Ray Morris

I'm beginning to implement tags within the question bank. I don't know if the implementation will be accepted for integration, but I'll at least make a patch available.  I'd like to hear any suggestions or comments on how you'd like to see it done.  

Here's what I have in mind at the moment as far as the UI.  This is the existing question bank UI:

We'd add a field to find questions by tags:

Hopefully we could do autocomplete, similar to the autocomplete the Moodle Tracker has:

As a second question, I'd love to do this as a plugin or something so people who want it right away can have it right away.  Based on a quick look at the code, it appears unlikely that there's a way to do that. If anyone who is more familiar with the question bank than I am has any thoughts on that, I'd love to hear them.

> We want to get this into core so we’re looking for comments and suggestions. So:
> do you think this makes things easier for teachers?

Yes

> if you create questions will this make it easier for you to create questions?

Yes

I can think of two methods that may work for you.  I think this will do exactly what you want, just using different words.

Create a Topic called "Math Quiz".   In Gradebook, create a category called math quiz.

Within that Topic, create three Quizzes - Part1, Part2, Part3.  In the gradebook, add each of those three to the Match Quiz category.  

What you called "a quiz with sections" Moodle calls "a topic with quizzes", but it works the way you want it to work, I believe.

The other option would be to use Lesson rather than Quiz.  Lessons can have questions like Quizzes do, but are much more free-form. You can (and must) decide how Lessons behave, whereas Quiz always behaves the way the developers decided a Quiz should behave.  (Neither is necessarily better.  Sometimes you prefer an assembled product and other times you prefer pieces you can assemble yourself as you see fit.)

The Assignment module has a plugin which allows the teacher to upload several different assignments and the student is presented with one randomly chosen assignment to fulfill that activity.

https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=assignment_random

  Can the same be done with Quiz, or more generally with Actvities?  Could we create six quizzes and have a randomly chosen one be made visible to the student?

I'm familiar with random questions, where a quiz has X number of random questions from category Y, but that doesn't quite fill our need.  I think we need to manually create the different versions of the quiz because our questions could be in three or four different categories, which Moodle doesn't handle.

> so we said she could join in with a later group. However, she now

> is unable to get her certificate as the old course is closed and she

> hasn't done the quizzes in the new one.

> Does she have to repeat the quizzes, or can we transfer her grades over to the new course?

...

> We're pretty sure we'll come across this issue again in the future.

It sounds like this is in fact the a same class/course, but you're telling Moodle that it's a different course?  I suspect you're right, you will come across similar issues in the future if it's actually the same course, but you tell Moodle that it's not.  (This is the data architecture version of lying and it creates similar problems.) 

That's certainly not an uncommon thing to do since Moodle has no concept of semester or term, but yes, expect to run into other similar problems.  Alternatives, such as using Moodle groups to separate semesters within the same course, avoid some of the problems but create different problems instead.