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.
Showing posts with label quiz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quiz. Show all posts
Friday, September 17, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Quizzes pt. 2
Gahd - I feel like I have spent far too long today messing around with Script-O Pro.
I really really really hope that if you are forking over the dough for the professional membership the help for using the site is more forthcoming, because at this point it is wretched!!!
As per the brief I created a quiz with their online quiz maker. It has some good options
- Multiple answer - where more than one answer can be correct.
- Single answer - where only one answer is correct. Handy tip - don't confuse them.
- True/False - 'nuff said.
- Matching - where you choose from a term in a drop down box to complete a sentence.
However, it has some jolly confusing options, either because the resultant page doesn't have the input options the other three did, or it doesn't act they way you thought it might, or it doesn't have any help - AT ALL.
- Fill Answer - where you have a word to enter to complete the sentence. To do this you must enclose the word in *asterisks* either side of the word. The page will then have an input box.
- Short Answer - can't work this one out, the help file for it was inactive.
- Simple Cloze - tried and tried with this one. It didn't have any help files active. Nothing I tried was really sufficient. I found an HTML cloze exercise and copied and pasted it into the quiz and modified it, but it doesn't really work.
So those are the questions.
Just as painful is the creation of the quiz. Similar to Moodle there are a range of options open to you in the creation of the quiz. Imposing a password for log in, regulating the amount of attempts, show the answers or not upon completion, randomising the questions and answer order. Good stuff there. Not so good is that every time you save the quiz you have to go back to that page, or that you need to use the drop down boxes quite carefully or else you'll have blank questions all over the place.
Something else incredibly painful is the need to know/look up some HTML tags for inserting an image. I needed to upload an image (that's fine), but when I clicked on the link for 'Your Images', it came up with the URL for the image. I had to look up the tags for insertion to include the image.
I can see it is quite a powerful program, and probably quite a boon to the more cash strapped schools out there. However, as someone who is not an HTML code monkey it was a bit painful (I did need to insert some break tags in a couple of questions), as was the lack of substantial available help.
Anyway - if you're interested in having a go of my quiz, it is at this link. Or if you are the website, enter 519 into the course ID student log in.
Will shortly give you an update on my quiz created in Moodle. My students have until the 13th to complete it. So far I've only had 12 try it out of about 60.
I really really really hope that if you are forking over the dough for the professional membership the help for using the site is more forthcoming, because at this point it is wretched!!!
As per the brief I created a quiz with their online quiz maker. It has some good options
- Multiple answer - where more than one answer can be correct.
- Single answer - where only one answer is correct. Handy tip - don't confuse them.
- True/False - 'nuff said.
- Matching - where you choose from a term in a drop down box to complete a sentence.
However, it has some jolly confusing options, either because the resultant page doesn't have the input options the other three did, or it doesn't act they way you thought it might, or it doesn't have any help - AT ALL.
- Fill Answer - where you have a word to enter to complete the sentence. To do this you must enclose the word in *asterisks* either side of the word. The page will then have an input box.
- Short Answer - can't work this one out, the help file for it was inactive.
- Simple Cloze - tried and tried with this one. It didn't have any help files active. Nothing I tried was really sufficient. I found an HTML cloze exercise and copied and pasted it into the quiz and modified it, but it doesn't really work.
So those are the questions.
Just as painful is the creation of the quiz. Similar to Moodle there are a range of options open to you in the creation of the quiz. Imposing a password for log in, regulating the amount of attempts, show the answers or not upon completion, randomising the questions and answer order. Good stuff there. Not so good is that every time you save the quiz you have to go back to that page, or that you need to use the drop down boxes quite carefully or else you'll have blank questions all over the place.
Something else incredibly painful is the need to know/look up some HTML tags for inserting an image. I needed to upload an image (that's fine), but when I clicked on the link for 'Your Images', it came up with the URL for the image. I had to look up the tags for insertion to include the image.
I can see it is quite a powerful program, and probably quite a boon to the more cash strapped schools out there. However, as someone who is not an HTML code monkey it was a bit painful (I did need to insert some break tags in a couple of questions), as was the lack of substantial available help.
Anyway - if you're interested in having a go of my quiz, it is at this link. Or if you are the website, enter 519 into the course ID student log in.
Will shortly give you an update on my quiz created in Moodle. My students have until the 13th to complete it. So far I've only had 12 try it out of about 60.
Monday, July 26, 2010
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.
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.
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