Mary Cooch

Building learning, social constructionism at its best -  as Moodle Community Educator I feel it is my duty to highlight a new plugin by committed Moodler AND TEACHER Jean-Michel Védrine which allows students to create quiz questions and get graded for them - and have them used in subsequent quizzes with their classmates.

We've discussed the merits of getting students to do this before and indeed I did a project with a class from my old high school where they created questions for the Functional Skills ICT (basic ICT skills) course they were doing. There are various ways to get them to create questions ranging from changing permissons to (how I did it) giving them teacher rights in a course. But Jean-Michel has updated and enhanced an actual activity module which you can download from the plugins database now.

Here's how it works:

As a teacher, with the editing turned on, add the Question creation activity:

Add a name and instructions and then decide how you want to grade them. The default is 50% automatic grade for creating the questions and 50% manually graded by the teacher:

Then decide which question types you want them to create and you can also make them create a minimum number of a certain type -for example here, I made my students create at least 3 multiple choice:

You can decide if you want them to be able just to create questions, to create and preview, save as new questions but it is ESSENTIAL before you get them all busily on task that you check you have cron running regularly; if not, they won't be able to do this as they won't have the permissions - as I discovered on my test site at first:

When the student clicks on the activity, they see clearly what they have to do:

And as they work through the questions, that page updates with where they are in terms of what they have created and how it has been (automatically graded)

The teacher can then manually grade the questions, for the other part of the grade:

The student can clearly see their grades:

And the teacher has some student-created quiz questions in the question bank for later use

It's the kind of thing that makes you proud to be a Moodler 

Moodle 2.8 is out now, and if you'd like to see some of the improvements for teachers in a setting with real content, rather than trying in a lonely sandpit with all your courses and activities named "test", (or in my case, named "asdasd")  then feel free to head off to the School demo site, Mount Orange. If you log in with the username teacher and password moodle, you can then go through the links tagged as NEW IN 2.8 on this Teacher page.

Examples (for which you need to be logged in as above):

• experience the new cool gradebook scrolling, on different devices and with different browsers
• view the Grade history of your course and zoom in on one student or grade item in the Single view
• finally let your students make more than one choice in a choice! (I gave a preview of this in an earlier Moodle tip:One choice or many)
• easily attach extra files to assignment instructions to support your students 
• create and subscribe to an event monitoring rule, so you can be notified when students add an entry to a glossary or enrol in your course for example. Note that because emails are disabled on the site, you will get the notification as a pop up message - and of course you will have to log as a student (username student/ password moodle) and do something to trigger it

Because I can't get enough of Moodle, I keep an eye on other forums and email lists as well as Moodle.org and it was from one of those, a UK university mailing list, that this tip arrived - courtesy of quizmeister Tim Hunt.

Problem (thanks Matt) Our students take a "Pre-learning" quiz before they begin a course and then they take a second, "Post-learning" quiz at the end, hopefully with an improved score to reflect their progression. How can I compare the two quizzes so that I get a third column in the gradebook showing the comparison and level of improvement?

Solution (thanks Tim)

• In the Common module settings for each quiz, ensure you have an ID - for example, PreQ and PostQ

• In the Categories and Items, create a new grade item -for example Quiz Compare-  and click the calculator icon (2.7 or below) or, if you are up to date with 2.8, Edit settings>Edit calculations:
  

• Add your calculation. A simple one might be for example as below:
  

• Student Donna gets 4.2 before the course; 6 at the end of the course, and the Quiz Compare column tells us she's improved by 1.8:
  

A simple example, but hopefully you can see the potential

Note: Depending on how you use your gradebook, you might want to exclude this grade item from the course total.

Moodle's choice activity offers many possibilities for quick polling of your students. There are some ideas in the documentation Using choice and during last year's Learn Moodle MOOC, we had a useful forum discussion Good ideas for using Choice . Perhaps if you have some new suggestions, you can add them to this forum thread?

One thing that is not so welll known is that, despite its name being "choice" you can actually only offer one choice. So the "choice" is to choose it or not!  This could, for example, serve as a poor man's attendance register:

It could also be a simple way of getting students to agree to a course contract or  internet use agreement. They check the box to agree - and you could even restrict access so that they can only access the other activities once they have accepted the terms set out in the choice.

Normally, however there is more than one option in a choice activity, and although participants are allowed to change their mind (choice) they can only make one selection. Until now...

Moodle 2.8, with us in November, is bringing with it the possibility of allowing students to select more than one option in a choice activity:

 In this first choice, participants must choose their best date for a meeting ,but can only opt for one date:

In this choice in Moodle 2.8, they can choose all dates on which they are available:

There is a subtle difference in the shape of the "radio buttons" when you are allowed to choose more than one option, similar to quiz questions. It would be great to hear which ideas people have for using this new feature. 

Nothing new here; this has been available for a while and mentioned in forums before,  but it doesn't seem to be widely known. I was just documenting this today, so I thought I would share it as a Moodle tip - with thanks to Tim Hunt for jogging my memory on Twitter.

Being able to move activities and resources by dragging them to their new location is a great feature:

However, you can find yourself trying to do tricky two-handed manoeuvres if your item is at the bottom of a long course page and you need to move it right up to the top, dragging and scrolling at the same time.

Instead, just click on the move icon - usually a cross-hairs icon as (1) below. This then displays a screen where you will see links to all the items on your page and the tops of sections (2). Just click to select the location you want to move your item to  and the job is done. No dragging or scrolling