Quizzes Pt. 3

Way-ay back in late July and early August, I made my first posts about quizzes, and how I had used Moodle to create a couple of quizzes for a course I teach, and I made a *ahem* promise to let you know how they went. Now it could be that I had forgot completely about that promise, or it could be I've been trying to keep y'all in suspense...

Anyways - I made two quizzes in Moodle, and now I'm going to tell you about my experiences with them.

1. I did impose a time frame upon them. An opening date and a closing date. For both I did extend the closing date. For the first because I decided to be generous, for the second we had an Internet outage at uni, so I thought I'd cut them some slack.

2. Automatic marking is unreal and awesome, and if I could do all my assessments that way I would. Not only because I am intrinsically lazy, but the power of the reports and tracking. I was able to see where my students were getting it right or getting it wrong. Couldn't do that before with bits of paper.

3. As part of the awesomeness of tracking, I was able to see before the quiz closed who had taken the quiz, who was still taking the quiz, and who had not yet attempted the quiz. I was then able to email or message those students to light a bit of a fire under them.

4. Don't give them short typed answer questions, you cannot begin to imagine all of the 'correct' answers and variations that people come up with. Your guesses are only the tip of the iceberg. I had to go in and manually add about 35 other answers to ensure that people weren't penalised for not thinking what I was thinking.

Over all, I give online quizzes a thumbs up. It may take a bit of time to write and format them, but I think it is well and truly worth it.

Now if only I could work out how to do an online referencing quiz where I don't have to go through and mark it, that would be even more awesome. Hmmmmm, I've seen a Flash based thing, now if only my Flash skills were better.