Thank you for your useful and detailed feedback Dominique. One of the reasons I like this concept is that I am more interested in learning than testing and this has benefits for teachers to learn about their questions and their students and the students can articulate their issues with questions they encounter.
1.You say that this new behaviour will be a plugin. It would be better if it were core.
I am always ambivalent about new functionality for core as my favourite core enhancements are the ones that improve the areas of plugin-in-ability (not a real word). There are more things I would like removed from core than added to it. I like the idea of a slim core and well supported plugins eco-system. However...
Technically it could be added to core simply by adding the code to the distribution. However if I were wearing the hat of a product manager at Moodle HQ, I would be asking questions about how much support it would require and how many people would be likely to benefit from it and how much additional complexity it adds to Moodle overall. I suspect there are already question behaviours that are very rarely used, and more choice is not always better.
2. There should be an option, defined by the teacher and why not by the student, for flagged questions to be marked manually. While there is a risk that students may abuse this feature, it could be useful in some cases.
I don't know how that might be done.
3. The text "Is there a problem with this question? ..." should be easily editable by the teacher directly in the question, without having to modify the source files.
I understand why you would want that but I think it would require the functionality to be available within each question type and I am not sure how that would be done
4. If not used correctly, folding and unfolding text on a web page can be more painful than useful. First you need to ask yourself how useful this feature would be here and consider several cases and options. For example, if the explanation fields are closed by default and the student opens them for comments, the fields should not be closed automatically each time the student presses the [Check] button.
Yes, that feature is a response to my reaction to Tim Hunts code. I thought that the 'give explanation' field is something that is only occasionally used and thus would normally not occupy screen space. I didn't want students to feel they should always give an explanation. However anything that requires additional activity to get to a field means it is less likely to be used.
Consider that in some cases students may want to edit their comments when revising their quiz.
If the question response is editable then the explanation is editable (at least I think so)
5. "Note that once you have gone through all attempts the text box is no longer available." If you say the students will no longer be able to edit the explanation field, this may be appropriate in some cases. If you say that the student will no longer be able to view the explanation field, this would not be appropriate as students may want to read their comments when reviewing the quiz.
I should explain that I meant they would not be able to edit it, not that they would not be able to see it
Making the explanation field visible / modifiable or not after the student has gone through all attempts should be an option to be set by the teacher. Consider that in some cases students may want to edit their comments when revising their quiz.
Now that was my point. The editable state of the explanation field is determined by the state of the question itself. When the question is editable the explanation can be edited. That is directly from how Tims code works. I am not sure how to do it differently.
"I have restricted the buttons that appear in the Atto editor, but that was more about learning the API rather than being strictly necessary." Restricting buttons should be an option set by the teacher. For young students, a limited number of buttons is a good idea. For university students, a complete editor including for example the equation editor could be useful.
Yes, I think all buttons or none is a better set of choices. However I am not aware of any way to offer that type of choice at the quiz level, only at the system level. As I mentioned the way it works at the moment was me exploring how to develop with the Atto Editor as there was no example in the Wiki of how to use a specific feature.
7. "Many thanks to German Valero who supplied Mexican Spanish string translation..." Do not hesitate to ask me if you need the French translation.
Despite 7 years of study at school.
These are the strings
