Moodle’s building blocks for

eAssessment tools

Tim Hunt, Leading Technical Developer,

The Open University

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13403905@N03/2080281038/

Overview

Question behaviours

• How the student interacts with the question

• For example

1. Student give a response and clicks ‘Check’

2. They immediately get told if they were right, with

feedback.

3. If they were wrong, the can click ‘Try again’

4. If they get it right on a later try, they get less marks

5. After 3 incorrect tries, they are just told the answer

• Some parts of this are configurable.

Question behaviours (to date)

• Interactive with multiple tries – as on last slide

• Deferred feedback

• Immediate feedback

• Deferred feedback with CMB

• Immediate feedback with CBM

• Adaptive mode

• Adaptive mode (no penalties)

• Manually graded

Question types

• I could describe the behaviour without saying anything

about what the question was

• Question types say what the question is

– what is shown

– how the student responds

– how it is graded

– how the feedback is generated

• They let the teacher specify all that, within a template,

using web forms

Question types (to date)

• All question types are a combination 4 basic interactions

– entering words

– entering numbers and mathematical expressions

– selection

– positioning things – points, molecules, parts of a diagram

• Moodle now has question types for each of these

individually

• … but what about combinations of them?

Question display options

• Does the teacher want feedback or marks visible during

the attempt, or only later?

• It matters, so the needs to be a way to specify

• Even if feedback is visible, it may not be available yet

– e.g. until a student has submitted an answer

Putting it together

• In principle, any question can use with any behaviour

• In practice, it is not that simple

– e.g. essays can only be manually graded

• Still, a flexible set of components that can be assembled

to build many activities.

• So, why do we still only have the quiz?

To put it together

each block must know

when to take control and

when to give it up

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rich_lem/350486730/

Overview

Useful linksDeveloper documentation http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Question_API

User documentation http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Quiz_module

Downloadable plugins http://moodle.org/plugins/browse.php?list=category&id=28