This discussion is stemming from a feature request I submitted (bug 5500).
My initial idea is that I have a teacher repository course that all of the teachers of a given course are editing teachers of. They can store/share copies of the resources they use with other teachers and thus create a mini-hive. With the ability to publish questions, I have encouraged teachers to create question categories in the teacher repository. Then they can use those questions in the individual courses without replicating them. If a correction needs to be made to a question, it can thus be made in one spot. This approach has worked well.
However, when importing (using the import link in the course admin block) a course that uses published question categories, the published questions are duplicated and added to the new course. What I would like to see is that a check be done to see if the question category belongs to the course being imported from. If it does, then I assume that the user wants to duplicate the questions and make the target course identical to the source course. If, the source course is using published questions, I would like for the target course to do the same. In other words, I want the target and source courses to behave the same.
One question raised was whether or not this would take away functionality from the user. I do not see that it does. On the contrary, I think it provides a more precise import process. Any input on this would be most welcomed. Peace.
Would this take away functionality from the user? Yes it would, but perhaps that's a good thing! If users are SUPPOSED to share (rather than proliferate copies), then the ability to copy SHOULD be removed. Removing functionality in this case serves the goal of the organization: that everyone should work from the same version, and that version should be maintained centrally (you know, like software
).
Although I haven't been using moodle for long, I did notice a change that occurred sometime between version 1.5.2 and 1.5.4. If you were a teacher "sharing" a published question category in 1.5.2.0, and you attempted to export the category to a file (a clear violation of "share, don't copy"), you got the following error message:
Good! Just as it should be, at least in an organization that wants to maintain a single version. But somewhere between then and version 1.5.4, the error message disappeared and exports were allowed
.
).
Although I haven't been using moodle for long, I did notice a change that occurred sometime between version 1.5.2 and 1.5.4. If you were a teacher "sharing" a published question category in 1.5.2.0, and you attempted to export the category to a file (a clear violation of "share, don't copy"), you got the following error message:
Only the teacher can export quiz questions
Good! Just as it should be, at least in an organization that wants to maintain a single version. But somewhere between then and version 1.5.4, the error message disappeared and exports were allowed
.
Actually, I envision having the best of both worlds - the precision of a smart course import and the ability to go into a course as a teacher and export the questions using the question export functionality. If a teacher wants to work independently to maintain their own bank of questions go ahead but if they want to be part of the collective (I admit it sounds a little Borg like) then they should be able to do that as well. My sense is that the current model discourages collaboration and forces the duplication of questions.