Peter Ruthven-Stuart

Hello,

I am using Moodle 1.6.2 + and the original Wiki (erfurt).

I have a Wiki with numerous pages and each page has at least 1 old version, and one of the pages has 15 previous versions.

However, when I click on 'Strip pages' in the Admin menu, I get the following message: "There are no pages with more than one version."

Having searched the Wiki forums, this seems to be a problem that other people have had, but I can not find a solution. I imagine that when I upgrade to the newest version of Moodle and the Nwiki my problem will be solved, however in the meantime, can anyone suggest a solution, please?

For example, I have access to the Mysql database, so could delete the old versions via phpMyAdmin. Would this be a safe thing to do?

Any advice will be most welcome.

Hello,

Thank you to Jamie for introducing this project to the Quiz module forum.

My original conception of this project was as a single module that would allow students to make their own quizzes for self-study purposes. However, due to the underlying complexities of this goal we have had to break the project into a number of phases, which will each feature the creation of a module or the development of a new feature within an existing module, or even possibly the adaptation of exiting features; e.g. the 'question bank'. So, what started out as the SelfStudy Module has now been renamed the 'SelfStudy Project'.

Jamie has explained some of the technical details behind the SelfStudy Project, so I'll take the opportunity to explain our plans from a Moodling teacher's stand point. I explained my motivation for developing self study features in Moodle in a posting in the 'general developer forum'. To summarize, as a teacher, I believe it is important to promote 'Autonomous Learning' amongst students, or at least encourage them to take more responsibility for their learning. However, one deficiency of Moodle is that the activities in Moodle courses depend upon the teacher to first set up and then facilitate the activity. Now, it is true, as has been pointed out by Martin Dougiamas, that the admin of any Moodle site can easily give courses to students in which they would be free to make their own quizzes, and any other activities. It is also possible to have students use Hot Potatoes to create their own quizzes, which could then be uploaded to a Moodle Forum to share with their peers. However, having had my students do both of these things it is clear to me that most students need some guidance, and even cajoling, to discover how to take more responsibility for their learning. In other words, just giving them the tools (e.g. editing access to a moodle course, or an authoring tool like HotPototes) is insufficient. What is needed, is the ability to integrate this self study habit into students' main online courses. From a Moodle perspective, this means making it possible for a teacher to monitor self-study activities from within a regular Moodle course - i.e. a course in which a teacher has various learning activities, some of which will be activities that foster autonomous learning. This is thus the purpose of the SelfStudy Project.

At the moment I envisage 3 phases for this project, the first of which we are now embarked on. The goals of the three phases are:

Phase 1: "Question Creation"

• Create a stand alone module, or an addition to the Assignment module activity, that makes it possible for students to create questions
  • note, when writing about question creation, I include the writing of feedback, for both correct and incorrect answers (the distractors)
    
• Make it possible for teachers to evaluate these questions, which could be done automatically and manually:
  
  • automatic grading: a simple grade based on the number of questions created by a student divided by the number required. This number will be sent to the gradebook
  • manual grading: allow teachers to individually grade questions and feedback, again this grade will be sent to the gradebook
    
• Make it possible for the teacher to import these questions into regular teacher-created quizzes. This could be done in one of two ways:
  • manually: the GIFT import feature; questions could be saved as a GIFT file, then 'imported' back in by the teacher to another category
  • automatically: all student created questions designated as 'good' could be automatically moved or copied to a certain category
    
    • once in this 'good question' category, the questions would no longer be editable by the original creator, although a record of who made the questions would be kept (i.e. the original author)

• It could be used to encourage students to reflect on a body of knowledge (a course / a unit / a topic, etc.) that they have studied.
• The creation of questions, which includes writing good distractors and feedback, will itself be a good learning experience. As question creators, students will take on the role of teacher, and will therefore have to make their knowledge explicit, which is a higher level cognitive task than answering questions
• The writing of feedback in particular will require students to explain a topic in more detail
  
• The knowledge that students' questions will appear in quizzes will be an incentive for students to write many good quality questions.
• It will be a good way to help individual teachers to increase the size of their question bank. Of course, with lower level learners the teacher would have to spend more time correcting and rewriting questions.
• It will allow teachers to discover what students perceive as important in a certain body of knowledge.
• Hither to, I've been assuming that the students create questions to which they already know the answers, since they also have to write the answers, distractors and feedback. However, another possible scenario is that students could be asked to write genuine questions that they have about a topic they are about to study. Here they would be asked to just write the questions. The teachers could then include the questions in quizzes having added correct answers and feedback, or students could add the answers as they discover them.
  
