Glenys Hanson

Hello Gordon,

My university has upgraded to Moodle 1.6.2 and now everything is much better

In particular, the activity reports, even the complete reports of students who've done dozens of Hot Pots and written lots of messages in forums, too, arrive in just a few seconds. Wonderful =D> (Oh! it doesn't work here. In Eudora it shows hands clapping.)

Since I've realised the students can find the whole list of Hot Pot exos by going to "Hot Potatoes Quizzes" they don't need the whole list in the central "Topics". Just the first exercise in the chain has to be visible. I've realised too that when the chain is added, the topic has to be "visible" to the students. Otherwise when the topic is later made visible, the whole chain is visible and each exercise has to laboriously turned off one by one.

Anyone interested can see the new "look" at L3 - Read English - GREFOPS. The enrolment key is : Rennes

You'll also be able to do all the exercises as a guest. I don't know if this a problem or not. I asked the question a year ago and nobody seemed to think it was, but maybe they hadn't envisaged a course made up entirely of Hot Potatoes exercises.

Cheers,
Glenys

Hello Gordon,
Those both sound like great ideas. How difficult would they be to implement?
Cheers,
Glenys

Hello Gordon,
Thank you so much for your speedy replies.
Of course I'll let you know if your change in the php script makes a difference. In the light of this, I'll keep all the Modules as one course for the time being.
I think I've already done all I can with chaining to hide as many Hot Potatotes exercises as possible from the students (all the JMatch and JMix exercises are presented as you suggest) but as it takes a student 2 to 4 hours to work through a Module they have to be able to stop and start again in the middle.
I've also realised that if I "close" the earlier Modules of the course the later ones load faster, but students are not all working on the same Modules at the same time.
I have about 50 supplementary grammar exercises which at the moment are proposed only as a "resource" because of the problems I mentioned in my first email. I would prefer them to be scored by Moodle if there were some way of doing this without adding them to the main central column.

All the best,
Glenys

Hi there,

If I may be allowed a belated two bits on this subject:

I feel quite strongly that Hot Potatoes should remain a learning tool. This is what its authors, Martin Holmes and Stewart Arneil, intend. I'm a bit shocked that they're called "Hot Potatoes Tests" in Moodle. As other people have said, the in-house Moodle tests are designed for testing and fulfil this objective much better. Maybe the word tests leads people to think that Hot Potatoes should fulfil this function too.

I use Hot Potatoes to do my best to create inductive, constructivist exercises through which learners can create their own know-how. I'm not even happy with the word "quiz" as this assumes a pre-existing body of knowledge which learners have to assimilate/learn-by-heart.

I'm happy for my students to "cheat" - they can find the answers very easily - or should do if I've designed my exercises correctly.

Am I the only constructivist around here?

(Hope I don't come over as too agressive )

Cheers,
Glenys

Hi there,

I feel I can't take undue credit for this.

It was actually the Centre de linguistique appliquée in Besançon, France that financed this. The Centre is part of the Université de Franche-Comté.

I admit, I did do a bit of arm-twisting...

Cheers,
Glenys