Course with a lot of Hot Pot exercises

Course with a lot of Hot Pot exercises

by Glenys Hanson -
Number of replies: 6
Hello,
I have created a course which has a large number of HP exercises: over 280 divided into 12 Modules. In fact, the course consists almost entirely of HP exercises.
This creates a very long Moodle page with long lists of exercises and leads to several probems :
  1. The students can be visually overwhelmed by such long lists.
  2. It's difficult to get a simple overview of the course. I'd like to use the central Moodle block just for this.
  3. Viewing their scores in "Grades" is very unwieldy.
  4. Consulting the students' activity reports takes several minutes for each person. (I realise this could be due to our university server, but it doesn't seem slow otherwise).
My question: Is it possible to place the Hot Potatoes exercises somewhere other than the central block? I realise I can hide the long lists from the students and provide links to them in a html page; which would be more user friendly for the students but would take a lot of my work on my part. It wouldn't solve the problem of the time it takes to consult the students' work.

Has anyone else had this problem? Do you have a solution?

A beta version of the course can be visited here: http://crmte.univ-fcomte.fr/moodle/course/view.php?id=75
The enrollment key is: guess

I have another course which includes many other activities as well as Moodle exos. Each Module is graded but the Moodle scores count for only a small part of the grade. Is it possible to separate Moodle scores from other grades? I had to do all my grading outside Moodle to avoid being confused by the mass of HP scores? Any solution?

This course can be visited here: http://crmte.univ-fcomte.fr/moodle/course/view.php?id=139
The enrollment key is: bat

In spite of these problems mainly to do with grading, I'm very happy with the way HP works in Moodle thanks to Gordon.

Cheers,
Glenys
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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Course with a lot of Hot Pot exercises

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Glenys,
it is always inspiring to see what you do with the Hot Potatoes exercises. Thank you for giving us a glimpse of your work.

I can see the having so many activities in a course makes the display a bit awkward. Probably this is a limitation of Moodle more than just the HotPot module.

At the moment, I do not think it is possible to easily move the display of activities from the main column to the side block.

One idea to ease the visual overload of some many HotPots would be to "chain" the HotPot acitivites, so that only the first activity appeared on the course page to the students, although this would of course mean that students could not go directly to quizzes in the tail of the chain.

Another idea would be to use the "Show a single section" icons on the course page, i.e. Show only topic 1 , and so limit the amount of material that was presented to the students. There is a similar icon on the index of HotPots index page, which you could use to speed up the display of that page.

To really speed up the display of HotPot grades would probably require some programming effort to cache the grades. At the moment, the HotPot grades are not cached and are calculated every time the HotPot index page, or a HotPot report page is displayed. This has the advantage the information responds to changes the teacher might make to the way the grade is calculated e.g. first/last/highest/lowest score, or the maximum grade setting. However practically speaking, this information does not change very often, so it would be worth caching the grades, and may be even the reports, so they could be displayed more quickly.

While we are on the subject of caching, it would also be possible to speed up the admninistration of HotPot quizzes if they were cached. The HotPot module does quite a bit of work adjusting URLs and inserting extra JavaScript before sending out a quiz. If a quiz is generated from the XML file, then even more work is required to combine the XML with the quiz templates to produce the HTML that is sent to the browser. If we added some intelligent caching functionality to the HotPot module we could drastically speed up the time to deliver a quiz, and lighten the processing load on the server at the same time.

The idea to remove the grades for certain HotPots from the course grade considerations is an interesting one. In this case the HotPot becomes more like a resource, that is to say, the teacher is only interested to know whether the student looked at the quiz or not, but this information does not contribute to the course grade.

regards
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Course with a lot of Hot Pot exercises

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hello again Glenys,
I was looking through the "hotpot/index.php" script today, and have made a small change which may significantly speed up the display of this page when there a hundreds of HotPots each with many attempts.

The latest version of the script is available in Moodle 1.6.2+, so next time your Moodle site is upgraded I would be interested to hear from you whether you and your students notice any improvement in the speed at which the page appears.

regards
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Course with a lot of Hot Pot exercises

by Glenys Hanson -
Hello Gordon,
Thank you so much for your speedy replies.
Of course I'll let you know if your change in the php script makes a difference. In the light of this, I'll keep all the Modules as one course for the time being.
I think I've already done all I can with chaining to hide as many Hot Potatotes exercises as possible from the students (all the JMatch and JMix exercises are presented as you suggest) but as it takes a student 2 to 4 hours to work through a Module they have to be able to stop and start again in the middle.
I've also realised that if I "close" the earlier Modules of the course the later ones load faster, but students are not all working on the same Modules at the same time.
I have about 50 supplementary grammar exercises which at the moment are proposed only as a "resource" because of the problems I mentioned in my first email. I would prefer them to be scored by Moodle if there were some way of doing this without adding them to the main central column.

All the best,
Glenys
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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Course with a lot of Hot Pot exercises

by Gordon Bateson -
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How about a Hot Potatoes block? I am not 100% familiar with what blocks can do, but it may be possible to create a block which could administer HotPots and keep track of the results, but wthout the requirement of creating an activity that appears in the central section of the course page.

Another (bright?!) idea I had was allowing an HP chains to be displayed as expandable lists, like you sometimes see on website navigation menus. For example on the Hot Potatoes index page, initially only the first quiz in a chain would be displayed, but chains with a "+" icon, could be expanded, and students could resume the chain from where they left off.
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Course with a lot of Hot Pot exercises

by Glenys Hanson -
Hello Gordon,
Those both sound like great ideas. How difficult would they be to implement?
Cheers,
Glenys
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Course with a lot of Hot Pot exercises

by Glenys Hanson -
Hello Gordon,

My university has upgraded to Moodle 1.6.2 and now everything is much better cool

In particular, the activity reports, even the complete reports of students who've done dozens of Hot Pots and written lots of messages in forums, too, arrive in just a few seconds. Wonderful =D> (Oh! it doesn't work here. In Eudora it shows hands clapping.)

Since I've realised the students can find the whole list of Hot Pot exos by going to "Hot Potatoes Quizzes" they don't need the whole list in the central "Topics". Just the first exercise in the chain has to be visible. I've realised too that when the chain is added, the topic has to be "visible" to the students. Otherwise when the topic is later made visible, the whole chain is visible and each exercise has to laboriously turned off one by one.

Anyone interested can see the new "look" at L3 - Read English - GREFOPS. The enrolment key is : Rennes

You'll also be able to do all the exercises as a guest. I don't know if this a problem or not. I asked the question a year ago and nobody seemed to think it was, but maybe they hadn't envisaged a course made up entirely of Hot Potatoes exercises.

Cheers,
Glenys
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