  • Another alternative to this would be to have the teacher provide just the questions, and have the students write the answers, distractors and feedback.
    

Phase 2: "Quiz Creation"

• Create a module that will allow students to create their own quizzes, consisting of self-made, peer-made, and teacher made questions.
• The peer and self made questions would be only those that have been 'passed' by the teacher, i.e. those transferred to the 'good questions' category.
• Ideally, students will also be allowed to share quizzes with their peers. So, for example, there could be a link on the course page, called "Shared Quizzes". If a student (or teacher) had indicated that a quiz they had made could be tried by other students, a link to the quiz would appear on the "Shared Quizzes" page. Such a feature would encourage cooperative learning.
• Another possible feature of this phase could be to allow students to work on the creation of quizzes in groups, in a similar way that students can work together on projects in the Project Module.
  

Phase 3: Generation of On-the-fly Quizzes from Smart Question Lists

• automatically generated tags:
  • transient tags (because they change): difficulty, number of attempts, known or unknown, etc.
    
  • fixed tags: date made, original author, grade given for question, question types (multiple choice, short answer ...), etc.
    
• manual tags:
  • these tags would be like the current 'categories' with the difference that questions could have multiple tags, for example; unit number, parts of speech, textbook name, etc.
    

To conclude, each phase of this SelfStudy Project is designed to engender a constructivist approach, and foster both cooperative and autonomous learning habits amongst students. Since this is a work in progress, we would very much welcome any comments about this project that address either the technical aspects or 'Moodling teacher' (educational) issues. Also if you have any questions about how these various features might work in a Moodle course, or indeed any ideas about how you might implement the features, please let us know.

Hello Andrew and Don,

I haven't yet installed your new Split Screen feature for the Quiz module, but have tried it out on your "Split Mode for Quiz Testing Course". It does look fabulous! I'll be sure to install it before the new term beginning in April.

When testing the feature in your site I noticed two things:

1. the width of the description layer appears to be fixed. This could be a problem if a teacher wants to use a video or graphic larger then the fixed width. So, it would be good if students doing quizzes with a split screen were able to drag the dividing bar to the right (as opposed to scrolling), so that they could see all the video / graphic.
2. when previewing the quiz as a teacher, the 'little hand' (the clickable edit icon) is not present in the left layer, as it is in descriptions and questions in the body of the quiz.
   

Best of luck with this project!

Hello Tim,

Thank you very much for creating the GIFT maker.

Like Ben Rich, I am also using a Mac (10.4.8. & Japanese Excel 2004). However, I couldn't even get as far as Ben. When double-clicking on the file (giftmakerv2.xls) I get an Excel error message, which says that there has been an error loading Microsoft Visual Basic (ロード中にエラーが発生しました).

Of course, I can't expect you to make a Mac GIFT_maker ... I wonder if other Mac users have had this problem?

Jamie, yes I need to distinguish between course groups and activity 'sub-groups'.

The 'Group mode' of stage 1 is not directly related to the ability create questions in 'groups' as suggested in stage 2.

When setting up a Moodle courses one of the parameters is 'Group mode' of which the choices are:

• No groups
• Separate groups
• Visible groups

This feature is indispensable when a teacher has a number of classes all registered to the same course. For example, one of my Moodle courses has 12 classes, of 40 students each, registered to it, so a total of 240 students. 'Group mode' for the course is set to 'Separate groups', which means when individual activities are compatible with these group divisions (i.e. classes), there is a pull down menu for the activity which allows me to see what students have done according to their group / class membership. From the students' point of view, they can only 'see' other students in their own group (their classmates). For example, in Forums, they can only see the postings made by their classmates. There is an explanation of 'Groups' here:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Groups

So, when I wrote about 'Group creation of questions' it would have been more correct to have referred to sub-groups. In other words, it would be very useful if when setting up a SelfStudy activity, the teacher could require students to create questions in sub-groups (3 or 4 students) in the same way that students work together on projects in Don Hinkelman's Project module. The key point here is that when a sub-group is given a grade for a question they have made, this grade is automatically given to all the students in that sub-group.

To summarise, the Group mode of stage 1 is a feature that has existed for a while, and most of the standard activity modules have this Group mode setting. It is a way of dividing up a very large cohort of students into separate classes. On the other hand, the 'sub-group' feature suggested in stage 2 above will allow a small set of students (e.g. 3 or 4 students) in the same group (class) to work together on some questions, and the grades that each sub-group get, will be reflected in each individuals' grade for that activity.

Hope this makes things clearer.