Joseph Rézeau

Sorry about the closed bug report. I suggest you vote for MDL-2727 instead.
Joseph
PS.- Jeff, don't worry about the testing, you can still continue, I appreciate your help.

I am glad to announce a new version of my REGEXP question type, available for Moodle 1.6 and 1.7. You can view the documentation and download the plugin from the Moodle plugins page here. New features in this version:

• it is now possible for the teacher to make a Hint button available to the student to allow her to "buy" the next correct letter (à la Hot Potatoes);
• in adaptative mode, the student gets full (colored) feedback as to which part of her answer was correct, which one was wrong, and gets relevant feedback to continue;
  
• the teacher can now view the whole list of alternate correct answers - automatically generated from the regular expressions she has entered in the Answer fields;
• the regular expressions entered by the teacher are now checked for matching parentheses and square brackets.

The organization of the various answers has been slightly modified and you may have to edit the regular expressions short answers that you created in the previous version. Full explanations are provided in the accompanying documentation.

Also included in the plugin is a modified version of the multianswer (Cloze) question type, with these features:

• the length of the blanks / gaps in the Cloze question matches the length of the very first correct answer in the question (as per this discussion);
• it is now possible to include any kind of HTML formatted text (even web addresses) in the feedback messages for all the sub-questions in a Cloze question;
• a number of minor but irritating bugs in the Cloze question have also been corrected.

It is of course possible to export to file (Moodle XML only) and import from file all the REGEXP questions. Help files are provided in French and in English.

Finally, you can see for yourself what this new version looks like by going to my test site http://rezeau.info/moodle and login as user moodler, password moodler. You can also e-mail me for a teacher password if you want to test it out in authoring mode.

Looking forward to your feedback. If you like it and would like to see this questiontype included in standard distributions of Moodle, vote for MDL-5129.

Thanks,

Joseph

Hi Jeff,

As you say yourself in your message, the "normal" way to tell students whether they selected the correct or incorrect answers in MCQ questions is to display the "Correct" or "Incorrect" feedback message upon their entering their answer (or later on, when reviewing). I am amazed at the large quantity of questions and answers in your questions database and also surprised that - when those questions were authored - you never thought of entering any feedback in them.

I do not think what you suggest, i.e. having another column in "Student may review" quiz parameters is feasible. The quiz settings interface is already far too complex (I'm sure Tim will agree).

On the other hand, it might be possible to automatize (partly) the insertion of Correct and Incorrect feedback messages into your bank of existing questions, depending on what is already in them, which tool you used to author those questions in the first place, etc. If you can attach here a short, typical extract, say of 10 or 20 questions (preferably in Moodle XML format) I can take a look.

Joseph

The questions editing window for a new question always presents 10 empty answers. This is usually much more than needed. However, when more than 10 anwers are needed, the only way to get an eleventh empty field is to save the first 10 answers and re-edit the question, etc. This is not user-friendly.

For most question types the ORDER of the answers is not important. However, for some, especially the SHORTANSWER and above all the REGEXP question types, the ORDER is of paramount importance. Moreover, it is often necessary, when modifying questions of the latter type, to insert a new "answer" (i.e. a regular expression) between two existing "answers". This is not possible, and can only be achieved through tedious copying and pasting of answer & feedback text from one field to another.

I am suggesting the implementation of a tool - similar up to a point to the questions re-ordering tool in the questions bank, which would do the following.

1- When a new question is created, it is created with 3 empty fields only (this is enough for most question types).

2- At any time when creating or modifying a question, it is possible to move each answer (and attached feedback text and attached grade) up or down.

3- It is possible to insert an empty answer field (& attached feedback & grade fields, of course) anywhere between 2 existing answer fields or before the first or after the last existing answer fields.

I do not have the necessary programing skills to embark upon this improvement, but I offer to collaborate to any endeavour towards it and to provide extensive and reliable testing.

Joseph

PS.- If you are interested in this proposed new feature, do vote for it MDL-8556.

Gloria,

Why would you want the timer located in the lower left corner of the screen? One problem with this location is that you can never know where that "lower left corner" would be on your students' screens, as it depends on their computer's screen resolution, the actual height (and width) of their browser window, etc.

Anyway, the simple CSS solution I gave in my previous post still works. You just add the following lines to the end of any one of your current theme's CSS files, e.g. in the Formal White theme, add to the end of fw_layout.css:

#mod-quiz-attempt #timer {
 position: fixed;
 left:10px;
 top:540px!important;
}

For example, on a 1027 x 768 screen resolution the counter would appear a couple of centimeters from the bottom of the window. You'll have to experiment with the top:xxx px size. But again I would not recommend this kind of relocation, too hazardous.

Joseph