Quiz Usability portal/Different paginating features in quiz

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This document discusses Quiz functionality in Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2 HEAD in Dec 2008, in order to solve issues related to tickets MDL-17333 and MDL-6353.

The issue

I read the description in MDL-6353 and thought this was a mistake until I tested it: "Well, if the option 'shuffle questions' is turned on, then they are automatically paginated.

But if the shuffle option is off, then they are actually manually paginated. The quiz 'questions per page' option then only has an effect when a new question is added."

I realized that this is right. So "I think what this setting does is it keeps the quiz organized permanently" in the description of this bug is wrong IF shuffle questions is set to "No".

Breakdown

That is, there are three features for managing the paging of a quiz

A.

Repaginate on request - allows changing the paginating manually afterwards for a more intricate paginating

B.

Keep quiz paginated consistently throughout with N questions

C.

Paginate any questions added from now on with N per page

(B and C are currently strangely mixed between the two settings).

And while doing the design of the editing UI I did not know that "questions per page" actually depends on shuffle questions.

A is a command, B and C are modes/settings which need to be made apparent in the UI. To make C not a mode, it could be a selection the user makes at the time of each 'add question' operation.

So the wording "After adding N questions" does make sense when shuffle questions is NOT enabled, since that is all it does (feature C).

But it does not make sense when shuffle questions is enabled, in which case the feature in question turns into another feature (features B & C combined).

But, like, what?? This inconsistency of behaviour makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Three usage scenarios I can think of:

1. User wants to make sure his/her quiz consistently has N questions per page
2. User wants to just add questions and afterwards think about paging: mostly keep a consistent paging scheme but user might want to deviate from it on some pages (for example, first page only has an introductory question, while further pages have a greater quantity)
3. User already has an intricate paging scheme realized in the quiz, but wants to add further questions with a consistent paging scheme only for the new questions

In 1, the user is served by either

- adding their questions first and then applying A (and then redoing that after adding further questions)
- having B set, and then adding questions. In this case the user can also set B on after adding the questions

In 2, the user can use A after adding the questions he/she wants, and afterwards make modifications to the paging manually.

In 3, the user can add their questions manually. But if the number of questions to add is big, it is useful to be capable of automatically page the *new* questions while adding them, requiring feature C.

Options for a solution

So the clearest model would seem to be having three distinct features. As B and C are modes, their being active should be visible on the edit page.