Development:Quiz UI redesign scenarios - Entering questions into an exam

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Organizing questions and entering them into an exam

Unless exams are very simple, teachers often have a natural set of categories to put questions in, from course curriculum or from the actual material of the course. This can be regarded as metadata of actual questions.

A teacher may or may not want to enter question metadata (such as categories) into the application, depending on:

• their confidence (experience) with Moodle or computers in general
• the amount of time available: in a situation where a teacher only has the questions on paper or in some other application and they need to get the exam to the student in 15 minutes; of course if selecting an existing category is 1-2 obvious clicks and/or the teacher already knows clearly what the new categories need to be, this might still be possible.
• what they perceive feasible in the application's user interface.

It is also possible that the teacher imports the data from another application, and in this case the metadata may come with the questions; the questions will be in categories in the application after importing.

Jack

• carefully crafted, can't reuse the questions (but may be able to use for reference)

Jack primarily creates just exams. For him, exams are one-time wholes and each question is a part of the whole, tightly bound to that one exam.

However, Jack can use his questions as templates, or at least sources for inspiration when creating new exams. Thus benefits from adding the questions in the question bank, but there is always the question of whether the reasonable way to categorize questions is in the original exams - the only context where those questions belong - or in thematical categories.

Mary

Based on the themes that come from course curriculum, Mary has organized her questions in categories. Under most themes she has subcategories for different difficulty levels and for most a given exam, she usually has about 60% of easier and 40% of mode difficult questions. Since she has a lot (i.e. dozens ... thousands) of questions for each course, she would find it useful to categorize questions based on different criterias – that is, to be capable of tagging questions, as well as searching for particular questions based on their content, tags or other properties.