David Scotson

"Plus, it's only possible to choose one answer anyway."

Perhaps I'm being overprotective but when I try to put myself in the learners place (and forget all my own knowledge of HTML forms) I thought that:

• even just momentary uncertainty is something you'd like to avoid in a testing situation

• someone could click one radio button, then another, and possibly not notice that the other had deselected itself (this is possibly outlandish, though in longer lists of answers still possible, I think)

Note also that I'm talking about replacing the current "Answer:" text, so it would be obvious that the text was part of the Moodle system, and if it did seem redundant for some questions that logically can't have two answers then it wouldn't look like the person creating the question text was responsible for the redundancy.

But the more likely causes of trouble is the possibility of the testee not realising that multiple answers are possible unless told so, which I've just done for each multiple answer question in my Quiz. I assume everyone else does this chore too.

I also thought about your suggestion of further limiting answers e.g. maximum of 4 and a minimum of 2 answers and having a) that enforced, and b) automatically displaying appropriate text

It would be quite a job though as HTML forms don't support such niceties natively so you'd need to cook something up with Javascript as well as checking it on the server.

I was just creating a quiz and I noticed that there is no indication given by Moodle as to whether a single or (at least potentially) multiple answers are required beyond the use of radio buttons for single choices and checkboxes.

Is it better to be explicit about this? I think at the minimum the current text of "Answer:" should be changed to "Answer(s):" for the multiple answer questions as it is potentially misleading to someone with a very literal mind. But perhaps something like "Choose one answer:" and "Choose at least one answer:" might be more appropriate. (Or is your single 'answer' made up of multiple 'options' or 'choices'?)

I'm not too familiar with Multiple Choice testing, but I there's a whole science behind it. Does anyone know the best practice for this kind of thing?

Two potential negative 'social' consequences of quoting are that responses can become bitty point by point rebuttals rather than a well thought out response to a summary of the other person's thoughts, and that such responses can tend towards 1 on 1 dialogues rather than opening out discussion to other forum participants. These are both my opinions but I'll see if I can find some research, or even just some other people's opinions, to back them up.

As an introduction here's a link to a weblog entry that argues against my suggestion in response to an article or two that I do agree with (to some degree at least), in order to show both sides of the issue.

The second two articles are an informative and entertaining read even if you disagree with some, or even many, of the conclusions. The author takes a very strong anti-quoting stance (amongst many other sweeping statements), as can be seen here:

Q . Why dont you show me the post Im replying to, while I compose my reply?

A. Because that will tempt you to quote a part of it in your own reply. Anything I can do to reduce the amount of quoting will increase the fluidity of the conversation, making topics interesting to read. Whenever someone quotes something from above, the person who reads the topic has to read the same thing twice in a row, which is pointless and automatically guaranteed to be boring.

and here:

Usenet clients have this big-R command which is used to reply to a message while quoting the original message with those elegant >s in the left column. And the early newsreaders were not threaded, so if you wanted to respond to someones point coherently, you had to quote them using the big-R feature. This led to a particularly Usenet style of responding to an argument: the line-by-line nitpick. Its fun for the nitpicker but never worth reading. (By the way, the political bloggers, newcomers to the Internet, have reinvented this technique, thinking they were discovering something fun and new, and called it fisking, for reasons I wont go into. Dont worry, its not dirty.) Even though human beings had been debating for centuries, a tiny feature of a software product produced a whole new style of debating.

I mentioned this in another thread about a similar suggestion, but I think that threading (as used by Moodle) and auto-quoting in unthreaded discussions (as used in phpBB-style forums) are actually solutions to the same problem.

Also, I don't know how many other Moodlers are using Gmail from Google, but my favourite feature by far is how it organises emails into conversations and removes all the repetition from quotes. (Unfortunately it only gets this half-right with Moodle conversations at the moment)

Without wanting to take this discussion even further off-topic, but I noticed on the martin.moodle.com page you link to that a $ price is given without specifying US or Australian Dollars, as is done elsewhere. That might cause some confusion for potential customers.

I have seen this feature in some discussion board software (usually called 'quick reply' or something similar), however, it is only available once you are inside a single thread, and those boards traditionally are more linear in their discussions, relying on quoting for threading.

It would only therefore really make sense to me to use it in Moodle forums where student's can't make their own threads (assuming you mean responding to your forum introduction, rather than a post you make starting a thread), and are not in the main intended to reply to each other's comments i.e. Forums used as some kind of Blog-variant. So Martin's suggestion seems appropriate.