Today I was thinking about a feature request from some of our teachers.
They were creating a lot of questions of the same type, which all needed to have the same options, and so they asked "can we have a way to set the defaults we want before we create a batch of questions". That is tricky. It requires an extra screen where you have to go to set the defaults. Where does that fit? It is an extra step in the process, etc.
Then, I remember what the Ordering question type does. When you create an ordering question, it remembers some of the key settings you chose, and then the next time you create an ordering question, it defaults to using those settings again. This seems like a simple and elegant solution, which just works with no extra screens.
Should we do the same thing for all the other question types? (It seems reasonable to me, but I am not sure, which is why I am asking here.)
Second question: Should we update the stored options any time you edit a question, or only when you are creating a new one? (Ordering does any edit, but I think only for new questions might be better.)
So far, my analysis of the overall suggestion is:
Benefits
- Saves you time if you need to create a lots of similar questions.
- No additional screen or extra setup steps. It just works.
- Easy to implement. (Internally choices are stored as User preferences, which are handled by Moodle core. We just need to remember to implement the privacy API.)
Disadvantages
Not sure if this is a disadvantage, but it was the only think I could think of, so I am going to write it.
- When you make a new question, the default options will depend on the last question you created, not on some fixed set of options. This might possibly confuse people sometimes, but I am not sure.
Please let me know your thoughts.
