Using Lesson

Note for Contributors
This page should explain what can be seen on the moodlesite.com/mod/lesson/view.php page
(the page where the teacher views the lesson)

The normal teacher view of a lesson shows all the text in the lesson and can be quite a long page. For a much more compact view of the lesson just press one of the "Move Page" links. That lists just the page titles and gives a useful view to check the structure of the lesson. Note that the page you click on is not shown in the list .

The Flash Card Lesson

The Lesson module can be used as a type of Flash Card assignment. The student is shown some information (optional) and a question in basically a random order. There is no set beginning and no set end. Just a set of Cards shown one after another in no particular order.

In the Lesson module the cards are pages. Correct answers jump to the Next Page, wrong answers stay on the same page.

There are two very similar variants of Flash Card behaviour. The option "Show an unseen page" never shows the same page twice (even if the student did not answer the question associated with the Card/Page correctly). The other option is "Show an unanswered page" which shows the student pages that may have appeared before but only if they answered the associated question wrongly.

When using either of these Flash Card lessons the teacher can decide to use either all the Cards/Pages in the lesson or just a (random) sub-set. This is done through the "Number of Pages (Cards) to show" parameter when setting up the lesson.

In fact, this type of lesson is very similar to a random ordered Quiz, the difference is that the questions are shown one page at a time. Further extra text can be included with each question.

Multichoice Questions

This is the default question type. Multichoice questions are popular questions where the student is asked to choose one answer from a set of alternatives. The correct answer takes the student further into the lesson, the wrong answers do not. The wrong answers are sometimes called the distractors and the utility of these questions often rely more on the quality of the distractors than either the questions themselves or their correct answers.

Each answer can optionally have a response. If no response is entered for an answer then the default reponse "That's the Correct Answer" or "That's the Wrong Answer" is shown to the student.

It is possible to have more than one correct answer to a multichoice question. The different correct answers may give the student different responses and jump to different (forward) pages in the lesson but do not vary in their grades, (that is, some answers are not more correct than others, at least in terms of grade.) It is possible for all the answers to be correct and they might take the student to different (forward) parts of the lesson depending on which one is chosen. (Although it's probably neater to use a Branch Table to accomplish this).

Multichoice Multianswer

There is variant of Multichoice questions called Multichoice Multianswer questions. These require the student to select all the correct answers from the set of answers. The question may or may not tell the student how many correct answers there are. For example "Which of the following were US Presidents?" does not, while "Select the two US presidents from the following list." does. The actual number of correct answers can be from one up to the number of choices. (A Multichoice Multianswer question with one correct answer is different from a Multichoice question as the former allows the student the possibility of choosing more than one answer while the latter does not.)

Again the correct answers are flagged using forward jumps, the wrong answers by same page or backward jumps. When there is more than one correct answer the jumps should all go to the same page, similarily with the wrong answers. If that is not the case a warning is given on the teacher's view of the lesson. The correct response, if required, should be given on the first correct answer and the wrong response, if required, should be on the first wrong answer. Responses on the other answers are ignored (without warning).

Here's an example, Which of the following are Mammals? [This question uses the "default" responses]

answer[0] A Dog

answer[1] An Ant

answer[2] A Buttercup

answer[3] A Cow

Short Answer

In a Short Answer question the student is prompted for a short piece of text. This is checked against one or more answers. Answers can be either correct or wrong. Each answer can optionally have a response. If no response is entered for an answer then the default reponse "That's the Correct Answer" or "That's the Wrong Answer" is shown to the student. If the text entered does not match any of the answers then the answer is wrong and the student is shown the default wrong response. 

By default the comparisons ignore the case of the text. There is an option to make the comparisons case sensitive.

There is a fundemental problem with this type of question. If you ask a question like "Who wrote Elergy written in a Country Churchyard?" as a Short Answer question it's fine for the students who know the anwser. But how about those who do not? To avoid those students getting stuck in a loop the Lesson module has a "Maximum number of Attempts" parameter which sets an upper limit on the number of times a student can attempt a question. The default value is 5 times. (This can be reduced to 1 if you wanted students to have only one attempt at each question.)

There is a slight complication here . The "Maximum number of Attempts" mechanism relies on looking at the record of attempts. That is fine for students as their attempts are all recorded. However, when a teacher looks at a lesson their attempts are not recorded. (The attempts are used to calculate grades and as teachers aren't interested in their own grades...) So teachers are not subject to the number of answers limit. But they should know the answers, shouldn't they!

