Sorry for the persistence but it's as trivial to anyone to upload a new version of an approved plugin, perhaps including some virus or spam, or something more sneaky. This just can't be the reason for insisting on a per plugin human approval instead of first contribution human approval.
Itamar Tzadok
Posts made by Itamar Tzadok
Installation should be fairly straightforward. In the git repo of the plugin you have a (download-)zip button. Click that button to download a zip file of the plugin. The zip should contain a folder with the same name. Extract the folder from the zip. For the dataform you need to change the folder name to dataform and copy it into moodle/mod. For the dataform view block you need to change the folder name to dataform_view and copy it into moodle/blocks. Then open the notifications page on Moodle and Moodle should indicate that there are new plugins to install. Proceed to install and with a bit of luck the plugins will be installed properly.
Most recent version is 1.0.4i and may be downloaded from git at https://github.com/itamart/moodle-mod_dataform (note that the entry in the Moodle plugin repository offers only version 1.0.4). It requires php 5.3 and Moodle 2. I haven't tested it on 2.2 yet, but it should work. The dataform view block should be available from https://github.com/itamart/block-dataform_view. There's hardly any documentation so for some getting started guidelines you can either search posts in the database activity module forum or ask me on that forum. The dataform is an enhancement of the database module so some of the latter's documentation may be helpful but only to a certain extent.
The current implementation in the filepicker is actually a fix to which I objected but unfortunately developers took absolutely no notice at all of that objection. See http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=166393 and MDL-25215.
By the same token, Joseph, I see no reason to force an instructor to this or that strategy/pedagogy.
One of the main advantages of online assessment over in-class assessment is realized in precisely such features. You can allow the instructor to require answers to all questions and attach to the timer a warning to students if not all questions are already answered.