Any chance that the Essay type of question may be incorporated into an upcoming build 1.5.X, without having to wait for 1.6 to be released. I have tried 1.6, and I am pleased to see that there is a functionnal solution in that version. The issues is that until 1.6 is stable, I do not want to use it in production, and I have no idea when 1.6 will become stable. Any clue on that?
The only other alternative right now is to tweak the system and use lessons. This has very many limitations and anoying restrictions, whcih are handles by quizzes such as in lessons
- No ability to enter standard preset feedback
- No ability for students to see feeback online (have to get it by email, ... and I email per questions)
- No secure window option
- No ability to shuffle questions
- Students see options that may lead them to navigate toother areas of the portal
I see that Quiz modules can be downloaded as add-on modules. I downloaded the latest version marked as standard (Latest 9227) for Moodle 1.5 dev. I can by looking at the files that there are references to essay questions. Can this add-on be incorporated with the latest release (1.5.3 Nov 2006). If this is not a standard thing, what would it take to make it work?
There is a version of the essay question for Moodle 1.5.3. You will find it at cdc.humboldt.edu/moodle. Its installation is a bit involved and so you may be better off waiting for Moodle 1.6. This will be stable by the end of the month when it goes into beta testing. I think you could expect to be able to put it into production use by the middle of march.
Thank you very much Gustav. This is fantastic. I have been so frustrated by having to use Lessons for essay quizzes.
It took me a little over 3 hours to figure out how to do all that is involved (I had never backed up the database). Had to install MySQL browser to run the scrips to create the tables and index. I have create a test quiz, had a test user run it, then I graded it. It all worked fine. The only thing that seems to be missing is the ability for students to check the detailed feedback and to see the comments, in a way similar to the other types of questions, by using the "Grades" modules. By the way, this is something that should be displayed in a secure window or something to that effect, so that it is not too easy for people to copy and paste, then hand out questions to other future exam attendees.
Thanks again.
Just another note on this, you can 'shuffle' questions in lesson by either the 'show an unseen' navigation path or setting up a cluster and setting questions to go to random unseen within a cluster.