Joseph Rézeau

Hi Colin,

Thanks for sharing this idea. Mind maps and knowledge maps have been around for quite some time. I think the first instance of something akin to mind maps that I came across with was running on a Commodore 64, way back in the 1980s.

I am both interested in those "maps" and skeptical as to their usefulness. You say "how can I expand what I know without knowing what I do not know?" and that is a very good question, i.e. a question with no easy answer. Of course, the more you learn, the more you discover the extent of your ignorance. That discovery, far from being a matter for discouragement is, I find, an incentive for always wanting to learn more.

On a more practical ground (in Moodle), it is generally agreed that finding the information you need when you need it and - preferably - expressed in words that you will understand, is difficult. Some swear by the documentation (I hardly ever read it), others will search the forums, and yet others will just post their question to the forums without doing any previous search (we tend to not like the latter). To be able to construct a "MKM" (Moodle Moodle Knowledge Map) or -as you suggest - specific maps for specific roles would no doubt be a formidable task. Any takers?

ATB

Joseph

Hi Velson,

I'm afraid you are getting things mixed up between the different question types that exist (in VLE's in general and specific to Moodle).

Multliple Choice Question type (MCQ)

The teacher can include almost anything in each of the choices. The student can only select one (or more, in the case of MCQ, Multiple Answers) of the possible choices or "answers" on offer.

The terminology for MCQ questions "answers" is not specific to Moodle.

In the Wikipedia article about MCQ, they say "respondents are asked to select the best possible answer (or answers) out of the choices from a list."

"Multiple choice items consist of a stem and a set of options."

"The options are the possible answers that the examinee can choose from, with the correct answer called the key and the incorrect answers called distractors."

For more info about the current Moodle terminology about question / answer / response / feedback, etc. see this discussion.

Short Answer question type (SA)

This is the type of question where you would like the student to be able to type a chemical formula. If you tell your students how to type the unicode superscript and subscript characters, then there is no problem for them to enter their answer as expected. You could even provide the needed characters in the text of your question for them to copy-paste (see attached example).

However, in the case of a far more complex formula such as

H
¦
H-C-H
¦
H

it is obviously quite impossible for the student to enter that into a SA answer box and even more impossible for the moodle quiz question engine to analyse that kind of answer.

"The student needs to be given comparable resources to the teacher. Otherwise the student will never be able to aspire to the standards a teacher thinks as normal."

In the light of my explanations above, I'm afraid I do not understand what you mean by that. The current impossibility for the student to enter complicated formula into a SA answer box is due the the inherent limitations of today's programing resources. This may change in the future, but it has nothing to do with "not providing comparable resources to teacher and student".

Joseph

Hi Velson,

I can understand your disappointment, but this is probably a case of setting your level of expectations too high. At the moment a VLE is no more able to evaluate the correctness of the formula of a methane molecule than it can evaluate an essay, a dissertation or a painting.

If, however, you follow the advice given in this thread, you can have the students "construct" their answer using the Maths, etc. tools available, post the result as an image within an essay (or attached to it), or as an assignment, which the teacher can then mark, same as they would mark an essay or any other kind of student answer that cannot be automatically evaluated by the quiz engine itself.

I hope that helps and will make you re-consider resorting to "paper and post" as the only solution to your problem.

Joseph

I should have remembered that I posted this solution myself in this thread 2 years ago.
ATB
Joseph

Bonjour,
Sur mon installation Moodle, le bloc horloge fonctionne correctement sous Firefox 3.5.9 et MS Internet Explorer 8, avec le thème visuel formal white. Comme le dit Jérôme, le problème de non affichage ne provient donc pas de Moodle ni du bloc horloge lui-même, mais de réglages propres aux paramètres de votre installation (navigateur). A vous de découvrir ce qui pose problème sur votre installation.
Bon courage.