Quiz Access Rule subplugin

Quiz Access Rule subplugin

by David Aylmer -
Number of replies: 3

Hi all,

Background:
I've now worked for four organisations that have asked me to change the way quiz navigation works for their moodle sites. They have all been sites that deliver completely on-line learning (not blended, not classroom).

Typically these demands have been made by UI/UX/ID experts and has been focused on two things:
- Reducing the number of clicks for navigation
- Reducing the amount of information visible to the learner (other than the learning material)

One of these organisations used quizzes with a large number of questions (~200) but all of the others used very small numbers of questions. Typically between 5-10 questions per quiz, and often just one question!
I'm not an instructional designer by any means... but the goal often seems to be micro-learning (on a small piece of learning content) and performing spot checks on said learning using existing question banks. (And taking advantage of grades and activity completion based on quiz completion, grades, minimum scores etc..)

A single-question-quiz has something like the following user journey:
view.php
startattempt.php
attempt.php
summary.php
review.php
view.php

I have delivered this behaviour of reducing navigation in the past via overriding renderers in a theme.
This works well but has always been theme specific.

The following is a bit of an quick and dirty experiment that bastardises the quiz accessrule subplugin system to skip some of the above navigation paths via page redirects.
It seems to work. It seems to be compatible with the rest of quiz.
Feedback welcome. Use at your own risk.

https://github.com/tellit/moodle-quizaccess_ldflow

screenshot showing settings for this subplugin

Average of ratings: Useful (4)
In reply to David Aylmer

Re: Quiz Access Rule subplugin

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

Nice hack. Thank you for sharing.

Did you see the other thread about quiz navigation that is going on at the moment? https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=386625.

Also, have you seen https://moodle.org/plugins/filter_embedquestion? That might be useful to you in some of the one-question situations.

Average of ratings: Useful (3)
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Re: Quiz Access Rule subplugin

by David Aylmer -
The plugin: filter_embedquestion. That's a bit of a revelation. Thanks for posting that. There's a little bit of a 'wordpress shortcode' culture out there, and I've come across many content creators that I think if I pointed out the above would really appreciate it. I will check it out today.

As an aside, "cloud-thinking": a common mod interface that returns renderered html from templates, or a renderer itself based on the state of a mod would allow for very complicated 'pages' that have all sorts of activities on them. It could allow a central mod manager/factory to sort out restrictions etc.. and combine mixed activity content (in various states) into pages in a well-architectured way. (Maybe that's too messy from a learning perspective? Don't know.)
I've been involved in two instances of theme/course formats that use PHP curl to "scrape" page content to combine actual mod content into larger pages of content, sometimes on a course page, sometimes within other mods. In one instance all buttons/links were rewritten, and the content retrieved via ajax calls and rewritten in place. In another example, simply the view page was scraped, and the links moved the user into the dedicated mod url for just that activity.
I appreciate that mods are kind of navigational dead-ends by design - and have long been that way - and maybe there are educational benefits to that? I don't really know enough about the subject.

On the ongoing discussion in the past week about quiz navigation, that combined with some current work requirements is the reason I decided to attempt this access rule. I did notice the recent posts, but they mostly seemed to focus on quiz examples based on classroom learning, and I have very limited experience with that, and don't think I have anything intelligent to add. I hope more people add to the discussion.
It's tricky. A turn-key quiz mod that satisfies every single use case possibly isn't viable in the very long term? Not sure? Sounds like a nightmare to maintain.
I haven't read in detail all of the points on the tracker item but I'll probably do that in the coming days.
Thanks for the reply.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Quiz Access Rule subplugin

by David Aylmer -
I just want to follow up on the filter_embedquestion and atto_embedquestion plugins.
(I'm surprised they are not yet more widely used.)
Brilliant. Great work to all involved. (And looking forward to the future updates) 👍