Hello Sam,
Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.
> - Reduced performance when editing activity settings
> - Reduced performance when displaying course view page and possibly some activity pages if 'jump' dropdown present.
Yes, we are definitely experiencing these two things.
We will follow your suggestions, and I suspect we may have to rationalize the course contents by combining many of the activities, especially the quizzes.
Hello,
Is there a maximum number of activities & resources in any single Moodle course above which performance drops significantly?
In other words, once a course reaches X number of activities & resources, should the course be then divided into multiple courses?
Our Moodle system generally runs quickly However, when trying to access activities (especially quizzes and assignments) in either of two large courses the activities take a long time to load, sometimes as long as 2 or 3 minutes. However when accessing activities in smaller courses in the same system pages load very quickly.
The System Engineer running our server has informed us that we should consider dividing up the two large courses into multiple courses since Moodle is unable to handle so many activities and resources in any one course. i.e he's saying it's a moodle 'limitation' and not a hardware problem.
So, is there a limit (or ideal max or optimal number) on the number of activities & resources in any one course?
I have searched moodle.org for an answer, and so far have only found this 2007 forum post and this 2007 bug report.
The two large courses in question are running consecutively on the following Moodle:
The two of the courses each contain a total of 599 activities and resources:
Assignments 10
Choices 15
Databases 1 (with 4473 entries)
Forums 6
Labels 148
Questionnaires 17
Quizzes 244
Resources (links and web pages) 154
Wikis 4
The two courses are fully online with no classroom component. The total number of students per course is 270, but the maximum number of concurrent users is about 30, and perhaps 60 near weekly deadlines. The slow loading of pages happens even when there are only a few students accessing the courses.
The Moodle set up is as follows:
Software:
Hardware:
Any advice or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Ludo,
Thanks for your reply and for looking into this bug.
"I cannot give an answer yet, wiki modes are tricky..."
The thing is, many of the users of the standard Wiki in Moodle 1.9 got used to the concept of groups being able to edit their own wiki but not those of other groups. It is not easy to explain to people that a core feature of the Wiki (and of Moodle given it's constructivist foundations) no longer exists in the new Moodle version.
Tim,
Thanks for your understanding.
I think your suggested alternate functionality would meet our needs. I can also see some added advantages with having these randomly generated questions exist as real questions, as opposed to the 'semi-real' status of randomsamatch questions.
How about adding to this functionality by making it possible to generate questions from multiple categories, and or sub-categories?
Also, the ability to generate questions from other question types and even glossary entries is very attractive. How about also from Database activity entries? That would be awesome!
On the other hand, not being able to upgrade current questions and quizzes generated the old way would be disappointing. How about some kind of conversion process? Tricky I guess since it would not only be a matter of converting randomsamatch questions, but also 'informing' old quizzes using these randomsamatch question types what newly converted questions to use.
Hello Tim,
"if you want a matching question, why not create a matching question?"
As James Scully mentions above, the ability to recycle questions in a new form is very important. It might sound "lazy", but it's also a very efficient use of time and resources.
Another great thing about the randomsamatch versus a standard matching question is that any one student is much less likely to get the same questions as his or her peer. With traditional match type questions the combination of 'questions' and 'answers' is fixed. On the other hand, with randomsamatch the combinations of 'questions' and 'answers is, well ... random. This also means that the same student at a later date can do the same quiz and get a different set of 'questions' and 'answers', but the quiz creator doesn't need to create multiple matching questions. Note, to achieve this, the quiz needs to be set to "Each attempt builds on the last" = No.
The attachment show the results of a student who did a quiz containing just one randomsamatch question. The combinations are taken from a bank of 25 SA questions. In the second attempt, just one of the left-right combinations was repeated. This 'same' question' is reused in a later question, giving the student further exposure to these questions.