True / False

The True/False question is a special case of the Multichoice question.The student is prompted to choose which is the correct option. With this type of question you should be able to average 50% by guessing

Matching Questions

Matching questions are much more interesting than the last type of question. They can make quite powerful and flexible questions. They consist of a list of names or statements which must be correctly matched against other list of names or statements. For example "Match the Capital with the Country" with the two lists Japan, Canada, Italy and Tokyo, Ottawa, Rome. It is possible to have repeated entries in one of the lists but care should be taken to make the repeats identical. For example "Identify the type of these creatures" with the lists Sparrow, Cow, Ant, Dog and Bird, Animal, Insect, Animal.

When creating this type of question the items for the first list go into the Answer boxes and items for the second list go into the Response boxes. Once created a more sensible labelling scheme is shown. When the student successfully matches the items the jump on the first answer is used. An unsuccessful answer jumps to the page on the second answer. The question does not support custom responses, the student is told how many matches are correct or if all the matches are correct.

Numerical Question

This type of question requires a number as the answer. In it's simplest form it requires just one answer to be specified. For example "What is 2 plus 2?" with the answer 4 given a forward jump. However, it is better to specify a range because the internal rounding of numerical values can make single numeric comparisons rather hit or miss. Thus, if the question were "What is 10 divided by 3" it would be necessary to give the answer as Minimum:Maximum, that is two values separated by a colon. Thus if 3.33:3.34 is given as the acceptible range for the answer, then the answers 3.33, 3.333, 3.3333... would all be taken as correct answers. "Wrong" answers would include 3.3 (less than the minimum) and 3.4 (greater than the maximum).

More than one correct answer is allowed and the answers can be either single or pair of values. Note that the order in which the answers are tested is Answer 1, Answer 2... so some care needs to taken if the desired response is to appear. For example the question "When was Larkin born?" could have the single value of 1922, the exact answer, and the pair of values 1920:1929, the 20's, as the less exact answer.The order in which these values should be tested is, obviously, 1922 then 1920:1929. The first answer might have the response "That's exactly right" while the other answer's response might be "That's close, you've got the right decade, it is was actually 1922."

Wrong answers can be given but depending on their actual range, care should be taken to place them after the correct answers. For example in adding the wrong answer 3:4 to the "10 divided by 3" question it needs to come after the correct answer. That is the answers are ordered 3.33:3.34 (the "correct" answer) then 3:4 (the "wrong" answer, but not wildly wrong answer!).

Branch Tables

Branch tables are simply pages which have a set of links to other pages in the lesson. Typically a lesson may start with a branch table which acts as a Table of Contents. Each link in a branch table has two components, a description and the title of the page to jump to. A branch table effectively divides the lesson into a number of branches (or sections). Each branch can contain a number of pages (probably all related to the same topic).

The end of a branch is usually marked by an End of Branch page. This is a special page which, by default, returns the student back to the preceeding branch table. (The "return" jump in an End of Branch page can be changed, if required, by editing the page.)

There can be more than one branch table in a lesson. For example, a lesson might usefully be structured so that specialist points are sub-branches within the main subject branches. (Thus the name used is Branch Table rather than Table of Contents page.)

The number of links shown when setting up or editting a branch table is set by the "Number of Answers/Branches". This parameter can be changed on the fly by simply clicking on the Update the Lesson button at the top of the teacher's page and changing the value.

It is important to give students a means of ending the lesson. This might be done by including an "End Lesson" link in the main branch table. This jumps to the (imaginary) End of Lesson page. Another option is for the last branch in the lesson (here "last" is used in the logical ordering sense) to simply continue to the end of the lesson, that is, it is not terminated by an End of Branch page.

When a lesson includes one or more branch tables it is advisable to set the "Minimum number of Questions" parameter to some reasonable value. This sets a lower limit on the number of pages seen when the grade is calculated. Without this parameter a student might visit a single branch in the lesson, answer all its questions correctly and leave the lesson with the maximum grade!

Further, when a branch table is present a student has the opportunity of re-visiting the same branch more than once. However, the grade is calculated using the number of unique questions answered. So repeatedly answering the same set of questions does not increase the grade. (In fact, the reverse is true, it lowers the grade as the count of the number of pages seen is used in the denominator when calculating grades does include repeats.) In order to give students a fair idea of their progress in the lesson, they are shown details of how many questions they are answered correctly, number of pages seen, and their current grade on every branch table page. (This is one other thing teachers don't get to see - sorry!)