?
2. Efficiency - how quick and easy is it for someone who knows exactly what they are doing to set up the particular quiz that they have in mind?
3. Transparency - suppose another teacher asks you to for help with their quiz. How quickly and easily can you see how the quiz is currently set up?
4. Consistency - you have never created a Moodle quiz before, but you know about forum and assignment. Does that help?

This thread shows that most of the usability problems we have are Learnability ones. The single big form, and the complex edit quiz page, are actually quite efficient and transparent once you know what you are doing. The challenge is to improve learnability while doing as little harm as possible to the other aspects of usability (but some trade-off could be the right decision).

Incidentally, this usability situation is quite common in open source software, which often ends up being built by power users for power users.

Different roles

Please recall that Moodle has various different standard roles, like Teacher, Non-editing teacher, and Student.

In the past, the majority of the usability work has focussed on the student experience, although there are still a few notable issues. (The main fixes I am aware of that could be done are the un-completed thinks linked to MDL-46090. Patches welcome )

And again, this thread backs that up. Most of the discussion is about usability for teachers.

However, some good work has been done for teachers over the years, but there is still a lot to do.

It is a bit sad that some of the past usability improvements for teachers have been broken by recent theme/navigation changes made by Moodle HQ For example, in Boost theme, if you are looking at one quiz report, the only way to get to a different one is to go back to the quiz front page. Someone should fix that.

People hate change

Many of us know this from personal experience when they move things around in the supermarket (grrr!). However, this makes perfect sense if we remember efficiency and transparency. Any change will reduce those in the short term for existing users. Hopefully, in the long term they improve them.

We also have to remember consistency. Just about everything else in Moodle works by filling in one big complex form - though rarely as complex as for the quiz/questions.

Therefore, we need to be particularly careful before we contemplate any really huge "quiz re-design project". Instead, I would rather think about specific, incremental steps that could be taken to improve one thing at a time. In a mature project like Moodle, that is much more likely to be feasible. And, at least considering where we are starting, there are lots of things that could be made better one bit at a time. There is a lot of low-hanging-fruit, despite past improvements.

On the other hand, particularly if you are proceeding in a series of steps, it is a good idea to have some sort of overall vision about where you are going. That helps ensure that all the steps progress in the same general direction (like I did with MDL-46090 for student improvements).

The end

At least, that is the end of this rather long post. As I say, these are general points about usability. I will comment about some of the specifics in this thread later.

I guess my general tone may be a bit negative (because I have a lot of experience how hard it can be to get these things right). However, can I assure you that I agree that there is a problem, and I am really please there are people willing to help do something about it.

Oh, and https://tracker.moodle.org/issues/?jql=component%20%3D%20Quiz%20AND%20component%20%3D%20Usability finds relevant things that are already in the tracker.

Here just an other example that is confusing in quiz.

Here a user story:

I will create a  quiz and set the grades: a max grade, a passing grade and feedback related to several intervals.

I plan to define the max grade to 50.

When setting up a quiz instance I can at first define the passing grade. Well. Ok. But where the hell can I set the maximum grade? I set the passing grade to 35. Thats my plan.

Then I can define the feedback intervals  based on percentage. Is the passing grade a number or a percentage? hmm. Ok. I know that feedback is defined based on percentage and I add the data.

Then I will save my definitions. Uups. It doesn't work. Where is the problem? Ah, passing grade can be set to the max of 10 . Is this a general setting or related to the max grade. I don't know.  Where the hell can I set the max. grade?

----

The solution: Define the passing grade onyl when you've created to quiz questions complete.
Go to the quiz editing page where you add the questions , define the maximum grade. Then go back to the quiz setting page and add the correct passing grade. Why the hell should the teacher go back to the settings?

Is it possible to do this in  a better way? Is it? I think yes, it is.

Option 1:

Add the max grade definition in the row before passing grade. Let the setting in the question editing page and let them overwrite if you correct at the other place.

Option 2:
Add the passing grade to the question editing page direct below the max grade settings.

I came up to this situation when I answered a users question about quiz grading in German forum here at moodle.org

added to https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-63327

Ralf