Quizzes pt. 1

A couple of weeks ago I spent about a week messing around on Moodle creating quizzes. I had recently undertaken some training on Moodle provided by work, one session of which was creating online assessments.

For a couple of reasons I decided to create a couple of quizzes. They are as follows;

1. Use it or lose it (use the training while it's still a bit fresh, or forget it altogether)
2. I was a bit taken with the automated marking (question type dependent of course)
3. Start making use of Moodle (as I previously had not used Moodle or BlackBoard)
4. Most importantly (at the time) I wanted to reduce the incidence of plagiarism with my students. There had been some low level unintentional plagiarism, and some instances that were a bit more serious.

I decided to have 10 questions, and each question should have 2 to 3 variations of the question.

I then randomised the order of the answers to the questions, randomised the individual questions, and randomised the order in which they were listed in the quiz - just to ensure that almost every student undertaking the quiz would have a slightly different quiz to the next person.

Creating the questions was quite difficult at time, dependant on the question type.
1. True/false: not that hard, only two choices for the answer, but I didn't want an entire assessement that was true/false.
2. Multiple choice: once again, not that hard.
3. Short answer: a bit tricky, choosing a question that required a short answer that had limited alternate words.
4. Cloze: This one was a stone cold pain in the @$$. I found the syntax to create more than two options for a cloze question really challenging since you need to code in to the answer whether the choice is correct or incorrect. I spent a bit of time hassling out the support guy at work getting help with this as part of my quiz.
5. Inserting images was also strangely difficult. I was able to upload them easily enough, but for some reason embedding them into the question was oddly not particularly obvious.

Since I composed my quiz in a sandbox mode, I couldn't get anyone else to really test my quiz. I did manage to eventually import to the course and set an opening and closing date on the quiz.

Just before signing off, I did discover how important it is to have your students acquainted with using the LMS. Today I had the first class of a semester with new students. So I'll do a part 2 and let you know how the first quiz went.