Talk:Changing the Moodle Question Engine
Lesson and Moodle Question engine
After reading this and only using 1.5 Quiz (30-50 exams for 20-40 students, 3 sessions a year for 3 years), it seems that Lesson and Quiz have really overlapped more than I expected. I will have to look at the "new" adaptive functions of Quiz.
I don't think that adaptive functions should be stored with the question, that seems to me to an individual quiz or lesson function. For example, one teacher wants the question to be adaptive, an other teacher does not. One quiz the teacher wants one condition, and a different one in a second quiz. Same issue happens in Lesson with the adaptive jumps. IMO, the core question is the same.
I have to add that creating the question is really the hard part. A techie can program the adaptive steps as per instructions and even type in a question. But creating a good question is gold and beyond the reach of a techie. I am that techie :-)
In 1.5, I can copy/import a quiz into a new course. I believe this actually creates a new question category. This is different than creating a quiz, then selecting the categories to pull questions from. I notice in the former the question id changes and remains the same in the latter.
It is not possible in Lesson 1.5 or 1.9 to import or select parts of another lesson. It is copy the whole Lesson or nothing. There is no page bank (nice idea). It is possible to import a question file (say GIFT) with one or more questions at any point in the lesson. The teacher has to set the adaptive jumps for the question. I think that works just fine.
Will the development of the Moodle Question engine permit RSS feeds or someone developing a question of the day block? I didn't see that in the big picture.
And thank you so much for posting in the Lesson Forum ! --Chris collman 07:31, 22 January 2009 (CST)
- Embedding questions in other places - actually, all you need to do is get the permissions right, then embed the contents of the preview pop-up window in an iframe. Actually for that to be really effective, we should clean up the preview pop-up to have fewer unnecessary controls. Finally, to make it easy to do, we should make a text filter.
- Question of the day block would already be perfectly possible to write. If anyone had the time and inclination.
- Question RSS feeds. I don't even want to begin thinking about how the permissions checks would works. It would be possible in principle, but would be a separate project.--Tim Hunt 18:31, 22 January 2009 (CST)
- Thanks Tim. Just wanted to make sure 2 & 3 had potential as projects for somebody else's plate. My primary concern is that Lesson be able to view and import question(s) just like a Quiz, (subject to roles, context etc).
- Text filter, even a search on the question ID? What a novel idea. I assist a team in vetting questions. In 1.5 it is a pain to find a question even if you know the category and the id number. I guess I better spend some time with 1.9.3 and 2.0.x localhosts and Quiz to get up speed. Sigh, when are we going to upgrade, now I feel old in a new way. Best --Chris collman 06:29, 23 January 2009 (CST)
Feedback displaing issue to have in mind
One comment for now: there is an performance and consistency issue with feedback displaying which isn't easy to fix, but can probably make it way in such major update.
Questions like shortanswer or numerical to display feedback use ... a loop with test_response, effectively regrading questions each review only to find what feedback should be displayed. This has some performance impact (and it will be worse for the questions with more complex grading like using regular expressions) and also creates an inconsistency: editing question (but not doing regrading) it is quite easy to create a situation when user will see a grade from an old version of the question with feedback from the new, telling student an incompatible things :-/
The core of the problem is that system store a grade but not which answer gave it (or feedback). And, worse still, only some question types needs this, while other doesn't and this is related to db tables. One workaround maybe to create an abstract qtype for qtypes with many answers with which repeated checking is done (like shortanswer, numerical, calculated and so on), while other can just create some new field in db for qtype use.--Oleg Sychev 21:07, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
