Question sharer

2016-07-24T13:39:42Z

Clodo:

{{Questions}}

By default, teachers can only share questions with teachers in the same course as themselves and they can only save questions to the course they are currently working in.

This custom role of 'Question sharer' allows them to access and share questions at category or site level. The role must be created by an adminstrator and then given to selected teachers.

==Creating a new role==
#As an administrator, go to ''Site administration>Users>Permissions>Define roles'' and click the 'Add a new role' button at the bottom of the screen.
#On the next screen, ignore archetypes and presets and click 'Continue'
#Give the role a name and if desired a description and tick the "System" context:

[[File:questionsharer.png|center|thumb|600px]]

4.In the filter, type "question"

5.Set the following capabilities to 'allow':

moodle/question:add

moodle/question:editall

moodle/question:managecategory

moodle/question:moveall

moodle/question:viewall

moodle/question:useall

[[File:questioncaps.png|center]]

6. Click the 'Create this role' button.

==Assigning the role to a teacher==

#As an administrator, go to ''Site administration > Users > Permissions > Assign system roles''.
#You should now see your newly created role here
#Assign the role to the required course teacher(s).(''Note that the users still need to have the teacher role in their courses.)''

Note that you can also assign the role to a user in a course category if you only wish them to share questions in that category. To assign a role to a user within the scope of a particular category only:
# Log in as an administrator.
# From the site's homepage, click on the desired course category.
# From inside the desired course category, click on "Assign roles" in the Administration block.
# Click on the role you wish to assign to the user.
# Select and add the user to the role.

==Sharing questions==

A normal teacher in a course can only see the question category for their own course when they access the question bank. This teacher for example can only see her US Film course questions and can only add her questions to there (or any sub-category she might create):

[[File:regularteacherview.png]]

However, when she has been given the Question sharer role she can then access any questions which have been added at category level ('Miscellaneous') and for the whole site ('System')

[[File:sharerview.png]]

She can also save her questions to there, allowing them to be shared by other teachers with the Question sharer role.

Note that she can also add questions from ''Administration>Front page settings>Question bank.'' (but she has no higher administrative powers.)

===What are these categories?===
*The categories you will see relate to course categories. For example, 'Miscellaneous' is the default category available on a new install of Moodle (which can be renamed)
*So a teacher of French with the Question sharer role might see 'Category - Languages' , assuming her French course resides with the Spanish and German course in a category called 'Languages', for example. If she saves her quiz questions to the 'Languages' category, then her Spanish and German teacher colleagues with the role can also access them from their respective courses.

[[File:questioncategories.png]]

*She can edit the names by clicking on ''Course administration>Question bank>Categories'' and then clicking the edit icon:

{|
|[[File:categorieslink.png|left|Question bank|thumb|300px]]
|[[File:editname.png|eft|Editing the name|thumb|300px]]
|}

===Sharing questions site-wide===
*From a course, go to ''Course administration>Question bank>Categories''
*Click 'Add category' and select System as the parent category.
*Create your category and add questions to it.
*The questions in this category will be available anywhere on the site for teachers with the question sharer role to access.

==Why does this work?==

See: [[Question permissions explained with diagrams]].

==See also==

* [[Question bank]]

[[Category:Roles]]

[[de:Fragen-Sharer-Rolle]]

[[es:Compartidor de preguntas]]

[[fr:Partager la banque de questions]]

How to minimize the question bank when doing backup/restore

2016-07-19T10:12:04Z

Clodo:

When you back up and restore a course or a quiz, often a very large question bank is backed up which includes many questions not being used in the course or quiz. This can be a problem when the question bank on a site gets very large (over 1000 questions or over 500mb). At this point, backup and restore may fail due to timeouts or other technical reasons. Sharing courses on the Hub is also difficult because large question banks of unrelated questions are included which make sharing backup files difficult and confusing to teachers receiving the question bank.

Originally, the question bank in a course and the upper level categories of questions has always been included in a backup. In 2007, a Tracker issue (MDL-12403) was made to allow teachers and administrators to limit the questions included in a backup to just the ones needed. Discussion on that this issue showed that a solution was difficult and in 2013, a checkbox was added to the Backup procedure to completely remove the question bank in a backup file. Thus from Moodle 2.7, it was possible to do an all-or-nothing inclusion or exclusion of the question bank. When the checkbox to exclude the question bank is checked, all quizzes are also removed from the backup.

This did not solve the original issue so a separate Tracker issue was made concerning how to minimize or select the questions included in a backup (MDL-41924). As of Moodle 2.9, this issue is still open. As teachers and admins need to share questions and share courses which often include quizzes (one of the most popular activities in Moodle), it is still possible to minimize the questions, though doing it manually is complicated. The following workaround was successfully done in Moodle 2.9.1, and the resulting course backup file was restored on a Moodle 2.8.5 site.

This workaround strategy is based on the design of the question bank which only includes questions in a backup that are in the same category or a higher level category. Thus System Level questions are included in every backup on the site. Note that Moodle uses the word "category" in two ways which can be confusing. A "category" can refer to a group of courses (Course Category) or a group of questions (question bank category). In this section, we usually use "category" to mean a group of questions in the question bank. These categories are also called "contexts".

'''Workaround to Minimize Questions in a Course Backup'''
# Move all questions from System Level and other upper level Categories in your question bank to lower category levels--down to course level categories. (this makes it difficult to view and share, but is necessary).
# Move the course (or a copy of the course) to a temporary Course Category somewhere on your site where there are no other courses.
# Make a backup of your course and restore this backup in the same Course Category. (Moodle will automatically push all upper level category questions into course level categories--you will see this happen on the screen).
# Go into the newly restored course and open the Question Bank. You will see all questions are at the course level.
# Prune (delete) all unneeded questions in your newly restored course. Do not worry about deleting here, because you are only deleting course level copies of the questions. The original questions on your site are not affected.
# As you delete groups of questions, Moodle will list and confirm the questions you wish to delete. If you mistakenly try to delete a question that is being used in your course, Moodle will mark that one with an asterisk. Then cancel the deletion, and try selecting again. Note those questions and cancel the deletion and choose only unneeded questions. (in the case of thousands of questions, this deletion process can take a long time).
# After you have minimized the questions manually by deletion at these course level categories, you can now make a another backup file and when you restore it, only the remaining questions you selected will be included.

In addition, you can encourage Moodle HQ to tackle this issue by voting, watching, and commenting in these two tracker issues: MDL-41924 and MDL-12403.

[[es:Como minimizar el Banco de Preguntas al hacer respaldo/restauracion]]
[[fr:Comment minimiser la banque de questions lors d'une sauvegarde/restauration d'un cours]]

MoodleDocs - User contributions [en]

Question sharer

How to minimize the question bank when doing backup/restore