Moodle - Assessment Content Creation
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Creation of graded content in Moodle is handled by creating content in activities, as mentioned in the previous section, with quizzes and assignments being the most common and important assessment types.
Quizzes
Quizzes contain questions, which have their own settings and options, but are largely similar in what they offer:
The core question types are:
Calculated - Allows the insertion of random variables into an equation, for example “what is {a}+{b}” with an answer of {c}, where the value of {c} is defined as a+b.
Calculated multi-choice - Functions similarly to the Calculated problem type, but allows learner’s input to be one of a number of preset options, with the formulae for each input being set by the teacher.
Calculated simple - Functions similarly to the Calculated problem type, but has a much-improved editor at the cost of flexibility.
Drag and drop into text - Allows learners to drag and drop words into blanks for Cloze-type questions.
Drag and drop onto image - Allows learners to drag and drop words and images onto a background image, with correct and incorrect drop zones defined. This is analogous to Open edX’s Drag-and-Drop XBlock.
Description - Not a question, simply some assimilative content mid-quiz, such as instructions or learning content.
Essay - Allows long, manually-graded essay input, with a simple grading description available for teachers to use to grade. This is somewhat analogous to ORA, but is less fully-featured. Essay questions are very similar to assignments, but are contained within a quiz, and usually relate to other questions in the quiz.
Matching - Allows learners to match answers between two lists, for example “Match the capital with the country”.
Embedded Answer - Also known as Gap-Fill or more formally a Cloze Test, this allows multiple different input types to be inserted within text to fill in the question, for example a dropdown, text input, or numerical input.
Multiple choice - Allows the learner to select a single correct answer from a list.
Short Answer - Allows the learner to input a short string of text that is checked against a list of accepted answers.
Numerical Answer - Allows the learner to input a number with an accepted error range.
Random short-answer matching - Similar to matching, except with a randomised bank of short answer questions.
True/False - Allows the learner to simply select whether the proposed statement is true or false.
A full breakdown of the quiz problem editor can be found in the Problem Editor Analysis. My summary there was that the Moodle question editor is extremely bloated with feature creep and a generally poor user experience, despite its many features.
Moodle questions can also be created in GIFT (General Input Format Template), a text-based markup language created in the Moodle community for rapid quiz question creation, and is natively supported by the Embedded Answer question type. It is likely that this model was created in response to the poor user experience offered by the Moodle question editor, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to Open edX’s simple problem editor. It’s likely that GIFT inspired the creation of the simple editor and its markup language, as GIFT has existed since 2003.
Once created, questions can be dragged and dropped to reorganise their order, and to put “pages” between questions in the quiz. Questions can be set as requirements for other questions, and questions are automatically numbered within the quiz, but these numbers can be overridden (to match external papers or allow for “Question 1B” or similar). Question weights can be adjusted from the quiz outline, or from within the question, allowing for quick re-weighting of problems.
Question Banks
Moodle Question Banks are searchable categories of questions that can be pulled into quizzes. Questions are put into categories (which are synonymous with question banks), which can have parent categories (for example Computer Science Questions -> Medium Complexity -> Variables). This is in turn reinforced by the fact that each question can be “tagged” when it is created. This then allows authors to access random content from the library (category), and filter the results by a specific tag, as shown below:
In this example, the category “Default for Veg Cook” is chosen, with the tag “Vegan” selected to filter the 17 questions present in this bank down to 3 questions. When a random question is made a part of a quiz, Moodle keeps track of which problems have been previously assigned to a user, and will attempt to assign a different random question to those they have seen previously.
Banks can be shared within “contexts”, a Moodle concept similar to a hierarchical file system:
Essentially, in the example above, a question bank could be shared within an activity (which would be pointless), the course, the course category of Languages, the course category of Humanities (which contains languages), or the core system.
These contexts are defined arbitrarily at the system level by the site administrators, and then courses are assigned to the context structure to enable content sharing and other permissions. Users can access content from any context that they have permission to access - so if all staff in the Languages department were given read-access to the Languages context, they would be able to include all question banks shared with that context. Users can also be given access to specific banks rather than an entire context, and specific banks can be shared with specific user groups defined at the system level. So for our languages example, they might have a “French” context configured so that the Spanish language staff don’t have to see all the French content, but they could share their core question bank so that they can take a copy of it and translate it to Spanish.
This essentially means that course authors will have access to all content that they have specific access to, plus any content that is available in contexts that they have more general access to when looking for content from libraries to pull into quizzes.
Assignments
Assignments do not include much in the way of content besides a few simple fields for a description and instruction for the learner, with a WYSIWYG HTML editor:
This editor is, however, fully featured, allowing staff to include media like images, video, H5P activities, and audio in their assignment instructions.
LTI
Moodle supports LTI content with fairly typical associated settings such as the URL to access, keys, secrets, and custom parameters, similarly to Open edX. The LTI consumer tool in Moodle is called simply “External Tool”, but LTI is the only way to integrate an arbitrary external tool in this way.
The places where Moodle’s LTI implementation differs from Open edX are mostly in the following areas:
Course configuration - all course-level settings are contained within the activity itself, including the key and secret.
Preconfigured tools - Most significantly, certain tools can be configured at the site-level, meaning that most configuration steps in courses can be skipped entirely. The technical configuration such as keys, secrets, etc. can be defined by an administrator, and those prepackaged settings can then be applied to courses on that site.
Pre-packaged LTI integrations - Moodle has a significant number of tools that integrate via LTI while not explicitly talking about LTI, they simply work once configured at the site level, and gain their own button on the list of items to add, like BigBlueButton and H5P in the screenshot below. These are called Certified Integrations by Moodle.
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